it's about listening deeply enough.

... one of the assertions of science is that we don't know everything and that, in order to increase our knowledge, we have to be in dialogue with nature and it has to be a constant dialogue. And it's not sufficient to end that dialogue because, as we increase our ability to measure nature, we can ask questions that are [on a] finer and finer level. And so we keep finding new things not because nature is changing, but because we are increasing our capacity to ask the questions of nature.

- Dr. S. James Gates, Jr.
excerpted from the transcripts of "Uncovering the Codes for Reality"

a broadcast of "On Being" with Krista Tippet

Gates is Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland in College Park. He serves on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

zeroing in.

'I am a landscape,' he said.
'a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
And plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths.'
'I know,' she said. 'When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud.'
'We had an old dog,' he told her, 'when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him.'
'No one knows where it is,' she said,
'and even by accident no one touches it.
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself —'
' — or flinch back
just in time.'

'Yes, we learn that.
It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never.'

- denise levertov

the vigil.

Don’t go to sleep one night.
What you most want will come to you then.
Warmed by a sun inside, you’ll see wonders.
Tonight, don’t put your head down.

Be tough, and strength will come.
That which adoration adores
appears at night. Those asleep
may miss it. One night Moses stayed awake
and asked, and saw a light in a tree.

Then he walked at night for ten years,
until finally he saw the whole tree
illuminated. Muhammad rode his horse
through the night sky. The day is for work.
The night for love. Don’t let someone
bewitch you. Some people sleep at night.

But not lovers. They sit in the dark
and talk to God, who told David,
“Those who sleep all night every night
and claim to be connected to us, they lie.”

Lovers can’t sleep when they feel the privacy
of the beloved all around them. Someone
who’s thirsty may sleep for a little while,
but he or she will dream of water, a full jar
beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get
from another person. All night, listen
to the conversation. Stay up.
This moment is all there is.

Death will take it away soon enough.
You’ll be gone, and this earth will be left
without a sweetheart, nothing but weeds
growing inside thorns.

I’m through. Read the rest of this poem
in the dark tonight.
Do I have a head? And feet?

Shams, so loved by Tabrizians, I close my lips.
I wait for you to come and open them


- rumi
from the essential rumi,
translations by coleman barks


photo provided for artistic consideration by: dave wilson

s h a d o w l a n d.

"holier is the saint who has known the abyss."

- gerard de nerval
in chimeras

bless this.

fertile void.


- photo provided for artistic consideration by ozyman

that's the way it is.

heart. it breaks.


- photo provided for artistic consideration by tw collins

in the end is my beginning.

East Coker

(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')


I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.



II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.



III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.



IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.



V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

- T.S. Eliot

Blessed Solstice.

in the Darkness we nourish Faith
and fully believe in the (re)birth of the Light.

may we celebrate this Holy Darkness
by nourishing our Faith in the Unknown
and by maintaining our belief in the return of the Sun.

Sacred, Blessed Yule.





{thank you, Sherry, for the words. they resonate. deeply}

the great, holy ordinary of simply being is love.

Love and Strange Horses—Intima’

—

One hundred breaths split the air
as I lean
on the only pine tree I find.
It’s early or late, it’s breezy or hot.
The fields are dry. Summer is near.
The horses are everywhere,
strangely galloping a dream,
but I can’t remember
how to call them,
so I stand back, watch them pass.


—

The first time I rode a horse
my body found the music of fire,
crackling the wind. An unbearable pleasure
that also left me with a burn on the side of my leg.
A sign, the horsekeeper told me, of longing.
A need to return—to belong.
After all, departure is like
pushing the weight of our heart
against the village
whose name has kept us awake.


—

Rafael came from somewhere in Eurasia.
I passed my hands through his mane—
saw a history of conquests and battles,
a field of hay, a mount of truth,
heard a silent ring,
his eyes asking me to go with him,
to confess something sacred,
to name something lustful.
Nothing of where he came from,
or who I was, disturbed us.


—

I knew he was different by the way he ran—
without pause,
without grace,
without distraction,
without ease.
He was told how to move in the world
and resented it.
He knew he would never own anything.


—

He came toward me.
It was a quiet afternoon.
I stood unmoving.
And we listened to the untitled music
circling the earth like an anthem
free of its nation.


—

He was unfamiliar to me,
approaching as if he possessed the land.
Every morning he stopped five feet
from the river.


- Nathalie Handal

open it.

right before you. there is always a door. to what you only think is hidden to you.

quiesce.

Incomparable Quiet,
teach me, about the seven levels of silence.
May i be worthy of the lesson,
that in stillness,
i will learn exactly when
to act.



please read: the above photograph is from the remarkable body of work, "Ashes and Snow" by the artist Gregory Colbert. i do not own any rights to this photo and will gladly take it down upon request. i have simply shared it here out of respect and love for its imagery. Colbert's work can be seen here

agpeya.

do you remember your birthright as a wild creature of the limitless world?
greet each whistling prayer of the wind as an oracle of the extraordinary.
in your hand lies the birth of a new day.
it is yours to do, make, be.
bless this moment, for it is sacred.




photo star creatures made available for artistic consideration by: simon

word.

What we speak becomes the house we live in.

- Hafiz



photo: thinking outside the box inside the box provided for artistic consideration by sabberworm

even the common, aflame.

Thanksgiving Day Prayer

For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty;
And save our souls from being so blind
That we pass unseeing
When even the common thornbush
Is aflame with your glory,
O God our creator,
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

- Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918)



photo provided for artistic consideration by: ali zeeshan ijaz

thank you, on being: blog for sharing this prayer orginally

truth is too simple for words

truth is too simple for words
before thought gets tangled up in nouns and
verbs
there is a wordless sound
a deep breathless sigh
of overwhelming relief
to find the end of fiction
in this ordinary
yet extraordinary moment
when words are recognized
as words
and truth is recognized
as everything else

-nirmala

all of it falls.

The November Angels

Late dazzle
of yellow
flooding
the simplified woods,
spare chipping away
of the afternoon-stone
by a small brown finch —
there is little
for them to do,
and so their gossip is
idle, modest:
low-growing,
tiny-white-flowered.


Below,
the Earth-pelt
dapples and flows
with slow bees
that spin
the thick, deep jute
of the gold time’s going,
the pollen’s
traceless retreat;
kingfishers
enter their kingdom,
their blue crowns on fire,
and feast on
the still-wealthy world.


A single, cold blossom
tumbles, fledged
from the sky’s white branch.
And the angels
look on,
observing what falls:
all of it falls.


Their hands hold
no blessings,
no word
for those who walk
in the tall black pines,
who do not
feel themselves falling —
the ones who believe
the loved companion
will hold them forever,
the ones who cross through
alone and ask for no sign.


The afternoon
lengthens, steepens,
flares out—
no matter for them.
It is assenting
that makes them angels,
neither increased
nor decreased
by the clamorous heart:
their only work
to shine back,
however the passing brightness
hurts their eyes.

- Jane Hirshfield


photo made available for artistic consideration by: rob lee

devenue

God turns you from one feeling to another
and teaches you by means of opposites so that
you will have two wings to fly, not one.


- Jalaluddin Rumi


photo made available for artistic consideration by: laurent

surprise

Life is just the perpetual surprise that I exist.

- rabindranath tagore





photo is makayla taken by kyle may

le bon mot du jour: alchemy

through love. all pain will turn to medicine.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

tatramajjhattata.

Eagle Poem


To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadly growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.


- Joy Harjo
from In Mad Love and War


photo made available for artistic consideration by lorne sykora