I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days
and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West'

Belonging

 

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac (Part 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.
Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

Love

 

I want so badly some days
to be the kind of person who keeps a gratitude journal

and believes in manifestations, who believes
that if I throw myself on the mercy of the universe

the universe will be merciful, that happiness is as simple
as mirror work, which people tell me is not easy,

because who can look in the mirror for three minutes
and say I love you, I love you, I love you

without bursting into tears over all the ways
we have not loved ourselves.

Jennifer Saunders, from When the Guest Speaker Told Us

The Cat's Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy

A Gift

 

The middle of June, and I awake
to rain - gentle, persistent, enough
to soak the  ground and clear  the air.
 
Isn't this the best kind of surprise-
the thing you wanted but couldn't get
for yourself and didn't know
that you could have? Already
the frogs are singing and the grass
stretches its roots in rejoicing.
 
And here am I, with my damp hair
and empty hands, and nothing to say
but "Oh!" and "Thank you!"
 
Once again the world - my one
true love - has brought me flowers.
 
Lynn Ungar, 9 Jun 2023

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

The Mahabharata

"The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.

It is much greater. It is a work of art.

It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. 

It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. 

Not animals, not gods.  

It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.

It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.

But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.

And doing is life. Doing is karma.

Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man.  

You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.

The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.

Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.

The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.

In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.

It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives.

Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.” 

Tarun J. Tejpal, "The Alchemy of Desire"

Living

What a beautifully written piece! Shared by a dear friend. And it was such a wonderful surprise to see Pico Iyer also in there! I missed Kurosawa's Ikuru - need to find it. 

"Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Living" - which is based on Kurasowa's "Ikiru". 

"One of the things about the original Japanese film that really appealed to me," he explains, "it emphasizes the fact that you can't rely on the applause of the wider world to tell you whether you've lived well or not. Public acclaim may be nice to have, but ultimately, it's not worth very much. It's treacherous, fickle, it's usually wrong... you've got to take a lonely private view of what is success and failure for you. I think that is what it's saying. You've got to try and find a meaning that's within yourself, and I found that quite inspiring."

How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161482211/kazuo-ishiguro-living-ikiru-oscars

I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking

'Thinking like a mountain' was one of the books recommended by Malvika Solanki during an amazing permaculture course I did with her in June, a birthday gift to myself. From philosophy to science to ecology to poetry - increasingly all my reading is resulting in a blurring of the lines, the understanding of how we need to see everything as a whole, whether it be our own bodies, or our existence in the world. The source of much of our conflict is seeing ourselves as separate, not a part of an intricate web. 

"When humans investigate and see  through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognized as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. 

What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one to communicate. For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like  a mountain, sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". 

Page 35, 36, Beyond Anthropocentrism

From 'Thinking like a Mountain' , by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess

Photo: Bandipur, Nilgiris range of mountains. Near Malvika Solanki's farm, where I did the permaculture course. Life-changing. This was one of the books recommended by her. 

Swayyam: https://swayyam.org/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/swayyam/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swayyam_permaculture/ 

The Smell of a Good Stew

I started reading the 'No 1 Ladies Detective Agency' series many years ago, after I read a recommendation - and have been hooked on it since. 😊 Such pleasant delightful light reading! A great introduction to another culture and landscape, though maybe a partial view. Indians can relate to the values of Botswana, as described in here. Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, by the way. He also has a series called the Isabel Dalhousie Novels - again, fantastic writing. 

"...She leaned forward and sniffed at the stew. Mma Ramotswe believed in using your nose while cooking; too many people, she thought, relied on taste, and were always dipping a spoon into a dish to see how it was faring. In her view, that was unnecessary - and unhygienic. You could find out everything you needed to know through the sense of smell. 

A good stew smelled like a ... well, a good stew; it would remind you of that time when the sun has just sunk over the Kalahari, when the cattle have been brought back into their kraal against a background of gentle lowing, when the moon is floating up in the sky over Botswana and the children are sitting about the fire, waiting for their dinner. It smelled like that. 

It smelled like the world when, early in the morning, you made your way through the bush and the birds were just beginning to greet the world and the delicate leaves of the acacia trees were opening to the warmth of the gold with which the land was painted. It smelled like that, and all you had to do was to train yourself to know when something was just right."

Page 30, 'The House of the Unexpected Sisters'

from the 'No 1 Ladies Detective Agency' series, Alexander McCall Smith

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/

Mercy

When I was a child, every monsoon season, I spent a lot of time rescuing small insects drowning in pools of rain water in the hilly green area where we lived. I walked around after the rain, looking out for them. And for those that could not be reached with twigs, I made small paper boats and pushed them in their direction. When they clambered on to the boat, I would breath again. 

I can relate to this poem. :) 

Mercy
after Nikki Giovanni

She asks me to kill the spider.
Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find.

I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside
and allow it to walk away.

If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,

I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy. 

Rudy Francisco
Helium

Rudy K. Francisco is an American Spoken Word poet and author of Caribbean origin. 

A Conscious Return to Simplicity

"Speaking as a Chinese, I do not think any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. 

For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening and out of awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot."

'The Importance of Living'​​
Lin Yutang

Imagination

"..The greater the imaginative power of a man, the more perpetually he is dissatisfied. That is why an imaginative child is always a more difficult child; he is more often sad and morose like a monkey, than happy and contented like a cow. Also divorce must necessarily be more common among the idealists and the more imaginative people than among the unimaginative. The vision of an ideal life companion has an irresistible force which the less imaginative and less idealistic never feel. On the whole, humanity is as much led astray as led upwards by this capacity for idealism, but human progress without this imaginative gift is itself unthinkable.

...Some dream a little more than the others, as there is a child in every family who dreams more and perhaps one who dreams less. And I must confess a secret partiality for the one who dreams. Generally he is the sadder one, but no matter; he is also capable of greater joys and thrills and heights of ecstasy. For I think we are constituted like a receiving set for ideas, as radio sets are equipped for receiving music from the air. Some sets with finer response pick up the finer short waves which are lost to the other sets, and why, of course, that finer, more distant music is all the more precious if only because it is less easily perceivable."

'The Importance of Living'
Lin Yutang

Grace

Anne Lamott wrote this in June 2018, but so relevant to the present!

"The world can feel like an alcoholic father sitting in the living room in his vile underwear, tranced out or abusive; and the world can feel like your favorite auntie who thinks you are just great, still likes to hike, always brings trail mix, and knows her wildflowers. 

These are excruciating times, and this is the kingdom. It’s two, two, two mints in one. 

So yeah, some of us are a little tense. But we are not flattened. Nor do we look away from the suffering of others. And no matter how bad things look and how long change is taking, we don’t give up on goodness. Here is proof: we still take care of each other in ways that are profound, loving and sacrificial, by the bedside of our most beloved, and in the streets. We show up: the secret of life. 

We gather in cities to rise up, and at local parks for live music in the sun, where we and our cranky neighbor end up doing the old tribal hippie two-step in the same shaft of light. We are still laughing—some of us perhaps a bit maniacally—and people are creating the greatest, most live-giving routines and cartoons and responses. 

This is what saved me during the Cheney years. It was chemo. So, great laughter, community, joyous and/or sacrificial love. We can work with this! It is more than enough.

 Here’s the one fly in the ointment: we have to do this in dim lighting, what with a political fever dream, and our own failing memories and overwhelm. 

Life is always like E.L. Doctorow’s great line about writing, that it is like driving at night with the headlights on—you can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way. 

You still have to buckle up, no matter how slowly the car is moving. Put on the radio and sing along, loudly and off key. You just have to trust that, as John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” 

I heard a story last week from a sober friend that almost completely captures my understand of goodness and life, a story that has been medicine for my worried, worried soul: Caroline stopped drinking 30 years ago, at the age of 40, with zero interest or belief in any kind of higher power to whom she might be able to turn when cravings overcame her. 

But after a year of white-knuckle sobriety, contemptuous of a higher power, hanging on through will power, she one day heard and then found a frog in her shower. She lifted it and gently carried it in her cupped hands through the house. She could feel and, of course, imagine its terror. She took it out to the garden, where there was a moist patch of earth over near the blackberries, and set it down. It sat stock still for a bit, and then hopped away into the bushes. She said, “My name is Caroline. I’m that frog.”

 I am, too, and I am also a big helper. When I have felt most isolated and lost, I have always ended up being carried back to the garden in people’s good hands, to where I need to be, afraid and not breathing. for much of the way. And I have helped carry scared people, the best I could. You have, too. 

Isn’t that what grace is, when some force of kindness, against all odds, with unknown hands, brings us from fear and hard tiles to a moist patch earth, and sets us down? If I were God’s west coast representative, I would speed up the process a bit, and hand out klieg lights but I can’t. 

All I can do is to try and help you get back to where there is moist soil and fresh air, and let you help me. And those happen to be the two things I most want in life."