love flows down

Love comes with a knife, not some 

shy question, and not with fears 

for its reputation! I say 

these things disinterestedly. Accept them 

in kind. Love is a madman 

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, 

running through the mountains, drinking poison, 

and now quietly choosing annihilation. 

You've been walking the ocean’s edge, 

holding up your robes to keep them dry. 

You must dive naked under and deeper under, 

a thousand times deeper! Love flows down. 

The ground submits to the sky and suffers 

what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse 

for giving in like that? 

Don’t put blankets over the drum! 

Open completely. Let your spirit-ear 

listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. 

Let the cords of your robe be untied. 

Shiver in this new love beyond all 

above and below. The sun rises, but which way 

does night go? I have no more words. 

Let soul speak with the silent 

articulation of a face.

Rumi 

Coleman Barks version

Photo:  Peter Bowers

with thanks:  Love is a Place

listen

Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.

 In the boredom and the pain of it

no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste,

smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

 because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

 and life itself is grace.

Frederik Buechner

Photo:  Peter Bowers

what we offer up

I have filled all the paper made in Egypt,

and all that made in Baghdad too,

with this longing-talk poetry.

It must  be that I must have forgotten

how an hour of actual friendship,

being in your presence for just that long,

is worth a world of verbal imaginations.

Dear one, let this living

be what we offer up.

Rumi

Soul Fury

Translation:  Coleman Barks

without hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,

for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

And wait without love.  For love would be love, 

of the wrong thing. 

Yet there is faith.

But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.

And the darkness shall be the light

and the stillness the dancing.

T.S.Eliot

To deliver oneself up

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

Photo:  Peter Bowers

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