Author: Bill Schulz

These Exhaling Sounds

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

     Is the sweetness of the cane sweeter
than the one who made the canefield?

Behind the beauty of the moon is the moonmaker.
There is intelligence inside the ocean’s intelligence
feeding our love like an invisible waterwheel.

There is a skill to making cooking oil from animal fat.
Consider now the knack that makes eyesight
from the shining jelly of your eyes.

Dawn comes up like a beautiful meal being served.
We are hungry and distracted, so in love with the cook.

Don’t just be proud of your mustache
as you drive three donkeys down the road.

Instead of gemstones, love the jeweler.
Enough of these exhaling sounds.

Let the darling finish this
who turns listening into seeing.

– Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

DSC_7766

Photo: Runaround Pond, Maine – June 2019

quiet and human

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

How high the corn is this year, and what joy there is in seeing it! The tall crests nodding twelve to fifteen feet above the ground and all the silk-bearded ears. You come down out of the novitiate, through the door in the wall, over the trestle, and down into this green paradise of stalks and silence. I know the joy and worship the Indians must have felt, and the Eucharistic rightness of it! How can one not feel such things – so that I love the Mayas and the Incas as perhaps the most human of peoples, as the ones who did most honor to our continents.

photo of corn field

Photo by Gustavo Rodrigues on Pexels.com

The irreligious mind is simply the unreal mind, the zombie, abstracted mind, that does not see things that grow in the earth and feel glad about them, but only knows prices and figures and statistics. In a world of numbers you can be irreligious, unless the numbers themselves are incarnate in astronomy and music. But, for that, they must have something to do with seasons and with harvests, with the joy of the Neolithic peoples, who for millennia were quiet and human.
– Thomas Merton, journal entry – July 26, 1963

Control Burn – Gary Snyder

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

What the Indians
here
used to do, was,
to burn out the brush every year.
in the woods, up the gorges
keeping the oak and pine stands
tall and clear
and kitkitdizzie under them,
never enough fuel there
that a fire could crown
Now, manzanita,
(a fine bush in its right)
crowds up under the new trees
mixed up with the logging slash
and a fire can wipe out all.

Fire is the old story.
I would like,
with a sense of helpful order,
with respect for laws
of nature
to help my land
with a burn, a hot clean
burn
(manzanita seeds will only open
after a fire passes over
or once passed through a bear)

And then it would be more
like,
when it belonged to the Indians

Before.