The Altar of This Moment

Place everything you can perceive—

everything you can

see,

hear,

smell,

taste,

or touch,

upon the altar of this moment

and give thanks.

It is over so soon—

this expression,

this single moment of your precious life,

this one heart

pounding itself open

with fear or wild joy,

this one breath rising

in the cold winter air

smoothly and gently

or coughing and sputtering.

Bow, while you can, before

this one taste

of afternoon tea

warming its way to your belly,

or the fragrant orange

exploding its sweet juice

in your grateful mouth.

You have to love

the antics of your mind,

imagining life should only be sweet.

The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.

It is whole, like you,

before you think yourself to pieces.

Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,

and give special thanks for such grace

that wakes you up from sleeping through your life.

Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,

yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.

In this one moment,

your eyes meet mine and there is

a single looking.

What is peering from behind our masks?

Can it touch itself across the room?

Place your palms together;

touch your holy skin.

In another moment it will shed itself.

What will you be then?

What were you before you had two hands?

What are you now?

You cannot capture That

and place It on the altar of this moment.

It is the altar,

and this moment’s infinite expressions,

and the Seeing,

and its own devotion to itself.

You are That.

 Dorothy Hunt

Photo:  Peter Bowers

With thanks: science and non-duality website

The Mother

The most beautiful word on the lips of mankind is the word “Mother,” and the most beautiful call is the call of “My mother.” It is a word full of hope and love, a sweet and kind word coming from the depths of the heart. The mother is everything – she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness….
Everything in nature bespeaks the mother. The sun is the mother of earth and gives it its nourishment of heart; it never leaves the universe at night until it has put the earth to sleep to the song of the sea and the hymn of birds and brooks. And this earth is the mother of trees and flowers. It produces them, nurses them, and weans them. The trees and flowers become kind mothers of their great fruits and seeds. And the mother, the prototype of all existence, is the eternal spirit, full of beauty and love.






Kahlil Gibran
Photo:  Peter Bowers

What is There Beyond Knowing

What is there beyond knowing that keeps

calling to me?  I can't

turn in any direction

but it's there.  I don't mean

the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's

silk song, but the far off

fires, for example,

of the stars, heaven's slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind

playful with its breath;

or time that's always rushing forward,

or standing still

in the same - what shall I say -

moment.

What I know

I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it

on one shoulder,

important and honourable, but so small!

While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable.  How wonderful it is

to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end. 

I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,

in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out.  Life so far doesn't have any other name

but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet. 

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass

and the weeds.

Mary Oliver

We Are Here

It is a strange and magical fact to be here,

walking around in a body,

to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you.

It is an immense privilege,

and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here …

It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us

so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed.

We are here.

We are wildly and dangerously free.

John O'Donohue

From Anam Cara

image:  Peter Bowers

look at love

look at love

how it tangles

with the one fallen in love

look at spirit

how it fuses with earth

giving it new life

why are you so busy

with this or that or good or bad

pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all

the known and the unknown

see how the unknown merges into the known

why think seperately

of this life and the next

when one is born from the last

look at your heart and tongue

one feels but deaf and dumb

the other speaks in words and signs

look at water and fire

earth and wind

enemies and friends all at once

the wolf and the lamb

the lion and the deer

far away yet together

look at the unity of this

spring and winter

manifested in the equinox

you too must mingle my friends

since the earth and the sky

are mingled just for you and me

be like sugarcane

sweet yet silent

don't get mixed up with bitter words

my beloved grows

right out of my own heart

how much more union can there be

rumi

photo:  peter bowers

On Meditating, Sort Of

Meditation, so I've heard, is best accomplished

if you entertain a certain strict posture.

Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.

So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that

even better place - half-asleep - where the  world,

spring, summer, autumn, winter - 

flies through my mind in its

hard ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time

reveal their true attitudes:   they never

heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally

thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,

made out of earth and water,

my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - 

all that glorious,  temporary stuff.

Mary Oliver
Photo:  Peter Bowers

when you know yourself

when you know yourself

you know that there is nothing that is not God

you know that the face of God

is the Face of faces

you know It as both He and She

and neither: nada

you know It as the Beloved

whose embrace you can’t escape

you know Its Presence as your

absence, or rather,

your secret sensuous melting

into the ever-nowness of your aliveness

when you know yourself

you know that there is nothing

that is not this immeasurable immensity,

always hiding in plain view

you know It as the Nameless One

wearing any nametag with equal delight,

quivering like a child’s smile

simply to be noticed

Beloved

when you know yourself

you know that there is nothing that is not yourself

miriam louisa

this unlit light
Photo:  Peter Bowers

remembering

The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.





Wendell Berry
Photo:  Peter Bowers

If You Love

If you Love being Alive,

Being Alive will Love you back.

This, at least, is my Experience,

And all that I may speak of

Not Loving, necessarily,

The ever-changing content of Life,

But Loving the unchanging Essential,

The fact of Being Alive.

Such Love will not put an end,

To the ebb and flow of sorrow and joy,

But will touch the experience of each,

Will touch the experience of Life.

Untouched by all that arises,

But Touching all that arises,

Love born of Loving…

And being Loved by…

The Mystery of Life that we are.

Chuck Surface

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird  — 

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me 

keep my mind on what matters, 

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still  and learning to be

 astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium. 

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes, 

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy 

to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, 

telling them all, over and over, how it is 

that we live forever.



Mary Oliver 

Photos:  Peter Bowers

the work itself

Do not depend on the hope of results.
… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless
and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.

As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.





Thomas Merton
in a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966,
reproduced in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton
Photo:  Peter Bowers

a living friend

What does pre-eternity mean to you?  What is your 

origin? 

The source?  What is spirit?

Spend your life finding out your own state.

Those other mysteries will come clear.

God is depth.  And you, you fool, you are also deep.

The same depth is in you.

Don't worry about terminology, pre-existence, 

the original face, spirit, soul.

Search within yourself.  The great mystery is there.

Everyone talks about gnosticism and dervishes.

Those are just words.

I want someone with a pulse, a living friend, 

who says directly to me, You are a part.  I am the whole.

Come into this awareness.  Get to know me.  

Excerpts from the Sayings of Shams Tabriz

Soul Fury 

Rumi and Shams Tabriz on Friendship

Coleman Barks 

Photo:  Peter Bowers