There is a place you can go

There is a place you can go

where you are quiet,

a place of water and the light

on the water. Trees are there,

leaves, and the light

on leaves moved by air.

Birds, singing, move

among leaves, in leaf shadow.

After many years you have come

to no thought of these,

but they are themselves

your thoughts. There seems to be

little to say, less and less.

Here they are.  Here you are.

Here as though gone.

None of us stays, but in the hush

where each leaf in the speech

of leaves is sufficient syllable

the passing light finds out

surpassing freedom of its way.

Wendell Berry

photo:  Peter Bowers

The Spirit Likes to Dress Up Like This

The spirit

likes to dress up like this:

ten fingers,

ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

at night

in the black branches,

in the morning

in the blue branches

of the world.

It could float, of course,

but would rather

plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,

it needs

the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

the oceanic fluids;

it needs the body’s world,

instinct

and imagination

and the dark hug of time,

sweetness

and tangibility,

to be understood,

to be more than pure light

that burns

where no one is —

so it enters us —

in the morning

shines from brute comfort

like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

lights up the deep and wondrous

drownings of the body

like a star.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers

I know what love is

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today.  I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around 

inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends. 

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all

spiritual and physical things.  Children are not only of flesh and blood - children may be ideas, 

thoughts, emotions.  The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors

reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and 

flashing another kind of light from within.  No words or deeds may encompass it. 

Friendship is another form of love - more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and 

acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give.  It is not charity, which is

the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of the self.  It is both the taking

and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.  It is

the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of

earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing

finer.

Ansel 

Letter written by Ansel  Adams to his best friend, Cedric Wright 
Thanks to Letters of Note
Photo:  Peter Bowers 

Dithyramb of a Happy Woman

Song of excess,

strength, mighty tenderness,

pliant ecstasy.

Magnificence

lovingly dancing.

I quiver as a body in rapture, 

I quiver as a wing,

I am an explosion,

I overstep myself,

I am a fountain,

I have its resilience.

Excess,

a thousand excesses,

strength,

song of gushing strength.

There are gifts in me,

flowerings of abundance,

curls of light are sobbing,

a flame is foaming, its lofty ripeness

is ripening.

Oceans of glare,

rosy as the palate

of a big mouth in ecstasy.  

I am astonished

up to my nostrils, I snort

a snorting universe of astonishment

inundates me.

I am gulping excess, I am choking with fullness,

I am impossible as reality.

Anna Swir

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Just This!

Do you want to know what's in my heart?

From the beginning of time:

Just this!  Just This!

Ryokan 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

I stood transfixed

I stood transfixed listening...

and knew what can never be expressed; 

that the natural is supernatural, and that I am the eye 

that hears and the ear that sees, that what is 

outside happens in me, that outside and inside 

are unseparated.

Frederick Franck

The Zen of Seeing 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

seeing/drawing

Seeing/drawing is, beyond words and beyond silence,

the artist's response to being alive.  Insofar as it has 

anything to transmit, it transmits a quality of awareness.

...

And yet I know artists whose medium

is life itself, and who express the inexpressible

without brush, pencil, chisel, or guitar.

They neither paint nor dance.

Their medium is Being.

Whatever their hand touches 

has increased Life.  

They SEE and don't have to draw.  

They are the artists of being alive. 

Frederick Franck

The Zen of Seeing :  Seeing/Drawing as Meditation 

Photo:  Peter Bowers 

Being the Song

Reminding others of the enormity of their own 

Great Nature is the highest service one can offer another.

Kyoto Zen Master

First we serve, then we become service.

It is alot like prayer; first you pray, 

but eventually your life becomes the prayer.

First you sing, then you become the song.

Gandhi said, 'My life is my message."

Stephen Levine

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Duino Elegies, The Tenth Elegy

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,

let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.

Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,

or a broken string.  Let my joyfully streaming face

make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise

and blossom.  How dear you will be to me then, you nights 

of anguish.  Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair.  How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end.  Though they are really

our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,

one season in our inner year -, not only a season

in time -, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

 Rainer Maria Rilke
photo:  Peter Bowers 

Stream of life

The same stream of life

that runs through my veins

runs through the world

and dances in rhythmic measure.

It is the same life

that shoots in joy

through the dust of the earth

into numberless blades of grass,

and breaks into tumultuous waves

of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked

in the ocean cradle

of birth and death,

in ebb and in flow.

My limbs are made glorious

by the touch of this world of life;

and my pride is from

the life throb of ages

dancing in my blood this moment.

                                    








Tagore
Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Watchers

The horses graze the winter slope

and then go to the high ground

and stand, watching the traffic

along the road, the slow river,

the trees leaning and straightening

in the wind. The day's time

is their time. They do not move

toward it or away. Their minds

are at home in this world,

diminished by no question.

        

Wendell Berry

Photo:  Peter Bowers

When Seeking Ends

I can no longer read the Teachings

or visit those awakened on the path

who sit amidst flowers and incense

and eager seekers waiting for morsels

of Enlightenment food.

I can no longer sit on my black cushion 

waiting for the moment to appear

when the big bang will occur

and blow this world of work and life

into the heavens of bliss.

I can no longer search for what is missing

nor can I say that I have found it.

I listen to the furnace blowing at dawn

and watch a feather dance before its music.

I work and eat and sleep and simply live my life.

I no longer wonder if I should dye my hair

or give up eating meat

or lose ten pounds before summer.

If I do, I do, and if I don't, I don't,

and who is there to care?

The sound of the garbage truck

chewing up the remains of my week

offers just as much stimulation to my soul

as a church bell or the song bird's melody

lilting from the distant hill.

My candles of devotion sit unlit

upon the alter to the gods, 

the bell of mindfulness unrung

upon its hand-sewn cushion, 

the incense resting in a drawer.

What has become of the one

who searched and chanted and read and prayed

and hoped for enlightenment?

She still laughs with her family,

sips champagne with friends, and sings in the shower.

What is life when the seeking ends?

Just what it is, nothing more or less - 

an ordinary person doing ordinary things,

not wishing to be more or less,

content to simply be herself.

Dorothy Hunt

Photo:  Peter Bowers

No More Longing

Yesterday I sat beside

a pristine mountain lake

where sky and pines and water

lost their names in Seeing,

where Listening became

a single bird-song, wind song,

water-lapping song of joy.

Today, there's no more longing,

no more pain inside the heart;

the devotee has disappeared

into the scent of Now,

and space has blown desire

from its latest hiding place

into the peace of being where I am.

Dorothy Hunt

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Word Tumbling

Every word is wordless

in its Source;

and no word can ever

speak the Truth.

But the poet's words

keep tumbling out of Silence

like snowflakes falling

unbidden from the sky,

landing for one brief instant

before melting.

Dorothy Hunt 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.

Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and

starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped

from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping

the colored silks.

Neither are we different in what we know.

There is a door.  It opens.  Then it is closed.  But a slip of

light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,

or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:   Peter Bowers

Listening



My father could hear a little animal step,

or a moth in the dark against the screen,

and every far sound called the listening out

into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night

than came to our porch for us on the wind;

we would watch him look up and his face go

keen

till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand

inviting the quiet by turning the face,

waiting for a time when something in the night

will touch us too from that other place.

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers

At Our House

Home late, one lamp turned low,

crumpled pillow on the couch,

wet dishes in the sink (late snack),

in every child's room the checked,
slow, sure breath -

Suddenly in this doorway where I stand

in this house I see this place again,

this time the night as quiet, the house

as well secured, all breath but mine borne

gently on the air -

And where I stand, no one.

William Stafford

The thing about all this

... is that there is no

puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery."

All problems are resolved and everything is

clear; simply because what matters is clear

...everything is emptiness and everything is

compassion.  I don't know when in my life I  

have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiri-
tual validity running together in one aesthetic

illumination ... I know and have seen what

I was obscurely looking for.  I don't know

what else remains but I have now seen and

have pierced through the surface and have

got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

Thomas Merton

Asian Journal

Photo:  Thomas Merton

A Vast Wardrobe

Look how this nakedness shows its vast wardrobe!
Here it dresses as a rose;
there it dresses as a car;
here the suit is Mother;
there the suit is Daughter.
Spirit does not inhabit these things.
Nothingness does not climb in and out.
The rose grows thorns
and does not bloom in winter;
the mother will one day sleep without waking
and her daughter will weep.

Dorothy Hunt

Photo:  Peter Bowers

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses

off -  they were still singing.  They buzzed

like a locust on the coffee table and then

ceased.  Her voice belled forth, and the

sunlight bent.  I felt the ceiling arch, and

knew that nails up there took a new grip

on whatever they touched.  "I am your own

way of looking at things," she said.  "When

you allow me to live with you, every

glance at the world around you will be

a sort of salvation."  And I took her hand. 

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Remember Death

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs
From 2005 Stanford University commencement address

Photo:  Peter Bowers 

All Through Eternity

All through eternity
Beauty unveils His exquisite form
in the solitude of nothingness;
He holds a mirror to His Face
and beholds His own beauty.
he is the knower and the known,
the seer and the seen;
No eye but His own
has ever looked upon this Universe

His every quality finds an expression:
Eternity becomes the verdant field of Time and Space;
Love, the life-giving garden of this world.
Every branch and leaf and fruit
Reveals an aspect of His perfection-
The cypress give hint of His majesty,
The rose gives tidings of His beauty.

Whenever Beauty looks,
Love is also there;

Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.
When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.

They have together
since the beginning of time-
Side by side, step by step.

Rumi

Photo:  Peter Bowers



A Blessing For The New Year

Beannacht

 

 

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The gray window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the curragh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

John O`Donohue

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Sunday poem

Any poem could be the best

Any day the best or worst

A few butterflies in the garden or

the screech of brakes.  Not a breath

returns, not a blink of the eye, no

reminiscent smell or bright pebble.

Life comes

And goes.

It's that short.

Stephen Levine

Photo:  Peter Bowers