“Until you have cried, you don’t know God.” St. Ephrem
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A Two-Headed Thing – Rumi (…never think that you are worthless. God has paid an enormous amount for you…)
The universe swings again into orbit around us.
Am I looking for you or you for me?
The question is wrong.
As long as I keep using two pronouns,
I am this in-between, two-headed thing.
Some of the water in my stream flows quickly by.
Some stays frozen in an ice ledge along the bank.
Sun says to stone, Let me shine inside you
and change your center to ruby.
As the sun of infinite love
comes into your love,
you are given more humble work,
something common like streetsweeping;
then you are given mastery.
The sun says to the unripe grape,
There is a kitchen inside you
where you can make vinegar,
or if I help, sweet juice.
The king says to the falcon, I cover your eyes
with a hood, so that you will break
with your kind and see only my face.
The falcon replies, Yes.
The rose says to the garden,
I display these robes,
so that you will let the other flowers go
and be a one-rose garden.
Imagine a man selling his donkey
to be with Jesus.
Now imagine him selling Jesus
to get a ride on a donkey.
This does happen.
Jesus can transform a drunk into gold.
If the drunk is already golden,
he can be changed to pure diamond.
If already that, he can become the circling
planets, Jupiter, Venus, the moon.
Never think that you are worthless.
God has paid an enormous amount for you,
and the gifts keep arriving.
Dates from a withered branch,
the sweet light that came to Jesus in the cradle.
My face now makes the world’s bathhouse hot.
Don’t look at the wet wall paintings.
Look here.
There is something in us
that has nothing to do with night and day,
grapes that never saw a vineyard.
WE ARE ALL RETURNING.
says the Qur’an. Enjoy Shams,
or if you cannot do that, at least
consider what honest people tell you.
anomie
“Oh, God, we have been an exile in our own country
and a stranger in another land…” – Bruce “Utah” Phillips
anomie noun (Concise Encyclopedia)
In the social sciences, a condition of social instability or personal unrest resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. The term was introduced in 1897 by Émile Durkheim, who believed that one type of suicide (anomic) resulted from the breakdown of social standards that people need and use to regulate their behavior. Robert K. Merton studied the causes of anomie in the U.S., finding it severest in persons who lack acceptable means of achieving their cultural goals. Delinquency, crime, and suicide are often reactions to anomie. See also alienation.
off the coast
from Cold Mountain Poems – Han Shan, translated by Gary Snyder
In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I’m back at Cold Mountain;
I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
Han-shan / Gary Snyder
step inside this house
Nocturne
Last night
in the dark
my heart
kept me
awake.
Last night it
kept me awake
searching
for hollows
and histories
headlights
on an island road.
Last night
in the dark
a car horn
echoing in my chest,
crying
like a cat
in a darkened
stair,
my heart kept
me awake.
Outside,
security lights
stayed on.
Outside,
the lights were
on, the branches
still, and not a single
breath of air.
Last night
in the dark
my heart
kept me
awake.
Photo by Rahul on Pexels.com
A Song On The End Of The World – Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Christmas at Spring Harbor
late December
locked up tight
like a cloister door
a splinter of light
opens the sky
a crack before
the nurse with red hair
is there with your
meds saying
for God’s sake
close the door and
put on your clothes
I wake to doze while
beyond the walls
it’s Christmas
acting just enough
Photo by Irina Iriser on Pexels.com
It is like an English summer day, cool and cloudy, with deep green grass all around the Hermitage and trees heavy with foliage. Occasional slow bursts of gentle sunlight that imperceptibly pass by. Shafts of light in great rooms of shadow and the tall tree-church beyond the cedar cross. the path of creek gravel leads into the shadows and beyond them to the monastery, out of sight, down the hill, across fields and a road and a dirty stream. All such things as roads and sewers are far from this place.
Knowing when you do not need anymore. Acting just enough. Saying enough. Stopping when there is enough. Some may be wasted, nature is prodigal. Harmony is not bought with parsimoniousness.
Yet stopping is “going on.” To cling to something and want more of it, to use it more, to squeeze enjoyment out of it. this is to “stop”and not go on. But to leave it alone at the right time, this is the right stopping, the right going on. To leave a thing alone before you have had anything to do with it, if it is for your use, to leave it without use, is not “stopping” is not even beginning. Use it to go on.
– Thomas Merton, journal entry – May 16, 1961
Edge of Atlantic 