Let’s walk in the woods tomorrow...

Such beautiful imagery, such utter simplicity, so much joy. After all the poetry you've read across the years, this still takes your breath away.

"....maybe Rembrandt and da Vinci’s jeweled colours
were real – not just painted,
the way life looks through crystals of tenderness….

you smiled at me tonight
at the bottom of the stairs
with so much love in your eyes

all you said was…
“let’s walk in the woods tomorrow
at sunrise
just you and me… alone
before the world’s awake

I’ll show you
how to make a deer come near
by remaining very, very still
projecting kindness.”

…and all I said was…
“I’ll set the alarm for five”

but we were stained glass
ruby red and cobalt blue
and the choir was singing…"

Rossetti

Compassion. And Co-feeling

“All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages—Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance—this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with that word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German: Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla).

In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

This is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult.

The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit,współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximum capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy.

In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”

Milan Kundera, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’

Anthony Lee

Discovery of the day: Anthony Lee!  "Choreographer/Dancer/Artist/Student of Life" :)

This is so brilliant!  I have graciously accepted that no one can teach me to dance - :) -  but dance - or movement  - never ceases to fascinate me - to be able to say so much, without words.

Or to say nothing at all, but create so much beauty, by just moving. They move, and we are moved up from the dreary center where our everyday selves have parked themselves.

Somebody That I Used to Know | Choreography by Anthony Lee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2F52daJLbUo

More dances on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/antoniousness

Look

“...We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives.

Then there is the third category, the category of the people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of the people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.

So also, Tomas’s estranged son, Simon. He wrote a letter to Tomas. He did not ask him to write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life. And later on, after Tomas’ death, he searched and found the address of his mistress. Because he desperately needed an imaginary eye to follow his life, he would occasionally write her long letters.”

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
Milan Kundera

Wonder

Is a sense of wonder connected to a belief in God? Or at least to a wanting to believe in God? Beyond all disputable utilitarian functions, is God finally just a sense of Wonder? At the sheer beauty of people, things, coincidences, surprises, disproved prejudices, and the endless ability of life to renew itself?

And if you lose your sense of Wonder, will you become all dry inside, and when someone shakes you, will they hear the dry hard nut of your heart knocking against your sides?

From 'Report to Greco', the autobiography of Nikos Kazantzakis:

"........We stopped at a little monastery occupied by dervishes who danced every Friday. The arched doorway was green and had an open hand of bronze-Mohammed's sacred symbol - on the lintel. We entered the immaculate courtyard. It was paved with large white pebbles; there were flowerpots and creepers all around the edges, and in the centre a huge fruit-laden laurel.

We stopped beneath its shade to catch our breath. One of the dervishes saw us from his cell. Approaching, he greeted us by placing his hand over his breast, lips, and forehead. He was wearing a long blue robe and a tall kulah of white wool. His beard was pitch black and pointed; a silver earring hung from his right ear. He clapped his hands. A chubby barefoot boy came and brought us some stools. We sat down. The dervish chatted about the flowers we saw around us, then about the sea, which we observed sparkling between the laurel's lanceolate leaves. Finally he began to speak about dancing.

"If a man cannot dance, he cannot pray. Angels have mouths but lack the power of speech. They speak to God by dancing."

Father, what name do you give God?", asked the abbé.

"God does not have a name", the dervish replied. "He is too big to fit inside names. A name is a prison, God is free."

"But in case you should want to call Him," the abbé persisted, "when there is need, what name will you use?'

The dervish bowed his head and thought. Finally he parted his lips: "Ah! - that is what I shall call Him. Not Allah, but Ah!"

Please Help!

To Bangaloreans:

Remember the beautiful open grasslands next to Nrityagram, where Vasanthahabba used to take place? Please sign this petition if you want to help prevent it being destroyed to construct a theme park.(AAAARGHH!)

Hesaraghatta is the last remaining grassland in and around Bangalore and requires immediate protection.  It took me less than a minute to sign, it's a very simple process.

Please sign and share on your FB walls, thank you!

http://www.change.org/petitions/karnataka-government-don-t-destroy-hesaraghatta-grasslands 

Everything is waiting for you

So I spent years reading philosophy. And somewhere along the way, I gave up the Search for the Self and slipped into the Search for Beauty. And I now realize that all that I ever wanted to know, it was already there, in the poetry I have always drunk deep from, been intoxicated by.

Is seeking Beauty, and seeking the Self, one and the same, do these paths lead to the same light?

Everything is waiting for you

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte

The Moment

"I now exist on the principle of shortsightedness, which demands enhanced attention to the moment. Late wisdom, but close to the wisdom of childhood. A lovely summer day. Color, taste, scent. A squirrel. Cherries. Good tiredness. Cauliflower for supper. Clean house. And always darkness, darkness that spreads around all of it."

A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook, by Anna Kamienska

If there is a squirrel in it, I melt, anyways :) 

http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/search/label/Squirrel

Joy

Then Too There Is This
J. Allyn Rosser

Joy in the day's being done, however
clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists,
the packages nestling together,
no one home waiting for dinner, for
you, no one impatient for your touch
or kind words to salve what nightly
rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling
that one is really as alone as one had feared.

One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy
to see over the strip mall darkening
right on schedule a neon-proof pink
sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth,
cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up
and lit as if by a match struck somewhere
in the throat much deeper down.

You wouldn't recognize me

I have this thing about hands. And poems that speak of them. Hands, these far edges of us, to which all our warmth flows down. And then the reaching out. And the drawing in.

"......One of my friends, whose wife is a physician, went on to elaborate that when his wife's medical class dissected cadavers, the hardest task - the most psychologically upsetting for the students - wasn't dissecting faces. It was hands. He offered, "It's our hands that give us our humanity."

I guess it is appropriate that we hurt the most through them too.

Across a Great Wilderness without You
Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.
God bless them for not judging me,
I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe
and make strange noises at them—

language,

if language can be a kind of crying.
The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,
each bullet hole suffused with moon,
like the platinum thread beyond them
where the river runs the length of the valley.
That's where the fish are.

Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled
stone beneath the bank, their bodies
desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,
the way prayers become more hopeless
when uttered aloud.

The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:
I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm
over my bed. It's the sound of them
shouldering against each other that terrifies me,
as if it might hurt to brush across another being's
living flesh.

But I carry a gun now. I've cut down
a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—
my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools
I've retired from their life of touching you.


Open. Close. http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/search/label/Hands

Moved

"For we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved...."


From 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World', by Lewis Hyde 

The Gift

The most fascinating book I have probably ever read, recommended by a friend to whom I am indebted now, because of the same - :) - Lewis Hyde's 'The Gift', "the sort of book that you remember where you were, and even what you were wearing, when you first picked it up".
..............................................................................................

"It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no unnecessary connection.

...a gift makes a connection. To take the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table, and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal begins, a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his neighbor's. And his neighbor will return the gesture, filling the first man's empty glass.

In an economic sense nothing has happened. No one has any more wine than he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The French customarily tend to ignore people they do not know, but in these little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for an hour or more. 'A conflict exists,' says Lévis-Strauss, 'not very keen to be sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a tension between the norm of privacy and the fact of community...'This is the fleeting but difficult situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace which does away with the mutual uncertainty.'

Spacial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions another exchange - conversation - and a whole series of trivial social ties unfolds."

Page 58, Chapter 4, 'The Bond', from 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World', by Lewis Hyde

I found it on Flipkart.

Orpheus, and the Descent into Hell

A brilliant review, makes me want to read the book Right Now. :)
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"The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre.

The "Fifth string: Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. She seems to agree with medieval theologians in seeing Orpheus's wife Eurydice as his own "lower self", and also, perhaps, as death; in Cocteau's Orphée, she tells us, "Orpheus had gone down to Hell to find her, his own Death, as much as to retrieve his wife."

That phlegmatic savant Maurice Blanchot enters a more ambiguous, darker plea, seeing in the quest to the Underworld an attempt by Orpheus not only to rescue Eurydice, representing truth or art, but also, as Wroe writes, "to look at her in 'the other night', as the still-unattained object of his desire".

Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe
Ann Wroe showcases a new kind of writing in this playful and passionate paean to Orpheus.
John Banville

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/orpheus-ann-wroe-john-banville-review

Raag Kaushi Kanada

I love Hindustani classical music solely because of Ustad Hameed Khan, our dear friend in Dharwar, the most gentle person I know, and the only person I know who can make gentleness heard through a sitar, so perfectly. Because whenever he does his riyaaz in our guest room, I walk around the house in tears, because I cannot contain any more joy...........

I've never heard Vasant Rai before. A friend sent this to me. I know nothing about raags, but I know this piece is beautiful beyond expression. I suspect you will too. As I keep saying, you don't always have to understand. Poetry, or music, or people. There is still a giving. To open up and receive is a choice we make.

The most beautiful evocation of Raag Kaushi Kanada

http://aryaputr.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/kaushikanada/


* Photo from http://aryaputr.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/kaushikanada/

Classic Adams :) :)

So Zaphod and Trillian are stuck on the spaceship 'Heart of Gold', floating around for days in some remote area of the Galaxy, and Zaphod is going a little out of his mind - and he's drinking.

"That he had thought about what his position actually was and the renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first down and check if it was all right.

'Freedom.' he said aloud.

Trillian came on the bridge at that point and said several things on the subject of freedom.

'I can't cope with it,' he said darkly, and sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and preferred the one on the right.

He poured a drink down his other throat with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to, and maybe a bit of a sing as well.

He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that, so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully, and a sixth for moral support.

'You're drinking too much,'  said Trillian.

His heads collided trying to sort out the four of her he could now see into a single person...............

He boggled at her. He had never seen anyone sit on their own lap before.

'Wow,' he said. He had another drink.

Page 356, 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe',  Part 2, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams