awakened

'you can stop worrying now'

In advanced age, my health worsening, 

I woke up in the middle of the night,

and experienced a feeling of happiness

so intense and perfect that in all my life

I had only felt its premonition.

And there was no reason for it

It didn't obliterate consciousness;

the past which I carried was there,

together with my grief.

And it was suddenly included,

was a necessary part of the whole.

As if a voice were repeating:

"You  can stop worrying now;

everything happened just as it had to.

You did what was assigned to you,

and you are not required anymore

to think of what happened long ago."

The peace I felt was a closing of accounts

and was connected with the thought of death.

The happiness on this side was

like an announcement of the other side.

I realized that this was an undeserved gift

and I could not grasp by what grace

it was bestowed on me.

Czeslaw Milosz

Photo:  Peter Bowers

lute music

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

priceless gifts

An empty day without events.

And that is why

it grew immense

as space. And suddenly

happiness of being

entered me.

I heard 

in my heartbeat

the birth of time

and each instant of life

one after the other 

came rushing in

like priceless gifts.

Anna Swir (Swirszczynska)

Talking to My Body

Translation: Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

Photo:  Peter Bowers

november

Sunset On The Last Day Of Hunting Season

What deer still remain are far back in the woods by now.

They count their losses.  The others count

their trophies.  The score is even.

It's always a tie in the duality game.

Small Ponds 

Small ponds freeze first,

in the beginning, with just a film

at sunrise you wouldn't even

notice and then a crust

that lasts till noon.  Now half-sunk slush

doesn't melt and the conspiracy of molecules

spreads to lakes.  In the stillness

of a single night, when one breath

of wind might make the difference

between water and ice, solid reaches in and in

and grasps the last ripple for its own.

Vision Statement

Imagine swans

                       with black wingtip

           soaring in wedges,

wheeling on a sullen sky –

Imagine these snow geese

                       in late November

           scouting out a plausible lake

just before freeze-up –

Imagine we, too,

                       are that beautiful,

           streaming transparence,

aloft and countless,

heading home.

Joan Ruvinsky

Photos:  Peter Bowers

Joan Ruvinsky and Peter Bowers

november 

remembering  

her many faces

and none at all

t

revelation must be terrible

 

Revelation must be

  terrible with no time left

to say goodbye.

Imagine that moment,

  staring at the still waters,

with only the brief tremor

of your body to say

  you are leaving everything

and everyone you know behind.

Being far from home is hard, but you know,

  at least we are all exiled together.

When you open your eyes to the world

you are on your own for

  the first time.  No one is

even interested in saving you now

and the world steps in

  to test the calm fluidity of your body

from moment to moment,

as if it believed you could join

  its vibrant dance

of fire and calmness and final stillness.

As if you were meant to be exactly 

  where you are, as if, 

like the dark branch of a desert river

you could flow on without a speck

  of guilt and everything

everywhere would still be just as it should be.

As if your place in the world mattered

  and the world could

neither speak nor hear the fullness of

its own bitter and beautiful cry

  without the deep well

of your body resonating in the echo.

Knowing it takes only

  that first, terrible 

word to make the circle complete,

revelation must be terrible

  knowing you can

never hide your voice again.

David Whyte

River Flow: New and Selected Poems

Photo: Peter Bowers

to bow

 

To which direction shall we bow,

to what sacred space, shrine or God,

if not to the bowing itself?

Pir Elias Amidon

Free Medicine

Photo:  Peter Bowers

learning from trees

If we could,
like the trees,
practice dying,
do it every year
just as something we do—
like going on vacation
or celebrating birthdays,
it would become
as easy a part of us
as our hair or clothing.

Someone would show us how
to lie down and fade away
as if in deepest meditation,
and we would learn
about the fine dark emptiness,
both knowing it and not knowing it,
and coming back would be irrelevant.

Whatever it is the trees know
when they stand undone,
surprisingly intricate,
we need to know also
so we can allow
that last thing
to happen to us
as if it were only
any ordinary thing,

...





Grace Butcher
Photo:  Peter Bowers

heartbreak

is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life.  Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and parcel of every path, asking its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.

In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken, will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.  It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by it absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward.  Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path.  It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.





David Whyte

Consolations

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Photo:  Peter Bowers

how to fall in love

When you shift your focus

from what is absent

to what is present,

from what is missing

to what has been given,

from what you are not

to who you are,

from the ravages of linear time

to the immediacy of Now,

you are reconnecting

with love, truth and beauty,

and abundance is yours,

effortlessly.

For in truth,

nothing is lacking where you are,

nothing is missing from the present scene of the movie of your life,

and you are forever full,

and at the point of completion.

The only reason

you cannot find Oneness

is because you never left.

The day is just waiting to be lived.

So breathe in life, friend,

breathe in life.

Jeff Foster

relief

 

The only thing we know about death is the moment when the whole fear construct falls away and then rises again and the shock of me-ness occurs.  If we really pay attention to it, we will see that the me is fear.

This moment and the death process are the same. You will always meet death here.  Here is always the opportunity to surrender and to experience something that you don't know about. The relief of death is the relief from living in fear, the relief from the burden of the known. That is available here. Right now. And it will always be. And the one opportunity to take the one action that you can take will always be here and now. That is to surrender to what is. 

Steven Harrison

What's Next After Now

Photo:  Peter Bowers

the role i play

 

Life While-You-Wait.

Performance without rehearsal.

Body without alterations.

Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.

I only know it's mine, I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play's all about.

Ill prepared for the privilege of living,

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.

I trip at every step over my own ignorance.

I can't conceal my hayseed manners.

My instincts are for hammy histrionics.

Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.

Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,

stars you'll never get counted,

your character like a raincoat you button on the run - 

the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!

But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.

Is it fair, I ask

(my voice a little hoarse,

since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz

taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.

I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is. 

The props are surprisingly precise.

The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.

The farthest galaxies have been turned on.

Oh no, there' s no question, this must be the premiere.

And whatever I do

will become forever what I've done. 

Wislawa Szymborska

Photo:  Peter Bowers

pride

If I claim I was a terrible, horrible,

Evil no-good person,

It would be a lie, and it would be

Wanting always to be the best or the worst.

So now I'm destined to wander,

My bag full of pride a lot lighter,

And if I say I am done

With whatever ails me,

That would also be a lie.

I am not done, will never be done

Till the day I die,

But I am content to be human,

Naked and shaking with love

At the moment, and the next moment,

I just can't say.

Noelle Kocot

Photo: Peter Bowers

next time

Next time what I'd do is look at 

the earth before saying anything. I'd stop

just before going into a house

and be an emperor for a minute

and listen better to the wind

  or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether

blame or praise or just passing time,

I'd watch the face, how the mouth

had to work, and see any strain, any

sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more - the earth

bracing itself and soaring, the air 

finding every leaf and feather over

forest and water, and for every person

the body glowing inside the clothes

  like a light. 

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers

practice

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

Rocks don't see it.

Bless and sit down.

Forgive and forget.

Practice kindness all day to everybody

and you will realize you're already 

in heaven now.

That's the story.

That's the message.

Nobody understands it,

nobody listens, they're

all running around like chickens with heads cut

off.  I will try to teach it but it will 

be in vain, s'why I'll 

end up in a shack

praying and being

cool and singing 

by my woodstove

making pancakes.

Jack Kerouac

Photo: Peter Bowers

discontinuous poems

The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
  it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
  without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
  valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
  of mine.

Fernando Pessoa 

(writing under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro)

translation: Edouard Roditi

with thanks: love is a place

to begin with, the sweet grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat

  of the sweet grass?

Will the owl bite off its own wings?

Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or

  forget to sing?

Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

  of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

  are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

  thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.

It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It's more than the beating of the single heart.

It's praising.

It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life - just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

  still another.

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

the dancer, the potter,

to make me a begging bowl

which I believe

my soul needs.

And if I come to you,

to the door of your comfortable house

with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we

  change.

Congratulations, if

  you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you think that beauty exists for some

  fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure -

  your life -

what would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.

Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.

That was many years ago.

Since then I have gone out from my confinements,

  though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.

I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.

They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment

somehow or another.)

And I have become the child of clouds, and of hope.

I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.

I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,

I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?

Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

Mary Oliver

Evidence

photo:  Peter Bowers

natural and simple

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Photo:  Peter Bowers

with thanks: Love is a Place

first breath

As soon as she is born - she, 

he - the moment the newborn breathes

for the first time, taking, from the general

supply, some air, pulling it down

half her length, into the base of the

lobe which had first existed as a mattery

idea, and then had become the folded

lung, which lay in blue wait;

as soon as the sky

is drawn in, like a

petal expanding, in fast motion,

opening into the new being -

oxygen, where it had never been,

taking the neonate's bluish shade

back into the empyrean;

as soon as she's taken the good of one breath, 

and given back the rest - look,

she is dying. I mean she is living - for a time,

maybe ninety years - but she

is on her way, now, to that ending.

She had never died at all, until now,

never before been offered the human work.

Sharon Olds

Photo:  Peter Bowers

with thanks Love is a Place

the teachers

Owl in the black morning,
   mockingbird in the burning
      slants of the sunny afternoon
         declare so simply

to the world
   everything I have tried but still
      haven't been able
         to put into words,

so I do not go
   far from that school
      with its star-bright
         or blue ceiling,

and I listen to those teachers,
   and others too -
      the wind in the trees
         and the water waves -

for they are what lead me
   from the dryness of self
      where I labor
         with the mind-steps of language -

lonely, as we all are
   in the singular,
      I listen hard
         to the exuberances

of the mockingbird and the owl,
   the waves and the wind.
      And then, like peace after perfect speech,
         such stillness.





Mary Oliver
Photo:  Peter Bowers

practice

 

Once someone asked a well-known Thai meditation master, "In this world where everything changes, where nothing remains the same, where loss and grief are inherent in our very coming into existence, how can there be any happiness? How can we find security when we see that we can't count on anything being the way we want it to be?" The teacher, looking compassionately at this fellow, held up a drinking glass which had been given to him earlier in the morning and said, "You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it, I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say,  'Of course.' But when I understand this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. Every moment is just as it is and nothing need be otherwise."

When we recognize that, just as that glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, then life becomes precious and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead - our children, our mates, our friends - how precious they become. How little fear can interpose, how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life  as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself.  

When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit and what matters becomes instantly apparent: The transmission of love, the letting go of obstacles to understanding, the relinquishment of our grasping, our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. Taking each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy, as it arises and experiencing it fully, life becomes workable...

If our only spiritual practice were to live as though we were already dead, relating to all we meet, to all we do, as though it were our final moments in the world, what time would there be for old games or falsehoods or posturing? If we lived our life as though we were already dead, as though our children were already dead, how much time would there be for self-protection and the re-creation of ancient mirages? Only love would be appropriate, only the truth.

Stephen and Ondrea Levine

Excerpt: Who Dies?

Photo:  Peter Bowers

 

at the seven-mile ranch, comstock, texas

I live like I know what I'm doing.

When I hand the horses a square of hay,

when I walk the road of stones 

or chew on cactus pulp,

there's a drumming behind me,

the day opens up to let me pass through.

I know the truth,

how always I'm following each small sign that appears.

This sheep that materialized behind a clump of cenizo bushes

knows I didn't see him till he raised his head.

Out here it's impossible to be lonely.

The land walking beside you is your oldest friend,

pleasantly silent, like already you've told the best stories

and each of you knows how much the other made up.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Photo:  Peter Bowers

with thanks: A Year of Being Here

attention

"Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now."

Aldous Huxley,  Island

If this were the last time we met in this world 

what would I wish I had said     or done?

I know death is always somewhere in the neighborhood

for someone as old as I,

just as I know, no matter how much I might beg,

God would never forbid you might die.

There is no perfect word to speak,

no perfect deed to perform.

When after today I have left or am left,

if I am never to see you again,

then I just want to be fully here    now,

to be fully awake while we may.

There will be time for sleep after today.

Ron Stone

Photo: Peter Bowers

with thanks: A Year of Being Here