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

Lie down

Take off the backpack

Lie down in the long grass.

Pull up the blue sky-blanket.

Rest.

So many years of Dharma practice,

Straight-spine diligence, straining toward

enlightenment.

Today.

This hillside.

Just this.

Lie down in the long grass.

Let the earth take you.

Deer track and horse dung

and the eye within the eye,

revolving and luminous.

I never knew this.

Did no one ever tell me?

I remember my Zen master in the interview room,

'Trust yourself,' he said.  'Just be yourself.'

I think his meaning was this:

Take off the backpack,

Lie down in the long grass.

Let the sky take you.

Rest.

Breathe space

into space

into space.

I never knew there was this much light! 

Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin

Photo:  Peter Morgan

nothing into nothing

 

Dance.

A thousand times I have ascertained

and found it to be true:  the affairs of

this world are really nothing into

nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

Hafiz
Photo:  Peter Morgan

One Great Thing

And I thought over again 

My small adventures

As with a shore-wind I drifted out

In my kayak

And thought I was in danger,

My fears,

Those small ones that I thought so big

For all the vital things 

I  had to get and to reach.

And yet, there is only

One great thing,

The only thing:

To live to see in huts and on journeys

The great day that dawns,

And the light that fills the world.

Inuit Song

Photo:  Peter Bowers

With thanks: The Beauty We Love

This Shines On

This shines on

whether I'm in bitch mode or radiating benevolence

whether I'm depressed or enjoying equanimity

whether I'm achingly weary or frolicking tirelessly.

This shines on

whether my bookshelves are stacked with scriptures, chick-lit, crime or porn

whether my shoes are microfiber or leather, my coat cotton or mink 

whether my fridge is piously vegan or robustly carnivore.

This shines on

whether my philosophical tendencies veer towards the scientific and secular

or the mystical and metaphysical

whether I'm a closet optimist disguised as a cynic

or a knee-jerk nay-sayer, jus sayin 

Don't be fooled.  This shines on

- pristine, incorruptible - 

regardless. 

This shines on

whether you agree with me as you scan these words

or jump to defend your own view

whether you accept me as a flicker of the vast Light we are

or turn your back on our inextricable intimacy.  

This shines on

and in, and from, and through, every perception,

every experience and every face and fact of World

known by human and non-human Knowingness

(and I exclude nothing, no thing in creation

from that capacity for Knowingness.)

This shines on

The sages call it Reality, but beware:  it's not a thing, an object

or even a state.  To name it is to turn from it, but it could care less.

It shines on regardless.

Miriam Louisa

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been

witness to it:  how the

world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out

to the petals on the ground

to stay, 

knowing as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

I don't say

it's easy, but

what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,

this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east, 

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Mary Oliver

Photo:  Peter Bowers