Joy is not made to be a crumb

 

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver

Ethiopian Sacred Forests

 

James Godfrey-Faussett:

"100 years ago Ethiopia was blanketed by 45% forest and now that figure is down to just 5%. Part of the surviving remnants are over 1000 ‘sacred forests’ found protecting Ethiopia’s orthodox churches, that act as living stands of biodiversity amongst the brown overgrazed farmlands.

These small clusters of ancient trees, each about 2km away from the next, ensure that the local people are never far from the forests that are so deeply rooted in their social and spiritual lives.They are used as community centres, meeting places and schools and provide the only shade for miles. 

Each dot of green stands out on the landscape dramatically because they are some of the only trees left in a country that’s experienced widespread deforestation. Some of the sacred forests are more than 1,000 years old and these precious trees have thankfully been spared thanks to conservation as a by-product of religious stewardship. 

The forests are thought of as particularly sacred because each houses a tabot in the centre of the church, which is thought to be a replica of the original Ark of the Covenant. The trees are seen as ‘clothing’ for the church, part of the church itself, which is why just a small ring of trees – those closest to the church – has been protected, creating tiny forests with fields pushing right up to the edges.

Areas like these sacred forests are immensely valuable from an ecological point of view and should continue to be protected at all costs.

They contain precious genetic purity and diversity and should be seen as living nurseries that could hopefully some day be used as a basis to reforest the surrounding lands.."

From here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wildurbanspaces_biodiversity-ecosystemrestoration-ecosystems-activity-6948925557568909312-4Iib/

You must be the thing you see

After the red Gulmohars of summer, the pink/purple/violet Bauhinias are here, announcing August.

To Look at Any Thing

To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say,
"I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do - you must
Be the thing you see:

You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,

You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.

John Moffitt

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

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

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

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

Things to Believe In

trees, in general; oaks, especially;
burr oaks that survive fire, in particular;
and the generosity of apples

seeds, all of them: carrots like dust,
winged maple, doubled beet, peach kernel;
the inevitability of change

frogsong in spring; cattle
lowing on the farm across the hill;
the melodies of sad old songs

comfort of savory soup;
sweet iced fruit; the aroma of yeast;
a friend’s voice; hard work

seasons; bedrock; lilacs;
moonshadows under the ash grove;
something breaking through.

Patricia Monaghan

What we need is here

The Wild Geese

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over the fall fields, we name names

that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry, (Collected Poems 1957-1982)

Photo: The tabebuia impetiginosas are back! They will last for a few weeks in November, covering themselves completely in a cloud of pink 2 weeks from now. To think that I get to see them again, yet another year....

https://goo.gl/photos/KeZQuW2C5F4dtPLT7

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

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

One Way to Spend an Afternoon Together

Our noisy outer world is but a reflection of the noise inside: our incessant need to be occupied, to be doing something.

Three Types of Laziness, Tenzin Palmo

Sit with me. Let’s say nothing at all.
There is nothing that must be said.
The impulse to comment on weather,
we’ll feel it rise and melt away.

The weather will do what the weather does,
will rain, will shine, will hail.
Perhaps we will feel the need
to comment on the light or to wonder

when things will be different than they are now
or to worry about all the problems
that we will never be able to fix.
Urgency only lasts so long before
it disappears. How did we ever

believe we belonged anywhere
but here? Though the rain
is gone, the scent of rain persists.
If we are quiet long enough,
it will say everything that must be said.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2016/05/16/one-way-to-spend-an-afternoon-together/

Practising Dying

Learning from Trees


If we could,
like the trees,
practice dying,
do it every year
just as something we do—
like going on vacation
or celebrating birthdays,
it would become
as easy a part of us
as our hair or clothing.

Someone would show us how
to lie down and fade away
as if in deepest meditation,
and we would learn
about the fine dark emptiness,
both knowing it and not knowing it,
and coming back would be irrelevant.

Whatever it is the trees know
when they stand undone,
surprisingly intricate,
we need to know also
so we can allow
that last thing
to happen to us
as if it were only
any ordinary thing,

leaves and lives
falling away,
the spirit, complex,
waiting in the fine darkness
to learn which way
it will go.

Grace Butcher

From here.

A river in the trees

Listening to the wind in the trees, especially during this beautiful leaf-falling season here, being amazed at hearing the sound of water up above - one of my favourite things.

The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.

Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (Faber and Faber 1987)

http://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.in/2016/02/two-lines.html

Sarvam Annam

A Poem for My Daughter
Extracts

It seems we have made pain
some kind of mistake,
like having it
is somehow wrong.

Don’t let them fool you—
pain is a part of things.

But remember, dear Ellie,
the compost down in the field:
if the rank and dank and dark
are handled well, not merely discarded,
but turned and known and honored,
they one day come to beds of rich earth
home even to the most delicate rose.

❖

God comes to you disguised as your life.
Blessings often arrive as trouble.

In French, the word blesser means to wound
and relates to the Old English bletsian—

to sprinkle with blood.

And in Sanskrit there is a phrase,
a phrase to carry with you
wherever you go:

sarvam annam:

everything is food.

Every last thing.

❖

The Navajo people,
it is said,
intentionally wove
(intentionally!)
obvious flaws into their sacred quilts …

Why?

It is there, they say,
in the “mistake,”
in the imperfection,

through which the Great Spirit moves.

❖

Work on becoming a native of mind, a native of heart.
No thought, no feeling, could ever be “bad.”

It’s just another creature
in the bestiary of Buddha,
the bestiary of Christ.

Knowing this,
knowing this down to the marrow,
could save you, dear one,
much needless strife.

Remember that wild and strange animals
paused to drink at the pond
of the Buddha’s mind
even after he saw
the morning star.

❖

...To laugh …

To be shameless, wild, and silly …

To know—fully, headlong,
without compunction—the ordinary magic
of our beautiful human bodies …

these seem worthwhile pursuits, life-long tasks.

❖


By way of valediction, dear Ellie,
I pass along some words
from our many gracious teachers:

Eden is.

The imperfect is our paradise.

All is grace.

❖

Teddy Macker

http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2015/12/teddy-macker-poem-for-my-daughter.html

My post: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.com/2016/03/13-sarvam-annam.html

Solstice

These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off in the clouds.

And this is the shortest day of the year.
Still, in almost every window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not complete.

Barbara Crooker

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