Light, Light

Now you shall see the Temple completed:
After much striving, after many obstacles:
For the work of creation is never without travail;
The formed stone, the visible crucifix,
The dressed altar, the lifting light,

Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

...They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them
forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness..

T.S. Eliot, 'Choruses from The Rock'

Eden

In the Happo-En Garden, Tokyo  
Linda Pastan

The way a birthmark
on a woman's face defines
rather than mars
her beauty,

so the skyscrapers--
those flowers of technology--
reveal the perfection
of the garden they surround.      

Perhaps Eden is buried
here in Japan,
where an incandescent
koi slithers snakelike

to the edge of the pond;
where a black-haired
Eve-san in the petalled
folds of a kimono

once showed her silken body
to the sun, then picked a persimmon
and with a small bow
bit into it.

Komorebi

Komorebi

Komorebi (木漏れ日) literally means ‘light that filters through the trees’ and it’s made up of 3 kanji and the hiragana particle れ. The first kanji 木 means ‘tree’ (or trees), the second one 漏 refers to ‘escape’ and the last one 日 is light or sun.
 
Album: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/Komorebi

You must see how this could be you

For Steve, who chose to leave this week last year, who slipped from that thin line one cold dark February night.

I am walking to the bridge

http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2013/06/i-am-walking-to-bridge.html

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go, so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too
was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye (1953-)

Standing still, astonished

Messenger
Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Spun in drafts

Damp white imprints dog the feet;
snowbound trolley, snowbound street.
Her tip of glove to lip and cheek,
“Goodbye.” Go.

Deathly, into soaring snow
and stillness, as expected, go.
A turn: the plunge to the metro.
A blare of lights. A melting hat.


I stand, am spun in drafts, see black
take the tunnel, train, and track,
sit and wait as others sat,
touch cold marble, chill my hand
and, heavy-hearted, understand
that nothing ever really happened,
ever would, ever can.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Anthony Kahn, from Stolen Apples (Doubleday, 1971)

From here.

Then it asks more, and we give it

​The Weighing

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

Jane Hirshfield, 'October Palace'

Waking up

Poems from Moral Proverbs and Folk Songs

1

The eye you see is not
an eye because you see it;
it is an eye because it sees you.

8

Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.

10

Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up.

Antonio Machado, 'The Winged Energy of Delight', translations by Robert Bly

We speak in tongues

"I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck.

We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. …

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself."

Jeanette Winterson

Astonished

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver

This God, this laughter of the morning

Welcome Morning

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

Anne Sexton, 'The Awful Rowing Toward God'

Why nothing is really yours in Asia :)

I happened to meet this guy who does research on linguistics and Applied Artificial Intelligence. He posts interesting questions on the evolution of certain language structures, and does intriguing comparisons between Indian languages and others - and would love to hear other viewpoints and observations, since these are all hypotheses.

Linguistic anthropology is such a fascinating subject!!

Funky language features – the mystery of the missing possessive verb

http://aiaioo.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/funky-language-features-the-mystery-of-the-missing-possessive-verb/

Funky language features – the third spatial deictic reference in Japanese, Korean and Tamil

http://aiaioo.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/funky-language-features-the-third-spatial-deictic-reference-in-japanese-korean-and-tamil/

Playing the Chords

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.

You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.

Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.

So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

Ted Kooser, 'Delights & Shadows'

Unsayable

Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love, – just what is wholly
unsayable.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Now I seek mornings

"At the time (in my youth), I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace."

Jorge Luis Borges
Prologue to 'Fervor de Buenos Aires'

https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/NowISeekMornings

The Wolf

After Love

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin

Pour yourself out like a fountain

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Rainer Maria Rilke

Will the change. Want the transformation. Be inspired
by the flame where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself into sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to live gray and numb?
What’s frightened turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain. Flow into
the knowledge that what you are seeking
often finishes at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming
a laurel, dares you to become wind.

Translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold
into perfect white
squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of the sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

On the day of your favorite color

Here is the day of pumpkins,
their hollow heads lit and leering. Here
is the stripped sweetness of candy corn
cupped in my hands. Here is fall
swirling the leaves into a storm of red-
gold fire. Here is the sunset,
shorter now. And here is memory,
spilling from its orange coat:
your mandarin sheets, your russet
couch, kisses the color of burning.
Here is the day of heartbreak
ripened to glow. Here is the day of ghosts.

Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne

A book of candles

Become Becoming

Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out lout:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).
Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind' barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee, 'Behind My Eyes'

I felt I knew you

"I ride the NYC subway trains, usually in the evening when the seats are full. I focus on the shape of the space between the person sitting next to me and myself. I attempt to mentally and emotionally re-sculpt that space. In my mind, I reshape it- from the stiff and guarded space between strangers to the soft and yielding space between friends. I direct all my energy to this space between us. When the space palpably changes, and I completely feel like the stranger sitting next to me is my friend, I rest my head on that person's shoulder…"

I felt I knew you

http://www.georgeferrandi.com/108756/899221/all-projects/it-felt-like-i-knew-you-%282012-ongoing%29

Angels

In the Library

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Charles Simic, 'In the Library (for Octavio)'

Tenebrism

"Active from 1595 – 1610, Caravaggio was a major transitional figure in art moving from exaggerated Mannerism to a highly naturalistic style, illuminated with powerful light and shadow.  This dramatic use of light to intensify an image, also known as tenebrism, clearly influenced Spanish artists of the era."

http://daydreamtourist.com/2013/12/02/spanish-baroque/

Through it all

"Above all, read everything, be kind, and don’t worry. Some bad things are going to happen to you and to those you love. But through it all you will have poetry."

http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/01/01/new-year-letter/

Descend, descend

The Pear

November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well read.

He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,
the angles matter. Four or five degrees,
and you’re lost.”

Life is dear to him yet,
though he believes it his own fault he grieves,
his own fault his old friends have turned against him
like crows against an injured of their kind.
There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.

Descend, descend,
some voice must urge, inside the pear stem.
The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.
Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

Jane Hirshfield, 2008

You can begin again, and we are saved every day

In the heat of late afternoon...
Gary Young

In the heat of late afternoon, lightning streaks from a nearly
cloudless sky to the top of the far mesa. At dusk, the whole south
end of the valley blazes as the clouds turn incandescent with
some distant strike. There is a constant congress here between
the earth and the sky. This afternoon a thunderstorm crossed the
valley. One moment the ground was dry, and the next there were
torrents running down the hillsides and arroyos. A quarter-mile off
I could see a downpour bouncing off the sage and the fine clay
soil. I could see the rain approach, and then it hit, drenching me,
and moved on. Ten minutes later I was dry. The rain comes from
heaven, and we are cleansed by it.

Suddenly the meaning of baptism
is clear to me: you can begin again, and we are saved every day.

I will be years gathering up our words

How It Is

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.  
The dog at the center of my life recognizes  
you've come to visit, he's ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.  
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste  
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,  
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,  
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish  
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space  
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.  
I will be years gathering up our words,  
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Maxine Kumin, "How It Is" from Selected Poems 1960-1990.

Homer

(Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) was a German businessman and a pioneer of the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns.)

Schliemann is outside, digging. He’s not
not calling a spade a spade.
The stadium where the Greeks once played
used to stand on this very spot.

Each night, Penelope, operating
in mythical time, unspools the light
gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight,
her hands will restitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.

And each night I’d watch as my hero curled
himself round home plate, as if he were going
to bat for me. And I’d hold my breath, knowing
a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.

One must imagine Penelope.
One must imagine Penelope happy.
One must imagine Schliemann excavating
the dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating

the box score stats and the ticket stubs
he pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubs
the remains of Achilles’s rage on his shirt.
What does not kill you can still hurt.

Penelope’s suitors are striking out,
one after another. Their sad swings and misses.
They can’t even get to first base. She’ll cut
the stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.

Odysseus won’t care that the orb is undone.
He’ll take a swing at it with all his might.
The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight.
It feels to Penelope like he’s been gone

since the dawn of mankind, but he’s already zoomed
round third and flies like an arrow toward home,
as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air — 
the yarn fanning out like Penelope’s hair — 

not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.

Troy Jollimore

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

"The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us. The tears — if they come — are in response not to how sad the image is, but how pretty.

We should be able to enjoy an ideal image without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires."

Alain de Botton, 'Art as Therapy'

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3026140/how-paris-would-look-with-outdoor-ads-replaced-by-art#1

To live amid the great vanishing

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.

Stanley Kunitz

From Remembering Stanley Kunitz, by Jane Hirshfield

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Constantine Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.


His other famous poem, Waiting for the Barbarians.

A day so happy

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Czeslaw Milosz

From here: http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/02/06/a-day-so-happy/

"I don’t think the word ‘grace’ is overstating it. The unexpected and surprised note of delight spills out from observations of the natural world and towards the speaker’s past, his very own body, and even encompasses ‘evil’, which Milosz had cause more than most to disown."

Change must come from within :) :)

Zen Jokes:  http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Miscellaneous/Zen_Jokes.html

Be here now.
Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bugger all.

A Zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything."
The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill.
The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. "Excuse me, but where’s my change?" asks the Zen master.
The vendor responds, "Change must come from within."

Touch me, remind me who I am

​Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.

Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.

It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.

So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.

Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz, From 'Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected'

That you came to love it, that was the gift

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant----
stroke the white throat,
the heavy trembling dewlaps
you'd come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling,
that you came to love it, that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.

Jane Hirshfield

Audio: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20441

Thanks, K.

Tending your inner garden, eyes closed

​​And this is where I fell in love with Hank Hudepohl -

What inspires your writing? 

Sometimes I'm inspired by the way light falls across the kitchen floor, or by one of my wife's long, curly hairs on the sleeve of my sweater, or by the way my youngest daughter calls everything "blue" as she practices her knowledge of colors. For me, inspiration is a mix of imagination and observation; it is the outcome of paying attention to the world around you.

http://hankhudepohl.com/interview.html

Family Garden

Tell me again about your garden
Tell me how you planted, in the small
flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
but the fenced garden opened freely
to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
You gave away honey from the white hive too,
that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
summer evenings from a chair on the porch
tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

"Family Garden" by Hank Hudepohl from The Journey of Hands. © Word Press, 2007

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

Mark Strand

The Mercy Seat

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.

The Mercy Seat, Johnny Cash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGSTiDOjKU

Thanks, K.

As leaves from a tree

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”

Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin."

The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are
Maria Popova

The cause and cure of the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/27/alan-watts-taboo

Rain Tree Raagaas

Yes, there are traffic jams, there is pollution, there is noise. But then there are other stations you can still tune into. Other things you can still see.

I see rain trees. If I were to die today, I would go happy, replete.

Rain Tree Raagaas: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/RainTreeRaagaas

So let us not talk falsely now

"No reason to get excited", the thief he kindly spoke
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late".

  Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower by Emergence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyT3HGB2d8c&list=UUUzqkZ3vsu2DBNw0jSaxepA&index=1