In a Handful of God

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes it shyness,

When your fears surrender to your strengths,

You will begin to experience

That all existence

Is a teeming sea of infinite life,

In a handful of ocean water

You could not count all the finely tuned

Musicians

Who are acting stoned

For very intelligent and sane reasons

And of course are becoming extremely sweet

And wild.

In a handful of the sky and earth,

In a handful of God,

We cannot count

All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there

Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void

Or darkness.

There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic

In this luminous, brimming

Playful world.

Hafiz

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Because of Our Wisdom

In many parts of this world water is

Scarce and precious.

People sometimes have to walk

A great distance

Then carry heavy jugs upon their

Heads.

Because of our wisdom, we will travel

Far for love.

All movement is a sign of

Thirst.

Most speaking really says,

"I am hungry to know you."

Every desire of your body is holy;

Every desire of your body is

Holy.

Dear one,

Why wait until you are dying

To discover that divine

Truth?

Hafiz

Photo:  Peter Bowers



Entrance

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

Out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

From viewing things already too well-known,

Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

 Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo:  Peter Bowers

 

"A Carbon-Based Life Form"

A person tired from happiness grows sober.

Another, worn through

by sadness, stumbles into a kind of joy.

It is like a dog alone in a house, barking to hear its own kind.

Nothing needs to be added.  Yet we do.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers



Only when I am quiet and do not speak

Only when I am quiet for a long time

and do not speak

do the objects of my life draw near.

Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug.

Hesitant even the towels,

for all their intimate knowledge and scent of fresh bleach.

How steady their regard as they ponder,

dreaming and waking,

the entrancement of my daily wanderings and tasks.

Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose,

they seem to be thinking,

a quiet judgment that glistens between the glass doorknobs.

Yet theirs is not the false reserve

of a scarcely concealed ill-will,

nor that other, active shying:  of pelted rocks.

No, not that.  For I hear the sigh of happiness

each object gives off

if I glimpse for even an instant the actual instant -

As if they believed it possible

I might join

their circle of simple, passionate thusness,

their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,

the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.

Jane Hirshfield

The breeze at dawn

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

Rumi

Photo:  Peter Bowers



Are you looking for me?

Are you looking for me?  I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in

synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own

neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me instantly -

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says:  Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

Kabir

Live the Questions Now

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

A Day Comes

A day comes

when the mouth grows tired

of saying "I."

Yet it is occupied

still by a self which must speak.

Which still desires,

is curious.

Which believes it has also a right.

What to do?

The tongue consults with the teeth

it knows will survive

both mouth and self,

which grin - it is their natural pose -

and say nothing.

Jane Hirshfield

from After

Follow Truth

The Buddha didn't know that

his choice to be himself would

roll through the pages of history

like a rogue wave.  All he did

was sit beneath the bodhi tree,

intention fixed on awakening,

and when the light flowed in,

he offered it back as the fruit

of all his practice.  We each

act without knowing how the

ripples from our pond might

touch another, what the

consequences of our freedom

might be, or where the choice

to follow truth might lead.

Danna Faulds

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light,"

said the Buddha,

before he died.

I think of this every morning.

as the east begins

to tear off its many clouds

of darkness, to send up the first

signal - a white fan

streaked with pink and violet,

even green.

An old man, he lay down

between two sala trees,

and he might of said anything,

knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,

it thickens and settles over the fields.

Around him, the villagers gathered

and stretched forward to listen.

Even before the sun itself

hangs, disattached, in the blue air,

I am touched everywhere

by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything

that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself

as it blazes over the hills,

like a million flowers on fire -

clearly I'm not needed,

yet I feel myself turning

into something of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,

he raised his head.

He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers

When Death Comes

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth..

When it's over, I want to say:  all of my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made my life something particular, and real. 

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers