You swell into survival

Over And Over Tune
 
You could grow into it,
that sense of living like a dog,
loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,
able to exist only for the sake of existing.
 
Nothing inside your head lasting long enough for you to hold onto,
you watch your own thoughts leap across your own synapses and disappear --
small boats in a wind,
fliers in all that blue,
the swish of an arm backed with feathers,
a dress talking in a corner,
and then poof,
your mind clean as a dog's,
your body big as the world,
important with accident --
blood or a limp, fur and paws.
 
You swell into survival,
you take up the whole day,
you're all there is,
everything else is
not you, is every passing glint, is
shadows brought to you by wind,
passing into a bird's cheep, replaced by a
rabbit skittering across a yard,
a void you yourself fall into.
 
You could make this beautiful,
but you don't need to,
living is this fleshy side of the bone,
going on is this medicinal smell of the sun --
no dog ever tires of seeing his life
 
keep showing up at the back door
even as a rotting bone with a bad smell;
feet tottering, he dreams of it,
wakes and licks no matter what.

Ioanna Carlsen
 
(Poetry, March 2001)

Joy is a function of Focus

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. 

Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. 

If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. 

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. 

So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem 

“The Weighing”

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

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

From here thanks to Maria Popova

Falling more deeply in love with the world...

On the Winter Solstice

...On this longest night, it’s so clear—
the truest reason to write at all is to fall
more deeply in love with the world,

with its trees and its drizzle
and its stubborn shine and its
relentless hunger and its corners
that will never ever see the growing light.

Fall in love with the octopus that can detach
an arm on purpose and then grow it back again.

Fall in love with the elusive lynx
and the crooked forest and the frazzle ice
tinkling in the San Miguel River.

Fall in love even with this profoundly flawed
species that, despite all its faults,
is still capable of falling more deeply,
more wildly in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

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

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

Astonishment

"I can’t quite shake the astonishment. I can’t quite believe what my life keeps teaching me, that material existence is a thin veil thrown over a foundation of miracles so numerous and profound we almost invariably overlook them."

Martha Beck

Yes. Yes. Yes.

http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2016/09/you-love-roses-dont-you.html

A drop of your love

"Just because a drop of your love had blended in
I drank down the entire bitterness of life."

The original, in Punjabi:

Rall gai si es vich ik boond tere ishq di
Esse layi main zindagi di saari kudattan pee layi

Amrita Pritam

http://scroll.in/article/815278/the-story-of-amrita-pritams-final-love-poem

Album: https://goo.gl/photos/6hpXbpV9S9HD3HqP6

Sitting still, turning inward

"The idea behind Nowhere - choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward - is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don't try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems - and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind - lie within.

To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Islamic parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there's more light there.

As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millenia ago, it's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life."

Page 13, 'The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere', Pico Iyer

Unhappiness

Unhappiness comes to man
Through two doorways

The first doorway is named
Not getting what you want.

The name of the second doorway is
Getting what you want.

Either takes you there;
The former faster
Than the latter.

The former teaches
The futility of willfulness.

The latter teaches the foolishness
Of believing that
Satisfaction and happiness are the same.

Excerpt from Wu Hsin, 'Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish (The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin Book 1)'

Thanks, K.

Stillness

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
 
From The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
by Pico Iyer

Hunger

"We suffer, often unknowingly, from wanting to be in two places at once, from wanting to experience more than one person can. This is a form of greed, of wanting everything. Feeling like we're missing something or that we're being left out, we want it all. But being human, we can't have it all. The tension of all this can lead to an insatiable search, where our passion for life is stirred, but never satisfied.

When caught in this mindset, no amount of travel is enough, no amount of love is enough, no amount of success is enough...

The truth is that one experience taken to heart will satisfy our hunger. "

Mark Nepo

100 Butterflies (excerpt)

Where you are going
and the place you stay
come to the same thing.

What you long for
and what you've left behind
are as useless as your name.

Just one time, walk out
into the field and look
at that towering oak --
an acorn still beating at its heart.

Peter Levitt

October

Blue skies
And dragonflies,
October.

Notes from a Ritual

Note 12: Receiving

http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2015/11/12-receiving.html

This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I got a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.

Wendy Cope

Happiness

 

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life
to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives
who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile
as though I was trying to fool with them

And then one Sunday afternoon
I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees
with their women and children
and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Carl Sandburg

Supreme Court of Canada Grants Aboriginal title over Tsilhqot'in First Nation land

"A Supreme Court of Canada decision has granted the Tsilhqot'in First Nation of British Columbia Aboriginal title over a wide area of traditional territory. The unanimous 8-0 decision, gives the Tsilhqot'in First Nation rights to more than 1,700 square kilometers of land. The group now has rights to the land, the right to use land and the right to profit from the land.

Reports indicate that this is the Supreme Court's first on Aboriginal title, and can be used as a precedent wherever there are unresolved land claims."

Supreme Court of Canada Grants Aboriginal title over Tsilhqot'in First Nation land
http://natural-justice.blogspot.in/2014/06/supreme-court-of-canada-grants.html

The Tsilhqot'in Language: http://www.terralingua.org/voicesoftheearth/tsilhqotin/

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

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."

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

Not everything is lost

This is so completely my vision of happiness. This is what I live for. A real incident, from one of Naomi Shihab Nye's memoirs. Her father is Palestinian, her mother American.

"This is the world I want to live in.
The shared world.

Not everything is lost."

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal
 

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her — southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag —
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers —
Non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands —
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped
— has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye