I won’t die.
I won’t go anywhere.
I’ll always be here.
But don’t ask me any questions.
I won’t answer.
(– The Death Poem of Ikkyu)From death mask, a brief pause, to eternal face.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.-- Dalai Lama
| ཐུགས་རྗེ་ཆེ་། (tujay-chay) ཐུགས་རྗེཞེ་དྲག་ཆེ་།. (Thank you!) |
1. What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me. (John Cage)
2. The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation. (John Cage)
3. I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it. (John Cage)
Say Yes Quickly
Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says “How aren’t you?”
Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. In side you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and you have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
(Poem by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi )
Against Certainty
There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness.
If I then say “that,” it too is taken away.
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear.
I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.
To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another.
(Poem by Jane Hirshfield)Time to disappear.
Because we imagine anger is never a good thing, it is easy to think we should practice simply not being angry. But that approach is too general and abstract. It’s important for each of us to be precise, to be real, to be personal and honest, to find out exactly what my anger is. To do that we need to ask ourselves lots of questions about its actual nature. (--Nancy Baker, “Precious Energy” in Tricycle)
Anger visits often. But it doesn't arrive kicking and sputtering and punching. That's what occurs when it is not received and welcomed as a stranger, invited to sit a while, brewing tea or coffee, asking What's up? How have you been? What are you working on these days?
C. G. Jung once had a patient who believed she lived on the moon. So Jung met her there. As she realized he took her experiences as valid, she told a sad tale of vampires and isolation. Eventually, this woman who'd been abused as a girl made her way back to earth. Patients like her had taught Jung that the fact of a person’s madness did not in any way invalidate the richness and authenticity of their personal mythology.
(--Craig Chalquist, PhD, from Amazon Review of documentary film, Jupiter’s Wife, {1995}, by Michel Negroponte, about Maggie Cogan)That’s not it exactly. Not merely insane. Rather, caught inside a story.
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(--from Act 5, Scene 5, The Tragedy of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare)As Shakespeare elsewhere writes, the rest is silence.
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means “the awakened one.” At about the same time, another of humanity’s early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching.
To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, “Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create.” They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of “normal” human existence. They showed the way. (--from chapter 1, The New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle) http://res.allpdftools.com/allpdftools/pdf-download-resources/A_New_Earth.pdfQuakers go.
Blessed be the name of silence!
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”A good time to step outside our demands.
(― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)
“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. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
(--Thomas Merton, The Letters of Thomas Merton)A good time to sit inside life's suchness.
