For Longing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here

And quickens your soul with wonder

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire

That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease

To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -  

Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit your life with the sureness 

with which your body inhabits the world.  

May your heart never be haunted by ghost structures

of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.  

John O'Donohue

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Lute music

Let us celebrate

The Earth will be going on a long time

Before it finally freezes;

Men will be on it; they will take names, 

Give their deeds reasons.

We will be here only 

As chemical constituents - 

A small franchise indeed.

Right now we have lives,

Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,

Like everybody had once - 

Here at the year's end, at the feast

Of birth, let us bring to each other

The gifts brought once west through deserts - 

The precious metal of our mingled hair, 

The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs, 

The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses - 

Let us celebrate the daily

Recurrent nativity of love,

The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,

While the earth rolls away under us

Into unknown snows and summers,

Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

Kenneth Rexroth

Photo:  Peter Bowers

A Christmas Hallelujah

ring the bells

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering,

There is a crack in everything,

That's how the light gets in.  

Leonard Cohen

home

welcome home

welcome to the home never left

you have always lived here

will always live here

        this is home, forever...

so stop now

no effort is required

even during all journeys

you have always been here

        this is home, forever...

so relax now

the fire is in the hearth

this inner fire is keeping you warm

the storms outside cannot touch you 

        this is home, forever...

so rest now

everyone loved is right here

we have always lived here

will always live here

        this is home, forever...

Nirmala

Gifts with No Giver

a love affair with truth

here

Again I resume the long

lesson:  how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

The sky
is gray.  It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever.  The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.
What more did I
think I wanted?  Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be.  Even in me,
the  Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased. 

Wendell Berry

joy

Learn by little the desire for all things

which perhaps is not desire at all

but undying love which perhaps

is not love at all but gratitude

for the being of things which perhaps

is not gratitude at all

but the maker's joy in what is made,

the joy in which we come to rest.

Wendell Berry

Lie down

Take off the backpack

Lie down in the long grass.

Pull up the blue sky-blanket.

Rest.

So many years of Dharma practice,

Straight-spine diligence, straining toward

enlightenment.

Today.

This hillside.

Just this.

Lie down in the long grass.

Let the earth take you.

Deer track and horse dung

and the eye within the eye,

revolving and luminous.

I never knew this.

Did no one ever tell me?

I remember my Zen master in the interview room,

'Trust yourself,' he said.  'Just be yourself.'

I think his meaning was this:

Take off the backpack,

Lie down in the long grass.

Let the sky take you.

Rest.

Breathe space

into space

into space.

I never knew there was this much light! 

Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin

Photo:  Peter Morgan

nothing into nothing

 

Dance.

A thousand times I have ascertained

and found it to be true:  the affairs of

this world are really nothing into

nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

Hafiz
Photo:  Peter Morgan

One Great Thing

And I thought over again 

My small adventures

As with a shore-wind I drifted out

In my kayak

And thought I was in danger,

My fears,

Those small ones that I thought so big

For all the vital things 

I  had to get and to reach.

And yet, there is only

One great thing,

The only thing:

To live to see in huts and on journeys

The great day that dawns,

And the light that fills the world.

Inuit Song

Photo:  Peter Bowers

With thanks: The Beauty We Love

This Shines On

This shines on

whether I'm in bitch mode or radiating benevolence

whether I'm depressed or enjoying equanimity

whether I'm achingly weary or frolicking tirelessly.

This shines on

whether my bookshelves are stacked with scriptures, chick-lit, crime or porn

whether my shoes are microfiber or leather, my coat cotton or mink 

whether my fridge is piously vegan or robustly carnivore.

This shines on

whether my philosophical tendencies veer towards the scientific and secular

or the mystical and metaphysical

whether I'm a closet optimist disguised as a cynic

or a knee-jerk nay-sayer, jus sayin 

Don't be fooled.  This shines on

- pristine, incorruptible - 

regardless. 

This shines on

whether you agree with me as you scan these words

or jump to defend your own view

whether you accept me as a flicker of the vast Light we are

or turn your back on our inextricable intimacy.  

This shines on

and in, and from, and through, every perception,

every experience and every face and fact of World

known by human and non-human Knowingness

(and I exclude nothing, no thing in creation

from that capacity for Knowingness.)

This shines on

The sages call it Reality, but beware:  it's not a thing, an object

or even a state.  To name it is to turn from it, but it could care less.

It shines on regardless.

Miriam Louisa

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been

witness to it:  how the

world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out

to the petals on the ground

to stay, 

knowing as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

I don't say

it's easy, but

what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,

this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east, 

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers

And Bob Dylan Too

"Anything worth thinking about is worth

singing about."

Which is why we have 

songs of praise, songs of love, songs

of sorrow.

Songs to the gods, who have

so many names.

Songs the shepherds sing, on the

lonely mountains, while the sheep

are honoring the grass, by eating it.

The dance-songs of the bees, to tell

where the flowers, suddenly, in the

morning light, have opened.

A chorus of many, shouting to heaven,

or at it, or pleading.

Or that greatest of love affairs, a violin

and a human body.

And a composer, maybe hundreds of years dead.

I think of Schubert, scribbling on a cafe

napkin.

Thank you, thank you.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Morgan

Love's Inward Turning

Turn Attention inward, my friend,

Not with the mind...

But with the Heart.

The mind may bestow "knowledge",

Of what you are not. 

But the Heart will bring you to the "Experience"...

Of what you Are.  

For the Heart's Unbearable Longing,

Is "of" that which is Longed for. 

Resting there, in the Heart's Desire, 

The Beloved will inhabit you so fully,

That where She ends and you begin...

Will no longer be discernible.  

And Lover and Beloved will Vanish,

in the Fathomless Ecstasy of their Embrace.

Chuck Surface

Photo:  Peter Bowers

View With a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand

but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.

It does just fine without a name,

whether general, particular,

permanent, passing,

incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.

And that it fell on the windowsill

is only our experience, not its.

For it, it is no different than falling on anything else

with no assurance that it has finished falling

or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,

but the view doesn't view itself.

It exists in this world

colorless, shapeless,

soundless, odorless, and painless.  

The lake's floor exists floorlessly

and its shore exists shorelessly.

Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry

and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.

They splash deaf to their own noise

on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

in which the sun sets without setting at all

and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud

The wind ruffles it, its only reason being 

that it blows.  

A second passes.

A second second.

A third.

But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

But that's just our simile.

The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,

his news inhuman.

Wislawa Szymborska

Photo:   Peter Bowers

the only teaching

Enlightenment absorbs this universe of qualities.

When that merging occurs, there is nothing

but God.  This is the only doctrine.

There is no word for it, no  mind

to understand it with, no categories

of transcendence or non-transcendence,

no vow of silence, no mystical attitude.

There is no Shiva and no Shakti

in enlightenment, and if there is something

that remains, that whatever-it-is

is the only teaching.

Lalla

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Who Breathes?

Observe your own body.  It breathes.

You breathe when you are asleep, when you are

no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.

Who, then, is breathing?

The collection of information that you mistakenly

think is you is not the protagonist in this drama

called the breath.

In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally

happening to you.  

You can purposely end your own life, but you

cannot purposely keep your own life going.

The expression, "my life" is actually an oxymoron,

a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption.

You don't possess life; life expresses itself

through you.

Your body is a flower that life let bloom,

a phenomenon created by life. 

Ilchi Lee

Photo:  Peter Bowers

And When She Began to Sing

And then she began to sing, and when 

she began to sing, 

there was no one who really heard her

who was not then glad to be alive. 

Hafiz

Photo:  Peter Bowers

listen

The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing,

and its sound is love.

Kabir

Photo:  Peter Bowers

listen

Listen, my child, to the silence.

An undulating silence,

a silence

that turns valleys and echoes slippery,

that bends foreheads

toward the ground.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Photo:  Peter Bowers

with thanks: Love is a Place

worship

.

Emanating from the embrace

Of the Goddess and her God

Is a wheel of shimmering divine energies.

This is the sacred spot

Where worship is done.

The center of this wheel

Is right where you are.

Live here, and let your heart stream

With an unending flow of adoration.

In this way, tend the altar of love.  

The Radiance Sutras - 151

Lorin Roche 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Stand Still

Stand still.  The trees ahead and bushes beside you 

Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,

I have made this place around you,

If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows

Where you are.  You must let it find you.

David Wagoner

Photo:  Peter Bowers

the real work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Photo:  Peter Bowers

nothing to say

Birth, old age,

Sickness, and death:

From the beginning,

This is the way

Things have always been.

Any thought

Of release from this life

Will wrap you only more tightly

In its snares.

The sleeping person

Looks for a Buddha,

The troubled person

Turns toward meditation.

But the one who knows

That there's nothing to seek

Knows too that there's nothing to say.

She keeps her mouth closed.

Ly Ngoc Kieu

(1041-1113)

Photo:  Peter Bowers

like a fountain of water...thingness

For me there is no materiality to apparent

materiality.  In our bodies, 3 billion cells a minute are

dying and being reborn.  So our bodies look solid,

but they aren't.  How many minutes have just gone

by and how many cells have died and been reborn?

We're like a fountain.  A fountain of water looks

solid, but you can put your fingers right through it.  

Our bodies look like things, but there's no

thingness to them.  

Li-Young Lee
Photo:  Peter Bowers

I worried

I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall 

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it, and I am, well, 

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up.  And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Morgan

The Message of the Rain

when i was a child

i was a squirrel a bluejay a fox

and spoke with them in their tongues

climbed their trees dug their dens

and knew the taste 

of every grass and stone

and meaning of the sun

and message of the night

now i am old and past

both work and battle

and know no shame

to go alone to the forest

to speak again to squirrel fox and bird

to taste the world

to find the meaning of the wind

the message of the rain

Norman H. Russell 

listen

The sound of rain needs no translation.

Allan Watts

Happy are those ..

Happy are those who know

behind all words, the Unsayable stands,

and from that source, the Infinite

crosses over to gladness, and us.

Free of those bridges we raise

with constructed distinctions;

so that always, in each separate joy,

we gaze at the single, wholly mutual core.

Grace is not something to be acquired from others.

If it is external, it is useless.

All that is necessary is to know its existence in you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

drink from this cup

Adorable Goddess,

These practices are a nectar I share with you.

Drink from this cup whenever you are thirsty

Or crave to be refreshed in the essence of life.

Know that this ambrosia is available to you 

Everywhere, for the universe is made out of it.

Simply go to the intersection of flesh and spirit,

Breathe the tiny sparks that fly.

Within this very body

Are many gateways to the infinite,

Where incarnation and immortality

Consummate their passion for each other.

Share these teachings

With all generous-hearted people

Who come your way and ask.

When you meet someone

Whose heart is vibrating

With the flow of love,

Share the teachings without reservation.

Let your words and energies

Be free as your breathing.

Friends, relatives, neighbors, people who abide

in your village, city, country...

Be not concerned with their attitudes

Towards these teachings.

Everyone is discovering the intimate universe 

in their own way.

Openings to this nectar are here

In every breath, every desire, every transition

From waking to sleeping and sleeping to waking.

Once you have set out on the path of intimacy with

The immortal essence of life,

Never turn your back on it, my shining one.

Never turn away.

Though every moment be surprising,

Revelatory, unrecognizable and full of wonder,

Continue to cherish each breath.

Live in gratitude for the supreme nectar we imbibe

In each turning, outbreath to inbreath into outbreath.

Lorin Roche

The Radiance Sutras
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Solstice

I'm lying on a couch by the open window, listening to a 

warm breeze fluttering the leaves of the sycamore, cars

sighing and grumbling down Broadway with some destination

in mind.  A crow drops elegantly toward the pavement, 

the noon light splintering silver across the tops of his flattened

wings.  The air stills.  An unseen jet rakes the sky with

thunder.  Small tufts of tree-cotton drift by, their progress

hesitant but always angled upward.  In less than a month 

I will have been ill for exactly half my life, a milestone I

could never have imagined reaching with my sanity intact.

I seldom know what I need to be doing, or if I really need to

be here at all.  And yet I am here, and my life is connected

to other lives in ways I cannot fully comprehend.  A ripple 

of breeze presses one leaf against another and another, and

the sound empties and fills my heart with a sensation that

is indistinguishable from love.  I think of Meister Eckhart:

If the only prayer you say in your entire life is thank you, it

will be enough. 

Elizabeth Nordeen

august moon

Staying very still in the darkness,

I became less and less convinced of the fact that I 

actually existed.  

Haruki Murakami

Photo:  Peter Bowers

 Love is a Place

meditation

a practice no one can practice 

abandoning all hope 

free of a doer 

no intention or goal 

accepting and surrendering 

all that arises

going nowhere

for where would one go 

and who is there to go 

giving all to the moment

the moment that cannot be thought 

not knowing, not knowing, not knowing

Billy Doyle
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Beholding

I know that nothing has ever been real

without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Book of Hours

Photo:  with thanks to Peter Morgan

Thanking

I think as long as you are a human being 

there is thanking, gratitude for being, 

not for being human, 

but for being

what you fundamentally are.

Thanking for the sake of thanking.

Jean Klein

Transmission of the Flame 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Nothing's a gift

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

Here's how it's arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I'll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors,

some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we'll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

I can't remember 

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it's the only item

not included on the list.

Wislawa Szymborska

Myself

I do not feel myself expanded as all that is, 

A part of everything, and everything a part of me. 

Nor do I feel myself as "That" within which all appears,

The Absolute, everything arising within me.

I do not feel "myself" at all.

Unless, by "I" you mean...

This. 

Not a thing alive,

But... Aliveness Itself.

Formless Aliveness in samadhi,

Or Aliveness in form...

Show me that place, where one ends, 

And the other begins?

Show me that place,

Where "This" begins and ends?

One thought of "I"...
and Heaven and Earth are divided!

Chuck Surface