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