“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity.”
– A. Edward Newton
You find yourself disillusioned with the irrevocable personal losses: your health, your lover, your job, your hope, your dream. Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.
— Henri Nouwen
Existence is hard; it is literal suffering. It has wonders and joys, amazements and fascinations, yes. And it has love. All of this along with suffering, which happens to us and which we inflict on others and our own selves. Claire once asked me, if life is suffering, what is the point of being alive? In the end it seems simple enough: we are Life experiencing itself. We are Consciousness holding everything. We are the Mystery. It doesn’t bear too much thinking about, because thinking is a distraction. Better to simply pay attention to what is happening right now, what is right in front of me, and to meet it as fully and with as much attention as I can.
Taking my own advice, I happened to notice the sunlight on freshly washed grapes when I made my lunch. After visually appreciating them for a time, before relishing them in my mouth, I snapped a photo to share.
“Under your breath, just loud enough to be heard, tell the Earth that you can hear the sound of its turning, and it’s making you giddy. Say, too, how much you love the fact that in all eternity, this moment will never be repeated. Though you may drink in the delicious atmosphere with a trillion trillion more breaths, this special dispensation of air molecules will never fill your lungs again.”
–Rob Breszny
“Have you ever been loved? I bet you have been loved so much and so deeply that you have become blasé about how much grace it confers.
So let me remind you: To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you’re smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness.
Animals, too: You have been the recipient of their boundless affection. The spirits of allies who’ve left this world continue to send their tender regards, as well.
Do you “believe” in angels and other divine beings? Whether or not you do, there are hordes of them beaming their uncanny consecrations your way. You are awash in torrents of love.”
-Rob Breszny
Half Acre
I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is a land I grew in
Think of every town you’ve lived in
Every room, you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?
Do you carry every sadness with you
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you
A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking
So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our heart were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us
But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper
That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home
“I think parents sometimes forget that kids are putting on performances all day, just acting like the people we think we are until, like, ten years from now when we figure out who that actually is.”
–Jake Burt, Greetings from Witness Protection
Except that, as my teacher pointed out, no one really knows after ten years either.
No one can find the rewind button, child. So, just breathe.
Just Breathe
Two AM and she calls me ’cause I’m still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake,
I don’t love him, winter just wasn’t my season
Yeah we walk through the doors, so accusing their eyes
Like they have any right at all to criticize, hypocrites,
You’re all here for the very same reason
‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button girl,
So cradle your head in you hands
And breathe, just breathe,
Whoa breathe, just breathe
May he turn twenty one on the base at Fort Bliss
Just today he sat down to the flask in his fist,
Ain’t been sober, since maybe October of last year.
Here in town you can tell he’s been down for a while,
But my God it’s so beautiful when the boy smiles,
Wanna hold him, maybe I’ll just sing about it.
‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable,
And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button boys,
So cradle your head in your hands,
And breathe, just breathe,
Whoa breathe, just breathe
There’s a light at each end of this tunnel, you shout
But you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out
These mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again
If you only try turning around.
Two AM and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, its no longer
Inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
‘Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to
‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable,
And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
Sing it if you understand.
And breathe, just breathe
Whoa breathe, just breathe…
“The dharma — understanding, peering into the nature of reality — is not specific to Buddhism. The dharma is truth. And the only choice we really have is whether to try to be in relationship with the truth or to live in ignorance. There are no other choices. You have to actively engage. How did I come to be? How do I think of myself? How did I get what I have? (I don’t mean your degrees.) Where did I come from? What land are we on?If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. All of us, in some way, have profited from our wrong knowing.”
— angel Kyodo williams, Your Liberation is on the Line
“After all,” Anne had said to Marilla once, “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
–L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
“The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage.
I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died.
When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me.
I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”
–Thích Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear
“But we do neither: we never fail, and we never succeed. We are not the designers of our lives. Life is the designer of us. Life is vast and grand, intelligent, clever, and completely unknowable. It always has the last word. It is the last word. Life interrupts us when we are at our most self-assured. Life diverts us when we are hellbent on going elsewhere. Life arrives in a precise and yet unplanned sequence to deliver exactly what we need in order to realize our greatest potential. The delivery is not often what we would choose, and almost never how we intend to satisfy ourselves, because our potential is well beyond our limited, ego-bound choices and self serving intentions.”
–Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life
For Swap-bot, I joined a project that required writing a sestina.
According to the Academy of American Poets:
“The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:
ABCDEF
FAEBDC
CFDABE
ECBFAD
DEACFB
BDFECA
(envoi)(tercet) BE. DC. FA.
The envoi, a tercet, must contain two of the repeated words per line.”
So, here is what created itself within me.
The Dance
There I stood, waiting for the express
While pondering ways to renew
my flagging spirit, which struggled to climb
life’s mounting challenges, when I saw you, serene,
your hands moving in the air, a kind of dance —
the glorious joy on your face making you rich.
Gazing around, I noticed the world’s colors were rich.
In each person I sensed the soul’s desire to express,
to enter into the dance.
I felt that I could summon the energy to renew
and make myself serene
like an arbor trellis with those roses that climb.
To reach far, to stretch toward goals that require I climb —
this makes life worthwhile, and I feel rich.
In these moments, my heart beats serene.
I vibrate with life and tremble to express,
to evolve, to embrace impermanence and thus renew
life’s eternal dance.
So, which steps will we choose to dance?
Will it be the hustle, the two-step, the fandango climb?
Or maybe a slow waltz, to allow our breathing to renew
while rhythmically moving to the beat, slow and rich.
Perhaps we will lean in to share a kiss, to express
what tantalizes us as we attempt to appear serene.
We might do this under the silver light of the moon, serene
in the movement of the dance
and the people watching — their murmurs will express
how desire steeps, distills, intensifies, like the climb
of mercury trapped in a glass tube, the red rich
like blood, like the lungs give oxygen to renew.
And after we untwine ourselves, we turn within to renew
the relationship with the One who never leaves, the serene
companion who understands money does not make one rich;
nor does having it guarantee an invitation to the dance
and that life is often one painful, slogging climb
to an illusory summit that cannot contain all we express.
The koan: how to renew attention, surrender to the dance
or rest serene, no longer compelled to grasp or climb,
sitting in life’s rich mystery, waiting on emptiness to express.
–Kathryn Harper
Glimpses of My Daughter At Age Six
She is a sunflower-yellow
hourglass with a
center of nipple pink intensity
bouncing, twirling, burbling, squawking
like a Steller’s jay.
She is inside with Peter, Paul, and Mary,
multiplying three times infinity
in her rocking chair.
She is an apple, crisp and fresh,
the guitar singing melodies
sometimes jarring and jangling ears.
She’s a meandering stream of galaxies,
an ancient Redwood soul, not
fearing abandonment –
a kaleidoscope of wonder.
–Kathryn Harper
My dear Fur Person friend, Stella Bella the cat, died today. She was 17 years old. She had tumors in her bladder and on her lung. Sometime I will write about the adventures we had with her, and her many catly qualities. But today, just this.
Farewell Stella
I stroke your fur
no purr
frail limbs give
no resistance
laid out tenderly
no movement
eyes half open
no vision.
It was a good life
a long life
and we let you go
before we wanted
to spare you suffering.
It is the least we could do
for all the joy and love
you gave us.
–Kathryn Harper
