Winter Silence

Fall bounce 2
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I have become very quiet on these pages, I know.
Maybe it's the winter days now, grey, silent.... marvelous.

I have managed to make some visual art - this little leaf and acorn caught my eye the other morning and brought everything to an immediate halt. I bent over and looked closely, then ran and got the camera.

If you want to read more, go here and visit with Jeanette Winterson.

Or, I found these words of watching and silence yesterday as I inspected a Christmas book:

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
these things perhaps are the poem.

Jorge Luis Borges

The Blue Guitar and the Blackbird

Jackson PC-1 in Chlorine Blue
Originally uploaded by ArtBrom

The biggest challenge for most spiritual seekers is to surrender their self importance, and see the emptiness of their own personal story.
It is your personal story that you need to awaken from in order to be free.
To give up being either ignorant or enlightened is the mark of liberation and allows you to treat others as your Self.
What I am describing is the birth of true Love.
Adyashanti, How to Treat Others.

I have come across a couple poems by Wallace Stevens.
I have also read that in The Man with the Blue Guitar, Stevens was exploring whether our thoughts and mental images can represent reality as it actually is?

How do we see Reality? Through the glasses we have on, be they smokie, rose, or clear.
Through the stories that we tell, be they short or sweet or sad.
But, is any of that really Real?

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

So went the first cantos of the poem I found yesterday.
And then this morning, I came across Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, from which I offer the first five:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

I know I am being rather vague as to what my point is here.
I’m talking about making it through life in an honest manner. Sometimes it gets rather hard to see the truth.
Personally, I’ve come to believe in two trustworthy clues.
Is there love or silence in the telling? … the blackbird whistling or just after.

Perhaps you can take the poems and run with them yourself.
You might like to try this suggestion offered by Jeanette Winterson, at whose website I originally found the Blue Guitar.

Here’s a tip – and a mystery of its own – if you learn a poem, and then repeat it out loud in front of a mirror, watching yourself, you will discover something more about the poem, and something unexpected about yourself.

Adieu.

A Poem A Day

Dinner at our house
Originally uploaded by bunchadogs & susan

I just recently got around to reading Jeannette Winterson’s January column.
As usual she lifts my spirit. Please visit her website to read her full essay and other pieces.
For January she says:

“Honour the fate you are”…

I don’t want it to sound like I believe in pre-destination – fate is never that, but it is the web of possibilities from which we unthread our particular journey.
It may be that we don’t honour ourselves enough – in the sense of respecting our real nature – actual and developing.
The business of trying to be ourselves is a full-time occupation – which is not to say give up your job and your family, but is to say don’t be troubled by the size of the task.
Individuality is not a small thing.

I have said many times that I believe poetry can make a huge difference to how we feel about ourselves and about ourselves in the world.
I have just been reading The Letters of Ted Hughes, really engaging stuff,
and well worth getting hold of.
He says somewhere what I have found for myself, that reading poetry out loud is revelatory.

It is in part the incantation, which is ancient and mystical,
something we used to do, and rarely do now.
It is in part the sound and feel of breath, your breath mingling with the breath of the poet.
It is in part recitation, the pleasure of pushing the thing out of your body at the same time as taking it into the body.

I find that if I recite something a few times, I can learn it without really trying – though I know this happens through habit, and won’t happen to someone straightaway.
But it will fend off memory loss, and it will give you something to play with in your head the next time you are stuck on a tube-train, or in a queue, or any other situation that requires personal resources, great or small.

In any case, poetry is such an antidote to babble
that a dose of it once a day reminds us what language is – and what it isn’t.

Try it for the New Year – a poem every day read outloud... Think of it as a stretch exercise.

Inspired, I went looking for a poem and found none that really suited…
End of blog.
Until today.

Love Like Salt

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

Lisel Mueller

Snowstorm at Upaya

Snowstorm, Upaya
Originally uploaded by Upaya

Some of you may be sick of snow by now, but here in Georgia I miss it.
The last two days, I have even sat outside leaving the kitchen door wide open.
Still, it's January. Where's the snow?

I find my snow online.
This is a picture by Joan Halifax taken at the Zen center, Upaya.

Just this morning as I padded round the kitchen in my daily get-to-work routine, part of me bemoaned the fact of how life seems to be such a dreary process of one step in front of the other just now.

No particular pain. No particular gain.
So try not to complain,
(You can always write bad poetry)
apparently,
Spontaneously.

That was the trouble I decided.
I am not laughing enough these days.
And I reflected upon a recent conversation I'd had with Sandy.

She was writing the final submission for a series of inspirational articles in her local paper from a doctor's point of view.
Trouble was, she didn't feel inspired.
Uncle Eddie's death made her sad.
One of her patients had just died, and
"Michael, my little anorexic, drove through a horrendous snow storm yesterday to see me. I don't know how he made it. I have an appointment with him on Friday, but he may be dead. He is dying and I cannot help him."

Well, next day an envelope arrived with a copy of Sandy's article.
She'd ended with Ecclesiastes ... "and a time for every purpose under heaven."

So, it's Winter now.
Rest.
Feel the profound comfort of being tucked in warm and sheltered.
Use your eyes...

Sometimes grey is beautiful.

Can you see how it might be perfect?

In & Outs of November

Augie in Machu
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I miss Jeanette Winterson!
She has not written her monthly column since last September.
So, I went to November, 2005 and took these snippets.
Both wise and cooky.
I love that.

Then, I came across this picture from my nephew
traveling in Peru.
Thus, the lama and the sacred site.

I will let you connect the dots…
Like: November is springtime in Peru…
(unless - they only have two seasons)… but still, it’s all about opposites.

Or, Why is it so many of the world’s sacred sites
seem to be deserted? Dot. Dot. Dot…

Is this really what Jeanette is trying to tell us?
A warning,
Global warning…
Deep inside us…
… and wasn’t Machu Picchu big on keeping guinea pigs?...
And what’s that say about eating one’s experiment…

I am sure you’d prefer to listen to Jeanette, rather than my be-dotted brain…

I long for emptiness and silence.
From November 7th I am hiding away, disappearing into the woods, because
there is a book I have to write,
and one of the many things that can’t be done in public is to write a book.
Though I expect some one will try it soon as an installation.

And I am so tired that I dream about sleeping when I am asleep.

It is difficult to get a balance between the public and the private.

I am sure that the time we live in right now needs us all to be more public than we might like.
We have to speak out, make our voices heard.
I can’t believe that our home-grown lunatic Tony Blair is planning to spend 20 BILLION on a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Of course we have to speak out…

We aren’t living in a quiet time.
We aren’t going to lie easy in our beds.
I would like to be a hermit, but I can’t be.

At the same time it must be said that living more publicly- that is speaking out, raising our hands, getting in the way of the power mongers, needs a balance on the other side.
Private lives can easily shatter under public responsibilities, and,
what is less talked about
and just as dangerous,
is that the public cause can lose touch with its real values,
if we don’t have a private life to sustain those values….

I watch Tony Blair running from crisis to crisis,
and know that as he gets more and more out of touch
with the real things in life,
he is less and less able to make sane decisions.
Sanity is found in so many inconsequential things,
the small and sustaining pleasures of life,
like kids and dogs and a walk and a steaming cup of coffee in the back yard,
and a poem you want to learn,
and picking up twigs for the fire,
and spending all day cooking for your friends,
and letting your mind play and swim and leap and jump,
instead of forcing it endlessly down the same routes.

Peace is not optional,
and I wonder if we find world peace so difficult because our own peace is so hard to find?

So I am sitting here with a pulled muscle. Me! Atlas!
With a pulled muscle.
I am furious and have to give in.
My body is not stupid,
but I am….

Meanwhile – for everyone worrying about bird flu, let’s start by treating chickens properly…
I am very fond of fowls myself, and keep them very well
and they reward me with eggs and cause no trouble,
and why would I want to put them in cages, feed them steroids,
cut off their beaks and let their feet weld to the floor because they can’t move?

Would you do that to a chicken?

Then never ever eat any chicken product where that could have happened.

Simple stuff, changing the world.
It starts in your mouth.


. . . Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble, Gobble.

What Our Lips are Thirsting For

Originally uploaded by akiruna

The Keeper of the Lips allowed as how
I might be
The Holder of the Cup.

I’d call it something of a compromise.
Something concocted to put skittish minds at ease.
You do this and I’ll do that, not unlike dividing up the kitchen tasks.
Not to imply at all, at all, at all
any other housekeeping arrangement.
No. Not That at all.

But still,
Be still,
I am now, officially,
Holder of the Cup.

These words of Czeslaw Milosz immediately came to mind:

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospel in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.

I love these words and have absolutely no idea
why they are germane to this moment.

Perhaps Keeper of the Lips
will whisper a hint or two. (She is one most clever bird.)
Meanwhile, I inscribe them upon a piece of mental parchment
And drop it into the Cup; safe keeping.

Of course there is the Cup itself
And the words of Jeanette Winterson that originally defined it:

The best work is a cup that holds the liquid that you are…
We learn about ourselves through someone not ourselves – it is like falling in love – the stranger brings the gift.

I scribble this down too
And in it goes.

And now we’re really talking.
‘Cause love has entered in the conversation.

Yet another “devoted reader” (not her words, but mine)
sent me a Rumi poem today.
It inspired me to collect more snippets of his poetry
creating quite the love fest.

No apology intended,
simply more treasures for the Cup.

Because we need to know, What it's Going to Take.

Last year I wrote,
“Falling in love is how we practice falling into Love.”
Love (with that large-case letter) being just another word for Being.
Falling in love and Awakening: seems to me the first is simply rehearsal for the second.

Rumi’s poetry offers perhaps the best defense of this proposition.

And the Cup will be here too, less there be any doubts
Regarding what our lips are really thirsting for.

~
Someone who does not run
toward the allure of love walks
a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here senses
the love-hawk floating above
and waits and will not be driven
or scared to safety.

~
Flying toward thankfulness, you become
the rare bird with one wing made of fear,
and one of hope. In autumn,
a rose crawling along the ground in the cold wind.
Rain on the roof runs down and out by the spout
as fast as it can.

Talking is pain. Lie down and rest,
now that you've found a friend to be with.

~
The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.

How do they learn that?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.

~
A thousand half-lives
must be forsaken to take
one whole heart home.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the love be.

Lovers don’t finally
meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.