Tipping ourselves over

"Ray Bradbury has said, “We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

Your Turn: http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/dkp3wn35k9tcyhgwep9x9f7fmt4fwn

The lines in the picture are from Mary Oliver's 'Devotions'

It is important to stay sweet and loving

Tenderness and Rot
Kay Ryan

Tenderness and rot 
share a border. 

And rot is an 
aggressive neighbor 
whose iridescence 
keeps creeping over. 

No lessons 
can be drawn 
from this however. 

One is not 
two countries. 
One is not meat 
corrupting. 

It is important 
to stay sweet 
and loving.

From here.

The Choice between Bitterness and Generosity

There are people who give what they themselves have not received. As Michael Ondaatje said, "There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.” The choice is ours.

Yet another amazing story from The Humans of Bombay:

“I lost my mother when I was 5 years old. Those days were hard — my sister went off to boarding school and I was raised at my aunt’s house — but I missed my mother terribly. You know, if it’s your own mother, anytime you’re hungry you can say, ‘Mumma, I’m hungry’ and she’ll make something for you — but I grew up eating at strict meal times, craving my mother’s hand food.

I led a normal life after — went to school, Technical college, worked at a catering company in Libya after and then moved to Bombay in 1987. I established a real estate business in Borivali and an agency of about 250 nurses and ward boys that look after the elderly. Life was good — my son was settled and my wife and I were happy, but something at the back of my mind kept bothering me — the memories from my childhood didn’t leave. I kept telling my wife that I need to do something more to sleep well at night and after a few discussions she said, ‘why don’t we try and do something for the senior citizens who don’t have the luxury of a hot, home cooked meal?’ Having lost my mother at such an early age, I couldn’t imagine her not having a hot meal, when she was old and needed it the most.

Within a few days, my wife and I located 5 senior citizen couples who were in very bad shape and told them that from November 14th, 2013 they would have nothing to worry about and that we would deliver their meals to them. With 5000 Rupees and a heart full of love — my wife and I began our journey. Within the first week we knew that we would do this forever — the joy we had while watching them lick their fingers and sleep on a full stomach was unparalleled.

Since then, we deliver food to 56 senior citizens every day — we’ve hired two cooks who wake up at 5:30 every morning and along with my wife make about 300 chapatis everyday! Together, we don’t just prepare food; it’s soul food – with less salt, less oil, less ghee, in order to suit their special needs. We’re simple people, with simple needs — we operate out of our 1BHK home and use all our savings towards this without any regrets. What are we going to do with a bigger house or putting our money in the stock market? What about the people living today? What about those who raised us? When we can help out an old helpless couple whose maid ran away, or senior citizens abandoned by their own children— it is a life well lived…a life worth living.”

From here: https://www.facebook.com/humansofbombay/photos/a.188058468069805.1073741828.188056068070045/739376439604669/?type=3&theater

Radical generosity, and Euphoros

"The Greek word for the state of happiness is 'euphoria,' and the noun 'euphoros' means the bearer of goodness. One of the fundamental elements to finding euphoria is to be that euphoros -- bearer of goodness -- for yourself and for others. This means radical generosity, starting with yourself.

If we see ourselves as the bearers of good, wherever we go we will create an atmosphere of goodness around us, and we will spread a sense of well-being to others. We will start to do good things for ourselves without thinking about it, and we will start having good thoughts about ourselves.

We will experience positive emotions and produce positive outcomes because we will be connecting to our innate goodness. And from that place we will bring it to others."

Agapi Stassinopoulos

http://www.megfee.com/megfee/2015/11/4/goodness

Wouldn't that be so much nicer?

Nuthatch

What if a sleek, grey-feathered nuthatch
flew from a tree and offered to perch
on your left shoulder, accompany you

on all your journeys? Nowhere fancy,
just the brief everyday walks, from garage
to house, from house to mailbox, from
the store to your car in the parking lot.

The slight pressure of small claws
clasping your skin, a flutter of wings
every so often at the edge of vision.

And what if he never asked you to be
anything? Wouldn't that be so much
nicer than being alone? So much easier
than trying to think of something to say?

Kirsten Dierking

Astonished

In an Hour We Live a Lifetime

Walking the world of dry leaves
and rickety bridges,
there as in old letters,
we marvel at the things
we once knew that we have
just recently discovered—
How new it all is again.

How we orbit the same sun
every day and still
can be astonished
by the way things
shine.

Rosemerry Trommer

Caring, an Act of Rebellion

We are Mad You are Sane

Do you know what I
Love most about you?
That you care.

That you care fanatically
About those things the rest of us
Have forgotten or sold our souls on.

In a world deadened
By cynicism, by laziness,
By emotional detachment
That passes off as wisdom,
Your kind of obsessive caring
Is an act of rebellion.

Don’t ever think
Or let anyone tell you
That you’re oversensitive.

I sometimes think you may be
The only sane one among us.;
Guarding your heart from
An epidemic of elasticity;
Elastic explanations.
Elastic ambitions.
Elastic morals.

So this is what I want to tell
You this morning:
We are easy-spirited
Because we have lost our way.

You are heavy-hearted
Because you are holding your ground.
We are mad.
You are sane.

Never change.

Philip John

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/photos/a.1456617284574306.1073741827.1452843378285030/1810841775818520/?type=3&theater

A wealth not dependent on possessions

Journeying god
Traditional (Ghana)

Journeying god,
pitch your tent with mine
so that I may not become deterred
by hardship, strangeness, doubt.

Show me the movement I must make
towards a wealth not dependent on possessions,
towards a wisdom not based on books,
towards a strength not bolstered by might,
towards a god not confined to heaven.

Help me to find myself as I walk in others' shoes.

Prayer song from Ghana, traditional, translator unknown

On a Day when Hostility Rules the News

And even as the countries aim their missiles at each other
and dangle threats and hurl names, the woman
in the hair salon gives you a deal because
in an hour you’ve shared dreams, shared fears.

And the bus driver helps you find your way.
And the tall man in the grocery store sees you reaching
for a box on the top shelf and offers to hand it to you.

Even as the congress argues and quarrels and stalls,
the little blonde boy you barely know snuggles into your lap
and tells you he loves you. Kindness continues to thrive,
Kindness breeds more kindnesses. Kindness

reminds you again that wherever you are,
you are home, that the world you most want
to live in is right here at the kitchen table,
right here on the noisy, crowded street.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2017/08/27/on-a-day-when-hostility-rules-the-news/

Be ignited, or be gone

 

What I Have Learned So Far

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of -- indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

Mary Oliver

Kindness

"It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are - beneath the bluster - intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness.

We're well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we're slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential.

We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another. "

Page 119, 'The Course of Love', Alain de Botton

Love

​"The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximum generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviours.

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief and the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation - and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship - is its charity.

Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don't accuse them of being mean or self-pitying, we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract or a lack of sleep may have on mood.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships - if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love."​

Page 110, 'The Course of Love', Alain de Botton

Caretake This Moment

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.
Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.

It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.
Give your best and always be kind.

Epictetus (Epictetus: The Art of Living a New Interpretation by Sharon Lebell)
 

Content

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Morning

I watched the sun moving round the kitchen,
an early spring sun that strengthened and weakened,
coming and going like an old mind.

I watched like one bedridden for a long time
on their first journey back into the world
who finds it enough to be going on with:

the way the sunlight brought each possession in turn
to its attention and made of it a small still life:
the iron frying pan gleaming on its hook like an ancient find,
the powdery green cheek of a bruised clementine.

Though more beautiful still was how the light moved on,
letting go each chair and coffee cup without regret
the way my grandmother, in her final year, received me:

neither surprised by my presence, nor distressed by my leaving,
content, though, while I was there.

 

Esther Morgan

Imagine yourself a caterpillar

"Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,

You're beautiful for as long as you live."

Stephen Dunn

http://www.occupypoetry.net/poem_for_people_that_are_understandably_too_busy_to_read_poetry

Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair

Ode I. 11

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.

This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:

Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Horace, 'The Essential Horace', edited and translated by Burton Raffel
 

The mind, a squirrel caught crossing Route 80

I Remember Galileo

I remember Galileo describing the mind
as a piece of paper blown around by the wind,
and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree,
or jumping into the backseat of a car,
and for years I watched paper leap through my cities;

but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing
Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck,
dancing back and forth like a thin leaf,
or a frightened string, for only two seconds living
on the white concrete before he got away,
his life shortened by all that terror, his head
jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust.

It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground,
his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing,
that showed me the difference between him and paper.

Paper will do in theory, when there is time
to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows;
but for this life I need a squirrel,
his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering,
the loud noise shaking him from head to tail.

O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel
finishing his wild dash across the highway,
rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

Gerald Stern, 'This Time: New and Selected Poems'

The ground at our feet

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,

but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,

very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,

and learn to be at home.

Wendell Berry, 'Collected Poems'

Hold, one day more

A Room

A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.

Without changing expression,
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.

Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.
Doors are not equivocal,
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.

Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.
Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -
You are matter, as they are.

See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.

Jane Hirshfield, 'The Lives of the Heart'

There are thirty-one spells for forgiveness, though

Which one to try first?

In the book of spells
I do not find the one
that helps you forget
what you want
to forget.

There is one for
making the bees
come out midwinter
and another to make
the walls speak what
they’ve seen.

There’s a spell for
making minutes go slower,
and a spell to turn a woman’s
skin green.

But no spell
to forget what we wish
not to know.

There are thirty-one spells for
forgiveness, though.

Rosemerry Trommer

Ichigo Ichie: One opportunity, one encounter

"Ichigo Ichie literally means “one opportunity, one encounter.” The terms is often translated as “for this time only,” “never again,” or “one chance in a life time.”

Its better translation may be “Treasure every encounter, for it will never recur.”

The term is derived from Zen Buddhism and concepts of transience, and it is particularly associated with the Japanese tea ceremony and it is often brushed onto scrolls which are hung in the tea room. In the context of tea ceremony, ichigo ichie reminds participants that each single tea meeting is unique that will never recur in one’s lifetime, therefore, each moment should be treated with the utmost sincerity.

It can be applied to one’s daily life, “all we have is today, so let’s live it to the fullest.”

From here: http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2015/03/did-you-hear-that-winters-over.html

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny a human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

Alice Walker

Love Letters

Love Letters

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.

Ikkyu, 'Ikkyu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology', trans. by Sonya Arutzen

Miracle

Listen. Put on lightbreak.
Waken into miracle.

W. S. Graham

If not, not

Two Cats
Katha Pollitt

It's better to be a cat than to be a human.
Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty—
their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is
only a cat's way

of getting without fuss from one place to another—
but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a
saucer of milk for a declaration of passion
or the crook of your knees for

a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch,
you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes
awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention—
then slash! the stiletto

or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly
notice each other but find it somehow a comfort
sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa.
Both these ideas

are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers
cast up by different storms on the same desert island
who manage to guard, despite the utter absence
of privacy, chocolate,

useful domestic articles, reading material,
their separate solitudes. They would not dream of
telling each other their dreams, or the plots of old movies,
or inventing a bookful

of coconut recipes. Where we would long ago have
frantically shredded our underwear into signal
flags and be dancing obscenely about on the shore in
a desperate frenzy,

they merely shift on their haunches, calm as two stoics
weighing the probable odds of the soul's immortality,
as if to say, if a ship should happen along we'll
be rescued. If not, not.

"Two Cats" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009
 

Warding off the Darkness

"If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself.

Buy coffee for the person behind you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc.

The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical."

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/08/tim-ferriss-tools-of-titans-depression/

You are standing in the sky

“Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.”

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

From here.

A tree stands there

"Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.

A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling.

No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air."

Annie Dillard

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/gjxphz9aa362sj5psh3jw2dzl36egd

Trees, Curators of Time

"Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting.

It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile.

It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind."

Robert Macfarlane, 'The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot'

https://www.facebook.com/SometimesIWriteSometimesIAm/photos/a.210068335788867.45859.210048145790886/431155687013463/?type=3&theater

On a related note:

Britain's mightiest oak: A staggering 1,046 years old, it's still going strong: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3685614/Britain-s-mightiest-oak-staggering-1-046-years-old-s-going-strong-getting-bit-stout-middle.html