Purpose of Poetry

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Czeslaw Milosz

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)



Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Way It Is

There is a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn't change.

People wonder about what things you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and grow old.

Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.

You don't ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers

To Come Home to Yourself

May all that is unforgiven in you

Be released.

May your fears yield

Their deepest tranquillities.

May all that is unlived in you

Blossom into a future

Graced with love. 

John O'Donohue

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Resting

Resting happens when you do not look for rest.

Coming home means to be homeless.

The myriad places I may try to hang my hat

disappear in deepest wisdom -

No place at all!

Dorothy Hunt

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Woodcarver

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood.  When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded.  They said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver: 

"What is your secret?"

Khing replied:  "I am only a workman:

I have no secret.  There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten praise or criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

"By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand.

"Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

and begin.

"If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been 

No bell stand at all.

"What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood; 

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits."

Chuang Tzu

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Interbeing

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.  Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.  The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.  If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.  So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.  "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be," we have a new verb, inter-be.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it.  If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow.  In fact, nothing can grow.  Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper.  The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper.  And we see the wheat.  We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper.  And the logger's father and mother are in it too.  When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too.  This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception.  Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper.  You cannot point out one thing that is not here - time, space, the earth, the rain, the heat.  Everything coexists with this sheet of paper.  That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary.  To be is to inter-be.  You cannot just be by yourself alone.  You have to inter-be with every other thing.  This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source.  Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun.  Do you think that this sheet of paper would be possible?  No, without sunshine nothing can be.  And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either.  The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up of only 'non-paper elements.'  And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all.  Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine, and so on, there will be no paper.  As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.  

  

Thich Nhat Hanh

From:  The Heart of Understanding

Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra

Photo:  Peter Bowers

a living silence

To deliver oneself up,
to hand oneself over,
entrust oneself completely to the silence
of a wide landscape of woods and hills,
or sea and desert; to sit still while
the sun comes up over the land
and fills its silences with light.


Few are willing to belong completely, 
to such silence, to let it soak into their bones,
to breathe nothing but silence, to feed
on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life 
into a living and vigilant silence. 










Thomas Merton
From:  Thoughts in Solitude
Photo:  Peter Bowers 

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning

I sat down

on a hillside

to think about God - 

a worthy pastime.

Near me, I saw

a single cricket;

it was moving grains of the

hillside

this way and that way.

How great was its energy,

how humble its effort.

Let us hope

it will always be like this,

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building the universe.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers

stillness

stillness --

in the depths of the lake

billowing clouds

Kobayashi Issa

(1763 - 1828)

English version by David G. Lanoue

Thanks to Poetry Chaikhana 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Devotion

Q.  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 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.

Q.  What is the place of devotion in the path of knowledge?

JK.  Devotion is the driving power to understand that the seeker is the sought.

Devotion is an energy, a forefeeling that brings us to the devoted.

It is a global feeling, not fractional like thinking.

When knowledge is not integrated in our totality,

our global sensation, it remains an intellectual representation.

So devotion integrates knowledge in being knowledge.

Jean Klein

From:  The Book of Listening

Photo:  Peter Bowers

A Room

A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.


Without changing expression
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.


Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal.
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable or rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -

You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.





Jane Hirshfield
From:  Lives of the Heart
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Ask Me

Sometime when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether

what I have done is my life.  Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt:  ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait.  We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers