What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

David Whyte 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.
Because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.





Goethe
translated by Robert Bly

Photo:  Peter Bowers

great gifts

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; 

mostly, they are passed on unopened. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo:  Peter Bowers

peace

May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.

The Upanishads

Photo:  Peter Bowers

happy new year

Time is very slow for those who wait;

very fast for those who are scared;

very long for those who lament;

very short for those who celebrate; but for those who love, 

time is eternal.

William Shakespeare

Photo:  Peter Bowers

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