Within this tree

Within this tree

another tree

inhabits the same body; 

within this stone 

another stone rests, 

its many shades of grey

the same, 

its identical surface and weight.

And within my body, 

another body

whose history, waiting, 

sings:  there is no other body, 

it sings, 

there is no other world.  

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

I Am Standing

I am standing

on the dunes

in the heat of summer

and I am listening

to mockingbird again

who is tonguing

his embellishments

and, in the distance,

the shy

weed loving sparrow

who has but one

soft song

which he sings

again and again

and something

somewhere inside

my own unmusical self

begins humming:

thanks for the beauty of the world.

Thanks for my life.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Too Lazy to be Ambitious

Too lazy to be ambitious,

I let the world take care of itself.

Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;

a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.

Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?

Listening to night rain on my roof,

I sit comfortably with both legs stretched out. 

Ryokan
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:

that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:

in the dead of night

the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:

 a small, airy cloud

yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder tree reflected in the water,

and that it's backward and left to right

and that it grows there, crown down

and never reaches bottom,

even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:

winds weak to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:

cows are cows.

Second to none:

just this orchard

from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:

scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:

today the sun rose at three-fourteen

and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:

even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,

it still has more than four.  

A miracle, just take a look around:

the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:

the unthinkable

is thinkable.

Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence, the sorry fact is

that we arrive here improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,

if you're the planet's biggest dunce,

you can't repeat the class in summer:

this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,

no two nights will teach what bliss is

precisely the same way,

with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue

mentions your name by accident:

I feel as if a rose were flung

into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,

I can't help looking at the clock:

A rose?  A rose?  What could that be?

is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day

with so much needless fear and sorrow?

It's in its  nature not to stay:

Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we're different (we concur)

just as two drops of water are.  

Wislawa Szymborska

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him:  Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn't always understand. 

Czeslaw Milosz 

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain.  One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him.  "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed.  Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered.  He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon.  "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."





Zen Flesh Zen Bones
Compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki
Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Poet's Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying, "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

Pablo Neruda

What is devotion?

Jean Klein:  It is being in the total absence of oneself.  It is the deep feeling of one's homeground, one's origin where the devotee and the devoted are not two.  In the absence of oneself there is the global feeling of our dwelling place.  So devotion means to free ourself from what we are not.  When we are free from ourself, what we are shines.  Devotion means offering what we are not, offering for the love of offering, without anyone who offers anything to anyone.





Jean Klein
The Book of Listening

I Am So Glad

Start seeing everything as God, 

But keep it a secret.

Become like a man who is Awestruck

And Nourished

Listening to a Golden Nightingale

Sing in a beautiful foreign language

While God invisibly nests 

Upon its tongue.

Hafiz,

Who can you tell in this world

That when a dog runs up to you

Wagging its ecstatic tail,

You lean down and whisper in its ear,

"Beloved,

I am so glad You are happy to see me,

Beloved,

I am so glad,

So very glad You have come."

Hafiz

Varanasi

Early in the morning we crossed the ghat, 

where fires were still smoking,

and gazed, with our Western minds, into the Ganges.

A woman was standing in the river up to her waist;

she was lifting handfuls of water and spilling it

over her body, slowly and many times,

as if until there came some moment

of inner satisfaction between her own life and the river's.

Then she dipped a vessel she had brought with her

and carried it filled with water back across the ghat,

no doubt to refresh some shrine near where she lives,

for this is the holy city of Shiva, maker

of the world, and this is his river.

I can't say much more, except that it all happened

in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt

like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived

in accordance with that certainty.

I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back

to America.

Pray God I remember this. 

Mary Oliver

Seeing her face this morning I had to send praise

Ananda Ma says, "God comes to us in the guise of suffering."

Crowded 'round are those who wish to fill their heart with her, 

"To be close to The Mother is all we want."

She comes in our dreams, sleeping or waking, and tells us she is 

as close as a thought.  Comes when she is summoned.  Lives just 

beneath our skin.  

Whether we find our true teachers in a momentary glance or a 

lifetime of service, in a book or in a cathedral, in a single gatha or a 

stupa, in Her eyes or His, it is an initiation greater than birth.

Mother Teresa said she saw the ill and dying as "Jesus in His

distressing disguise."  How dedicated the heart must be to catch its

own reflection in another.

In India passing and departing many say "Namaste"

acknowledging the divine in each other.

So many kind personifications, so many reasons to be thankful.  

Genuflecting before a great ponderosa, or touching our 

forehead to the feet of a gratitude-soaked image of the formless, or

covering our head before the first form, we continue our pilgrimage

into a certain Oneness.

Some see this Oneness in the eyes of their teacher; others catch

a glimpse in a flickering candle or a grain of sand, in a breaking wave

or a tear rolling slowly down a child's cheek.  Zen masters note it in

the snap of a twig or the death of their mother.

In our longing is the irresistible draw toward the great satisfaction

of devotion.  Devotion of greater consequence than any object 

of devotion.

Step after step, breath after breath, we are able to step

within each step, to find the breath within each breath, and 

within that the sacred essence

just where Kabir said we would.

Stephen Levine

Photo:  Kathleen Knipp

You are like a perfect poem

You are like a perfect poem

Imagined by a poet 

Undivided from her own creation

Your form is word and sound

Your meaning is fluid and alive

But your essence is silence

You have no conclusion

Except the wonder of seeing the world

With brand new eyes

Jeff Foster