The only Zen

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

Robert M Pirsig

For those of us who never quite recovered from 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance':

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1951397,00.html

Being in the driving seat

"In the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an unfortunate. Literally someone who has not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of the society, they may unkindly be described as a loser. There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser. That shows 400 years of evolution in society, and I believe, in who's responsible for our lives. It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat.

That's exhilarating if you are doing well, and very crushing if you're not. It leads in the worst cases, in the analysis of socilogists like Emile Durkheim, it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reasons for that is the people take what happens to them extremely personally: they own their success, but they also own their failure.

Alain De Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html

Confronted by Chrysanthemums

For his morning tea
A monk sits down in utter silence,
Confronted by chrysanthemums.

Basho

Photo: Buddhist temple, Nanjing

Economic Localization, the need of the hour?

The Economics of Happiness: a documentary film about the worldwide movement for economic localization.

Site: http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomicsofhappiness

"The Economics of Happiness' describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents, including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Samdhong Rinpoche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Michael Shuman, Zac Goldsmith and Keibo Oiwa. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. 'The Economics of Happiness' challenges us to restore our faith in humanity, challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world."

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9xcDs9jRk&feature=share

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love, dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Oh dance me to the end of love, dance me to the end of love....

Leonard Cohen

Sumbody tutched me on the sholder

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
'this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder'
and turned his paper in.

Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.

The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of 'o' and 'd'
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

Tender Spot, Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye

Asking for Directions

We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.

We didn't say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.

That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.

Linda Gregg

Walking down the line

Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Green Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWNRUVMboq4

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's only me, and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one, and I walk alone

...I'm walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line of the edge
And where I walk alone

*Photo from Google Images

December

"I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village."

Shirly Jackson

Ludovico Einaudi

http://www.myspace.com/ludovicoeinaudispace

Primavera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxFAT581T4

Blue Willow: Persephone Falling

“Depression is hidden knowledge.”
—James Hillman

You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before, cracking apart, a black grin
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.

And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,

Only Normal

"Nothing is more useful or fitting than to be a normal human being; but the very notion of a "normal human being" suggests a restriction to the average - as does also the concept of adaptation. It is only a man who, as things stand, already finds it difficult to come to terms with the everyday world who can see in this restriction a desirable improvement: a man, let us say whose neurosis unfits him for normal life.

To be "normal" is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaptation. But for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work - for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness.

As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead "abnormal" lives."

Page 47, 'Modern Man in Search of a Soul', Carl Gustav Jung

Can you understand?

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Jack Gilbert, 'The Abandoned Valley'

Precious

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller

Rapture

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Page 1, 'The Power of Myth', Joseph Campbell

The Ashaninka, A Threatened Way of Life

"The Ashaninka are one of the largest indigenous groups in South America, their ancestral homelands ranging from Brazil to Peru. Since colonial times, their existence has been difficult -- they have been enslaved, had their lands taken away or destroyed, and were caught up in the bloody internal conflict in Peru during the late 20th century.

Today, a large communal reserve set aside for the Ashaninka is under threat by the proposed Pakitzapango dam, which would displace some 10,000 Ashaninka. The dam is part of a large set of hydroelectric projects planned between the Brazilian and Peruvian governments - without any original consultation with the Ashaninka.

Bowing to recent pressure from indigenous groups, development one other dam in the project, the Tambo-40, has already been halted. The Pakitzapango dam on Peru's Ene River is currently on hold, though the project has not been withdrawn yet. Survival International has collected these images of the Ashaninka and their threatened homeland, and provided the text below, written by Jo Eede."

Photo-story: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/the-ashaninka-a-threatened-way-of-life/100208/

Spell

If, at your desk, you push aside your work,
take down a book, turn to this verse
and read that I kneel there, pressing
my ear where on your chest the muscles
arch as great books part, in seagull curves,
bridging the seasounds of your heart,

and that your hands run through my hair,
draw the wayward mass to strands
as flat as scarlet silk-thread bookmarks,
and stroke my cheeks as if smoothing
back the tissue leaves from chilly,
plated pages, and pull me near

to read my eyes alone, then you shall see,
silvered and monochrome, yourself,
sitting at your desk, taking down a book,
turning to this verse, and then, my love,
you shall not know which one of us is reading
now, which writing, and which written.

Kate Clanchy

Paper Boats

“Noted philanthropist commits suicide, community stunned.” “His giving knew no bounds”.

But you don’t find it strange at all, it makes perfect sense to you. To be that kind, you must be extraordinarily sensitive. And when you are that sensitive, you needs must suffer, more than others. With extraordinary kindness, comes extraordinary pain.

“The Buddha when he was a small child of 7 or 8, was once taken to watch the annual Ploughing Festival, where his father, the King, ceremonially guided the bullocks in plowing the first furrow. At the end of the day, they find the little child seated upright in the same position they had left him, deeply disturbed by the plight of the tiny creatures who lost their homes and their lives in the plowing.”

Siddhartha had no choice but to go away. You cannot live with such sensitivity, a state of being-without-skin. You must either die, or go away, seeking detachment.

The other day, you notice a small green insect upside down, almost drowning in the bath water. You stop, lift him up gently with an old toothbrush, finish your bath quickly, and hasten to keep him on a potted plant in the balcony. You are in a hurry to leave for office, but you catch yourself going back to check whether he’s okay. Looking at the small green insect merging with the green leaves, a whole childhood of paper boats comes back to you.

Every monsoon season, you spent a lot of time rescuing small insects and bugs drowning in pools of rain water, in the hilly green area you lived. You walked around after the rain, looking out for them. And for those that could not be reached with twigs, you made small paper boats and pushed them in their direction. When they clambered on to the boat, you started breathing again. You died with each one that did not make it, that you could not save, across that wide open space full of rain water pools.

Going back yet again to check on the little green insect, you catch yourself. No, not again. The road to deliberate death is paved with paper boats.


* Photo from Google Images

Read to me....

In the Iranian film 'Blackboards' by Samira Makhmalbaf, the scene you remember the most is of an old Kurdish shepherd grazing his sheep high up in the mountains, stopping the teacher and asking him if he can read a letter for him. He slowly pulls out a carefully folded piece of paper from his pocket. His face opening up in a smile hearing that his son is doing well though he cannot visit him now. A face still smiling when the teacher continues on his way, suspecting the truth, that the son is perhpas in jail, like so many other young men from this region. (But kindness, more important than truth...)

You read about postmen in the Himalayas who walk long distances, climb up and down hills, cross rivers, to carry letters to remote villages. How they also serve as the reader and writer of letters to people there, and are much awaited, like family. A job you would’ve loved to do, a role you would’ve loved to play? Long moments of walking alone, and then connection and meaning, and words, and then a walking alone again. A pendulum of perfect balance.

‘The Reader’ was heartbreaking because it was all about reading and being read to. You walked around wounded for a long time after that.

So great was your need to read to someone once upon a time that you walk into an Old Age home one day, and ask the Mother Superior whether any of the old people there would like to be read to. She says yes, but then they try not to let them interact too much with young people because that would make them remember the children who abandoned them a long time ago, and the carefully constructed living-in-the-present would come apart in mindless, endless grief.

While you are talking to her, an old man comes in to ask if his son’s money order has come. His son hasn’t sent anything in years, nor bothered to come to see his father or call him or write to him. But this is a ritual the old man follows every day to retain what is left of his 'sanity', and the kind nuns indulge him.

You walk out, old, abandoned and bent, you do not walk around offering your reading anymore.

You remember the teachers in 'Blackboards', walking around with knowledge that no one wants to learn. What is worse, having riches that no one wants, or having nothing to give?

You cannot face it steadily

And a time to walk around clutching an old yellowing copy of Four Quartets, as if at the very last straw.

"You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,

You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'."

From 'The Dry Salvages', 'Four Quartets' by T.S.Eliot

Dying

"What did we ever own that hadn't
the quality of seasons
their numerous dyings?"

Brian Patten

This is the nectar off which I will feed...

"Her face is deeply mapped, her back slightly bent. Three years ago she made a pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Hajji. For a year afterward, she wore only white. Today she alters this slightly, wearing a long white dress embroidered with green, over black-and-white pajamas. It is cool here in the West Bank in late May; people think of the whole Middle East as a great hot desert, but here in this high, perched village the days feel light and breezy, the land a music of terraced hills.

Feelings crowd in on me; maybe this is what it means to be in your genetic home. That you will feel on fifty levels at once, the immediate as well as the level of blood, the level of uncles, of weeping in the pillow at night, weddings and graves, the babies who didn't make it, level of the secret and unseen.

Maybe this is heritage, that deep well that gives us more than we deserve. Each time I write or walk or think, I drop a bucket in. Staring at my grandmother, my Sitti, as she sits on the low bed, rocking back and forth in time with conversation, tapping her fingertips on her knees, I think, this is the nectar off which I will feed."

Page 50, 'One Village', from 'Never in a Hurry, Essays on People and Places' by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Second Half of Life

"...Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. I have given psychological treatment to too many people of advancing years, and have looked too often into the secret chambers of their souls, not to be moved by this fundamental truth.

Ageing people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding, but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin - and certainly a danger - to be too much occupied with himself; but for the ageing person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.

After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illumine itself. Instead of doing likewise, many old people prefer to to be hypochondriacs, niggards, doctrinaires, applauders of the past or eternal adolescents - all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the self, but inevitable consequences of the delusion that the second half of life must be governed by the principles of the first."

Page 108, 'The Stages of Life', from 'Modern Man in Search of a Soul', Carl Gustav Jung

Who am I now?

"They [the Piraha tribe of the Amazon] frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are."

from the article 'The Interpreter', John Colapinto

Faith

Naomi Shihab Nye, American poet and writer, was born of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. This excerpt is from an essay on their stay/visits to Jerusalem, where her father's family still lives in a village:

"My father and I hike to the tomb of Sheikh Omar, high on a hill. We must overstep the lentil fields to get there. My father stoops to pluck a handful of fresh green lentils, saying, "Once you eat them raw, you never forget the taste." Sometimes I feel this way about my whole life. Who was Omar, when did he live? My father says he was a disciple of Mohammed. He lived a long time ago. The villagers know this is his tomb, so they have built a rugged mound of a mosque to honour him.

Inside, faded prayer rugs cover the floors. A ring of half-burnt candles stands in one corner. We take off our shoes and kneel. I don't really know how to pray like a Muslim, but I know there is something very affecting about people putting down their shovels and brooms five times a day to do this. I like how life continues in the rooms where someone is praying. No one stops talking or stares; it is part of life, the denominator. Everything else is a dancing away."

Page 57, 'One Village', from 'Never in a Hurry, Essays on People and Places', by Naomi Shihab Nye

The ethos of Individualism

"Pre-industrial societies have little notion of a person as a separate entity. A Nigerian psychiatrist told me that, when a psychiatric clinic was first set up in a rural district of Nigeria to treat the mentally ill, the family invariably accompanied the sufferer and insisted upon being present at the patient's interview with the psychiatrist. The idea that the patient might exist as an individual apart from the family, or that he might have personal problems which he did not want to share with them, did not occur to Nigerians who were still living a traditional village life.

In his book Social Anthropology, Sir Edmund Leach refers to "the ethos of individualism which is central to the contemporary Western society but which is notably absent from most of the societies which social anthropologists study."

Page 78, 'The Significance of the Individual', from 'Solitude', Anthony Storr

The anchor, the ocean, the forgetting to be who I am

What is Lost
Jorge Luis Borges

I wonder where my life is, the one that could
have been and never was, the daring one
or the one of gloomy dread, that other thing
which could as well have been the sword or shield
but never was? I wonder where is my lost
Persian or Norwegian ancestor,
where is the chance of my not being blind,
where is the anchor, the ocean, where the forgetting
to be who I am? I wonder where the pure
night is that the unlettered working day
entrusts to the rough laborer so that he
can also feel the love of literature.
I also think about a certain mate
who waited for me once, perhaps still waits.

The audience of alternate selves

Note Autobiographical

"Every time he speaks of himself you sense something missing, something not quite true. It's not that you doubt his sincerity - on the contrary, you know he's making every effort to be honest. It's just that by putting himself in the spotlight he has blinded himself to his own shadow, to the audience of alternate selves who watch him from the wings. He tells you what he sees, but all the while the real self remains invisible, like light seen from the inside of a bulb.

It's like the difference between the way you picture yourself and your face in a photograph. The way you hold your breath at immigration, waiting to see if the man examining your passport will accept you for who you are."

Aseem Kaul, 'Etudes'

Most dangerous is the death of our dreams

Sabse khatarnak hota hai hamaare sapnon ka mar jaana

Sabse khatarnak hota hai murda shanti se bhar jana,
Na hona tadap ka, sab kuch sahan kar jana,
Ghar se nikalna kaam par, aur kaam se loutkar ghar aana,
Sabse khatarnak hota hai,
Hamare sapno ka mar jana.

..............................................................

Most dangerous is the death of our dreams

Most dangerous is
To be filled with dead peace
Not to feel agony and bear it all,
Leaving home for work
And from work return home
Most dangerous is the death of our dreams.

By Paash
(Paash was the pen name of Avtar Singh Sandhu (September 9, 1950 - March 23, 1988), an Indian poet. His strongly left-wing views were reflected in his poetry.He was killed by Khalistani terrorists in 1988 when he was on holiday in his home state, Punjab )

I am not done with my changes

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.

One of the sons was sad sometimes...

Interview, Saudi Arabia

The fathers do not know
what the sons have done.
They are waiting for the sons to call home,
to say it was a mistake,
it was not me.
Somewhere on another street
their boys in short white pants
are walking proudly
in a world they love.
Oranges peeled by hand,
frying onions,
marbles in dust.
Whatever might happen
is shiny, strong.

One of the sons was sad sometimes.
No one knew why.
There is no way, says his brother,
he could fly a plane.

The fathers blink back tears.
They have no evidence at all.
Please tell them something better.
Their sons went to school,
were normal, good.
Whatever would happen
might still be changed.

'You and Yours', Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Sunday After

Beautiful music, from this young Viennese composer, Albors Askari: http://soundcloud.com/dreimalbla

Breath. The Sunday After. It's Alright. Too much rain. Code Name - Dark Matter.

Playing on Repeat since the day I heard it first. I start the day with this. This music is a morning prayer. During the day, it brings me a certain stillness and peace amidst all the stress.
And in the evening, it becomes a lullaby.

Found him here.

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/albors.pascal.askari

* Photo from Google Images.

Kagemu à Paris

An incredible art/dance piece by artist Nobuyuki Hanabusa and dancer Katsumi Sakakura, together known as Kagemu.

'Black Sun' is a a combination of traditional and contemporary Japanese dance/martial arts with exquisitely choreographed motion-graphics:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGg-O_3Q1LM&feature=player_embedded

Read the interview of the duo: Kagemu's 'Black Sun' Synchronizes Projected Video With Japanese Dance.

Found it here: http://thereisnocavalry.wordpress.com/ - thank you, David.

* Photo from Google Images.

Borges

Such beauty, that you almost stop breathing.

The Causes
Jorge Luis Borges

The sunsets and the generations
The days and none was first.
The freshness of water in Adam's
Throat. Orderly paradise.
The eye deciphering the darkness.
The love of wolves at dawn.
The word. The hexameter. The mirror.
The Tower of Babel and pride.
The moon which the Chaldeans gazed at.
The uncountable sands of the Ganges.
Chuang Tzu and the butterfly that dreams him.
The golden apples on the islands.
The steps in the wandering labyrinth.
Penelope's infinite tapestry.
The circular time of the Stoics.
The coin in the mouth of the dead man.
The sword's weight on the scale.
Each drop of water in the water clock.
The eagles, the memorable days, the legions.
Caesar on the morning of Pharsalus.
The shadow of crosses over the earth.
The chess and algebra of the Persians.
The footprints of long migration.
The sword's conquest of kingdoms.
The relentless compass. The open sea.
The clock echoing in the memory.
The king executed by the ax.
The incalculable dust that was armies.
The voice of the nightingale in Denmark.
The calligrapher's meticulous line.
The suicide's face in the mirror.
The gambler's card. Greedy gold.
The forms of a cloud in the desert.
Every arabesque in the kaleidoscope.
Each regret and each tear.
All those things were made perfectly clear
So our hands could meet.

And where you are is where you are not

They are selling calendars at the traffic signals.
Calendars for 2012.
No. Not again.
Not another year.
You are so tired.


                                  "..You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
    You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
    You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

T.S.Eliot, 'East Coker' from 'The Four Quartets'

Postcards

...A universe that includes you

can't be all bad, but

does it? At this distance

you're a mirage, a glossy image

fixed in the posture

of the last time I saw you.

Turn you over, there's the place

for the address. Wish you were

here. Love comes

in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on

and on, a hollow cave

in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.

Margaret Atwood

Purpose

Kiro, the best student of a karate master of the shotokan style in Nagasaki, easily defeated a long-haired young man in an August Moon festival karate tournament. Later that night, he sees the young man being chased by the villagers for stealing a piglet which he held under his arm. Kiro goes to confront the young man. Without dropping the pig, the young man fought ferociously and with a side kick sent Kiro spinning backwards and on to the ground. After he escapes the astounded Kiro asks his master how a weaker opponent, with a pig under one arm, and tired after being chased, managed to fight so well and defeat him.

The master, in answer, narrated this Zen story:

"A Zen master was out walking with his student. The student saw the fox chasing a rabbit and said to his master, “I wonder which one will win?"
"According to an old fable", his master replied, "the rabbit will get away from the fox."
"Surely not, the fox is faster".
"But the rabbit will still escape", insisted the Zen master.
"Why are you so certain?” asked the student.
"Because the fox is running for his dinner but the rabbit is running for his life."

Page 68. 'Beaten by a Novice'
from 'Myths and Legends of the Martial Arts' by Peter Lewis

A View of Delft

A view of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer

In that town,
across the water
where all has been seen
and the bricks are cherished like sparrows,
in that town like a letter from home
read again and again in a port,
in that town with its library of tiles
and its addresses recalled by Johannes Vermeer
who died in debt,
in that town across the water
where the dead take the census
and there are no vacant rooms
for his gaze occupies them all,
where the sky is waiting
to have news of a birth,
in that town which pours from the eyes
of those who left it,
there
between two chimes of the morning,
when fish are sold in the square
and the maps on the walls
show the depth of the sea,
in that town
I am preparing for your arrival.

Page 100, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos' by John Berger

Photo from Google Images

Sacred Time

From Mircea Eliade's 'The Sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion':

Profane Duration and Sacred Time

For religious man, time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. On the one hand, there are the intervals of a sacred time, the time of the festivals (by far the greater part of which are periodical); on the other there is profane time, ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting. Between these two kinds of time there is, of course, solution of continuity; but by means of rites religious man can pass without danger from ordinary temporal duration to sacred time.

One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, "in the beginning". Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself.

At the edge where there is no I or not-I

This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.

He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

Czeslaw Milosz
(The Collected Poems, 1931-1987, trans. by Robert Has)

Imperfect Thirst

If your eyes are not deceived by the mirage
do not be proud of the sharpness of your understanding.
It may be your freedom from this optical illusion
is due to the imperfectness of your thirst.

Suhrawardi (1155–1191), Iranian Philosopher

The Historian of the Hunted

"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions."

Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer, author of 'Things Fall Apart'

Begin

This is now.  Now is,

all there is.  Don't wait for Then;

strike the spark, light the fire.

Sit at the Beloved's table,

feast with gusto, drink your fill

then dance

the way branches

of jasmine and cypress

dance in a spring wind.

The green earth

is your cloth;

tailor your robe

with dignity and grace.

Jelaluddin Rumi

Talk to me

Listening to a conversation between people in Tech Support in a US office, you learn that during Christmas time they get a lot of calls from people, who don't really have any technical problem to report, but just want to talk, because they are so terribly lonely. And the other one adds, Oh I get calls like that even on ordinary days, but it's more around Christmas.

Such loneliness that you would call Tech Support, just to hear someone speak to you nicely for a few short minutes?

You remember this scene from a German movie, a lonely man who calls random numbers from the telephone directory every day, hoping that at least one person will not bang the phone down after "Sorry, wrong number", but will stay on to have a conversation with him.

7 billion people. And not one person to talk to.

Hand

There will always be suffering
It flows through life like water
I put my hand over hers
Down in the lime-tree arbour.

Nick Cave (Australian musician)

Quoted in 'Another Side of Desire', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

All that is left

"Month by month, millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

In some photos taken in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte (near Calais) by Anabell Guerrero we can take account of how a man's fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend."

Page 114, 'Ten Dispatches about Place', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

These are the most beautiful lines I have come across in ages. Sent by a stranger on a mailing group. I didn't know words could express this state of being.

The Art of Disappearing
Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time. 

Lying on our backs, looking up at the night sky

Once in a Story

We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes returns them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering.

A famine is a tragic cluster of events. To which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time.

Page 8, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', John Berger

Leave the familiar for a while

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

Hafez, Persian Poet

Buy Hyacinths to Feed Thy Soul

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

Attributed to the Gulistan of Moslih Eddin Saadi,
a Mohammedan sheik and Persian poet who lived about 1184-1291

The poem is a sort of energy

I think that the poem is a sort of energy that transforms and goes farther away from the writer. And the important thing is not if it's still the same poem, but if it still gives some of its energy to the reader, even if by then, it is rather distorted.

Tomas Transtromer, Swedish Poet, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011

Notebook, 1989

There is a thread you follow

The Way It Is

There is a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what
things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and grow old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
But you don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

A Sense of Peace

"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of your feet are scattered like gravel.

It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough."

The ending of 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', by John Berger

November

Disconnect like dusk.
Like the unknown dervish.
November.

Hold Everything Dear

"There are 8000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 350 of them under eighteen years old. A period in prison has become a normal phase to be undergone, once or several times, in a man's life. Throwing stones can lead to a sentence or two and a half years or more.

Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university. The man speaking has glasses, is about fifty and is wearing a business-lunch suit. You learn how to learn there. He's the youngest of five brothers and imports coffee-machines. You learn how to struggle together and become inseparable. Certain conditions have improved over the last forty years - improved thanks to our hunger strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of an hour more exercise time each day. In the long-sentence prisons they used to mask the windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some sunshine. We got one body-search removed from the daily routine. Otherwise we read and discuss what we read, teach each other different languages. And come to know certain soldiers and some of the guards.

In the streets it's the language of bullets and stones between us. Inside it's different. They're in prison just as we are. The difference is we believe in what's got us there, and they mostly don't, because they are just there to earn a living. I know of some friendships that began like that.

The stance of undefeated despair works like this."

Page 16, 'Undefeated Despair', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

Kafka, and the Schizoid Dilemma

"When mothers both threaten their infants and also reject physical contact with them, they place them in an impossible position. Threats of any kind, from any source, simulate an intense need for attachment on the part of the infant, because the prime function of attachment is protection from the threat of danger. But if the source of the threat is the very person to whom the infant must turn for protection, the infant is faced with a conflict which cannot be resolved. Placed in such a situation, the infant exhibits vacillation between approach, avoidance, and angry behaviour. This disorganization of behaviour can only be alleviated by the infant turning away from everything to do with the mother.

It is clear that avoidance implies a deeper disturbance in the relation between the infant and its mother than does compliance. This may be connected with the fact that avoidance is manifested at an earlier stage in the infant's development than the more sophisticated behaviour of compliance. Avoidance is connected with the fear of being damaged or destroyed by hostility. Compliance is concerned with the fear of love being withdrawn. Avoidance suggests doubt as to whether love has ever been proffered. Compliance implies recognition that love is available, but doubts whether it will last.

.....One of the most characteristic traits of the people whom psychiatrists label schizoid is their inability to make close relationships with people without feeling threatened. The typical schizoid dilemma is a desperate need for love combined with an equally desperate fear of close involvement. Kafka was a writer who vividly portrayed this dilemma in extreme form, and who also used avoidance in adult life in order that he could employ his writing as a means of preventing 'behavioural disorganization'.

Although Kafka, during his brief life, made a number of friends who were deeply fond of him and who sometimes idealized him, he said that, even with his closest friend and later biographer, Max Brod, he had never been able to hold a prolonged conversation in which he had really revealed himself."

Page 100, 'Solitude', Anthony Storr

Philosophy

"Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere."

Novalis

Page 54, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', John Berger

These Hills Called Home

Temsula Ao. Poet, short story writer and ethnographer. Nagaland, India

Yet another beautiful collection of stories from Temsula Ao. Mind-opening too. We see what we choose to see. How much more effective these stories are in sensitizing us to what is going on in Nagaland, than newspaper/TV reports full of statistics.

Available on http://www.flipkart.com/, for delivery within India. I had written about her earlier, here.

"More than half a century of bloodshed has marked the history of the Naga people who live in the troubled northeastern region of India. Their struggle for an independent Nagaland and their continuing search for identity provides the backdrop for the stories that make up this unusual collection.

Describing how ordinary people cope with violence, how they negotiate power and force, how they seek and find safe spaces and enjoyment in the midst of terror, the author details a way of life under threat from the forces of modernization and war. No one—the young, the old, the ordinary housewife, the willing partner, the militant who takes to the gun, and the young woman who sings even as she is being raped—is untouched by the violence.

Theirs are the stories that form the subtext of the struggles that lie at the internal faultlines of the Indian nation-state. These are stories that speak movingly of home, country, nation, nationality, identity, and direct the reader to the urgency of the issues that lie at their heart."

Of Birds, and Beauty

This girl never ceases to amaze me. I don't know anyone else who takes such brilliant photos, and also writes so beautifully. She really sees. And makes us see too.

See this beautiful online book she has created, with her photos and her text, you can flip through the entire book online:

The Bird Hours: http://issuu.com/anvita-lakhera/docs/thebirdhours/68

Found it on her amazing blog, full of birds and beautiful writing - http://sometimesiwritesometimesiam.blogspot.com/

Come. We must go deeper.

Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize 1992

"Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

"What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world."

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

"We die containing the richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if in rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if into trees, fears we have hidden in as if in caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

"Come. We must go deeper, with no justice and no jokes."  

Who in the world am I?

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night?

Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.

But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!'"

Lewis Carroll, 'Alice in Wonderland'

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.

Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.

You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.

All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker

The Day Flies Off Without Me

The Day Flies Off Without Me
John Stammers

The planes bound for all points everywhere etch lines on my office window.
From the top floor London recedes in all directions, and beyond:
the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move,
I am a point of reference on a map;
I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes.

The pact we made to read our farewells
exactly at two in the afternoon
with you in the air
holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating.

I never hear a complaint here

At the University College of North Wales at Bangor

by Gerald Locklin

Most of my students here are very poor.

I seldom see them in the pubs: they
Cannot really afford the prices.

As winter hits they have to decide whether
To spend their shillings on the coin-operated heaters
Or on food.

I suspect that heat often wins—you can
Freeze to death quicker than you will starve.

Their incentive is that they will presumably
Have more comfortable lives if they survive
The minimalist conditions of college.

The government gives them a small grant
From which to buy books.
We are encouraged to require
Very few books.

A book is a valued art object here.

I never hear a complaint here
And no one misses a tutorial
Without the most profuse and formal
Of apologies.

In California my students and I and everyone else,
Also including the movie stars and politicians and
Pro-athletes,

Seldom stop for breath
In the midst of a constant bitching.

I want to resume the life of a shy person

"I want to resume the life of a shy person." Garrison Keillor

"Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category, a dimension that opens out into solitude. Moroever, it is an inherent suffering, as if we had two epidermises, and the one underneath rebelled and shrank from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is a part of the alloy that lays the foundation, in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self."

Pablo Neruda, 'Memoirs'

Photo: The Touch-Me-Not plant, my nickname at school :)

"The biblical Latin phrase Noli me tangere which appears in John 20:17 is translated as "Touch me not"."

I grok you

This word has always fascinated me:

To grok is to intimately and completely share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed. From the novel:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

 According to the book, drinking is a central focus on Mars where water is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized between the main characters, "Thou Art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Rang De

Kokila Devi, a widow from Jharkhand, one of the 18 people I have given loans to so far, through Rang De. Eight people had lent money to meet her need of Rs.10,000, and she has repaid 75% of the loan already!

Her profile: http://www.rangde.org/borrower/microcredit/india/jharkhand/kokila-devi/4821

"Kokila is a homemaker and is the sole provider for her children since the death of her husband. Training to become a village level service center has given her new hope and is ready to set up her grocery store. This store will provide her with a regular income and also serve the community by imparting health, insurance and other useful services. She is happy that she will be providing for her children and helping her village. Please note the loan tenure is 1yr and will be repaid in 4 equal installments."

On another note, a few kilometers from Jungle Lodges, Kabini, 200 kms from Bangalore, live communities that have never seen electricity, earning a max of Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 10,000 in an entire year.

Rang De is trying to create alternate sources of income for them. http://blog.rangde.org/2011/10/just-another-day. I am a volunteer with the Bangalore Chapter of Rang De. Looking forward to field trips to visit these communities, and hoping we can make a difference to these people.

Knock out Poverty. Become a Social Investor.

Rang De: http://www.rangde.org
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rangdeorg
Blog: http://blog.rangde.org

We're just a bit of pollution :)

In today's excerpt - astronomers and physicists are now grappling with evidence that suggests that all the things we can observe in the universe with even the most powerful telescopes is only four percent of what is there. The rest, they posit, is dark matter and dark energy:

"... 'Dark,' cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not 'dark' as in distant or invisible. This is not "dark" as in black holes or deep space. This is 'dark' as in unknown for now, and possibly forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent some­thing even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. 

As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, 'We're just a bit of pollution.' Get rid of us and of every­thing else we've ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. 'We're completely irrelevant,' he adds, cheerfully. 

Markings

From 'Markings' by Dag Hammarskjold, foreword by W.H.Auden. His personal diary, which reveals a totally different side to the former Secretary-General of the United Nations.

"Not to encumber the earth - No pathetic Excelsior, but just this: not to encumber the earth" *

"You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds."

"There is a pride of faith, more unforgivable and dangerous than the pride of the intellect. It reveals a split personality in which faith is "observed" and appraised, thus negating that unity born of a dying-unto-self, which is the definition of faith."

"Even in the most intense activity, this feeling of unreality - in you who have never come "close" to another. The old fairy-tale: the one who has been made invisible or transformed into a beast can only regain his human shape through somebody else's love."

"If only I may grow: firmer, simpler - quieter, warmer."
............................................................................................

*"The thought is taken from the posthumously published papers of Bertil Ekman (1894-1920) who died on a mountain-climbing expedition. His idealism and rigorist Kierkegaardian ethics exerted a powerful influence on H as a young man. W.H.A"

Lifting

Chanced upon Rumi again..

Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups,
they swim the huge fluid freedom.

* * * * * * *
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear?
When was I less by dying?

* * * * * * *

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking towards Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown,
lifting.

Jalaluddin Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

Skin

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

 Naomi Shihab Nye

Thanks, Meghna.