Seeking only our own happiness

I think these lines from a book a dear friend gave me sum up everything I've ever learned about happiness. All the meditation retreats in the world will not make a lasting difference, if in the end we don't love the world, and reach out to it with warmth - even the world outside our narrow circle of family and friends.

Hating the world, and being happy, apparently, are mutually exclusive :)  (Been there, done that!!)
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"So much of spiritual life involves one's interior journey, yet for most of us spirituality gets expressed - even transformed - only in our relationships with others.

...Our relationships with others not only test our spiritual resources but push us to levels of development we could not attain through solitary practice.

More important, our gifts to others are the very fruits of our self-development. The two forms of life, communal and solitary, are mutually sustaining.

...Seeking only our own happiness is the surest way to remain unhappy. As the great monastic and scholar Thomas Merton puts it, "Isolation in the self, inability to go out of oneself to others, would mean incapacity for any form of self-transcendence. To be thus the prisoner of one's own selfhood is, in fact, to be in hell."

Page 64, 65. 'Learning to Fall, The Rewards of an Imperfect Life',  Philip Simmons

Sometimes I get up early, and even my soul is wet...

 "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

You find yourself waking up earlier and earlier. You were never a morning person. Now you are.

Went for a walk this morning, at 5.30, before the world was awake, while the street lights were still on, the leaves, dark against a sky already turning blue...and you remember the Neruda poem you read yesterday...and the sea, and love, rise up within you, in waves....
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Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Pablo Neruda, 'Here I love you', Translated by W.S.Merwin

Photo: A gift from Martin, of the stunning photos, here. Early morning at Aachen, Germany.

A new voice

The Journey
Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.


Thank you.

In the middle of the world, breathing...

Mary Oliver came to me from a friend, who drifted away. What a gift, that keeps giving, endlessly. I know this feeling, this "standing in the middle of the world, breathing..."
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What I know
I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.

Mary Oliver

The Departed

From David, with his fine eye for all that is beautiful, his unfettered imagination, his intense prose, David, who chokes me up with his poetry:

The Departed
David Milligan-Croft

Holes appear in wardrobes,
Cupboards stare agape.

Delf wrapped in newsprint,
Boxes packed and taped.

Naked patches,
Where photographs once hung.

Dusty bookshelves
With no stories to tell.

Bulging suitcases
Clambering for the door.

Except, you’re not the one
Going anywhere.

From here.

Not to understand it, only to see

Rebus

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

(Rebus -- "A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.")

Jane Hirshfield

To learn to see

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.

Octavio Paz, Coda, from Letter of Testimony

Ache

"If he had a razor now he would have drawn it across his aching throat, across the intolerable ache of remembered happiness."

From 'Violets and Strawberries in the Snow', Shena Mackay, BBC Books.

Perhaps there are times

Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,
A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and
A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence.

Wallace Stevens

You must live though the time when everything hurts...

You must live though the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments,
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

From 'The Double Shame', Stephen Spender

Being raised above being

On Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet of Lithuanian origin, Nobel Prize for Literature (1980):

"At a time when voices of doubt, deadness, and despair are the loudest; when writers are outstripping each other in negation of man, his culture, and nature; when the predominant action is destruction . . . , the world built by the author of 'Daylight' creates a space in which one can breathe freely, where one can find rescue.

It renders the world of surfaces transparent and condenses being.It does not promise any final solutions to the unleashed elements of nature and history here on earth, but it enlarges the space in which one can await the Coming with hope.

Milosz does not believe in the omnipotence of man, and he has been deprived of the optimistic faith in the self-sufficiency of a world known only through empirical experience. He leads the reader to a place where one can see—to paraphrase the poet's own formula regarding time—Being raised above being, through Being."

Stand very still

Stand very still some coolish evening
see if you cant grasp that extra galaxy past
the last one visible on clearest nights.
Don't look for anything.
Let your eyes go completely
out of your head.
Just make sure it's dark, cool.

Stand very still.
Look at me, my eyes,
if that will help.
The words I really want to say to you
are under these.

J. Allyn Roser, 'The City Underneath'

The unseen design

'Under the Frog',* by the Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer, was my introduction to East European literature. The spirit of people who fight oppression, learn to circumvent it to lead as normal a life as possible - and the rich humour that is a hallmark of those who have learned to laugh, when they cannot do anything else.

This particular passage moved me especially. This is something I believe in strongly - that people have so many sides, you can never put them in a box and label them. We are plural. It is always good to leave that margin for surprise.

"It was the first time Gyuri had seen Makkai smile, in the four years of his tuition he had never glimpsed the woebegotten Makkai enjoying anything. He thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition - far from earning him esteem and fortune or securing him a comfortable position, was a handicap as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant.

The smile made Gyuri realise there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design."


*"Under a frog's arse down a coalmine" is the Hungarian expression for when you are truly at the lowest point of life.

A Wake

A wake rose up
In my heart today
A wake in a shoreless sea
In the midst of fragrance
my soul weeps, and gathers wet forest flowers
With what tune do the watchmen
fill the dark night today?

Today through what illusion
What mistake, do I become
agitated and forget all?
The rain pours down in
unchecked torrents…

Rabindranath Tagore

The sacred tortoise

"Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don't seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your own inner nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong. One man's food is often another man's poison, and what is glamorous and exciting to some can be a dangerous trap to others. An incident in the life of Chuang-tse can serve as an example:

"While sitting on the banks of the P'u river, Chuang-tse was approached by two representatives of the Prince of Ch'u, who offered him a position at court. Chuang-tse watched the water flowing by as if he had not heard. Finally he remarked, "I am told that the Prince has a sacred tortoise, over two thousand years old, which is kept in a box, wrapped in silk and brocade." "That's true" the official replied. "If the tortoise had been given a choice", Chuang-tse continued, "which do you think he would have liked better - to have been alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?" "To have been alive in the mud, of course," the men answered. "I too prefer the mud", said Chuang-tse. "Good-bye".

'The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet', Benjamin Hoff