Thursday, September 29, 2016

Warp and Woof


Warp and Woof

Daily experience for most
is a delightful fearful mixture..
We are content to allow the mixture
to serve as reality undoubted..
Acceptance of the
warp and woof
is the life we know..
Yet pain and distortion
confusion and doubt
lead some to question..
And in questioning to 
discover  Reality anew..
Finding:
warp and woof
are most blinding
hiding our inherited light
imposing seeming separation
and captivity remains...

Friday, September 23, 2016

Dogs and Cats



Dogs and Cats

These denizens of creation
fall short in our bifurcated minds..
We render ourselves
as the conscious ones
find disfavor on those below..
Yet now with a quantum question
we ask who is conscious
and consulting our experience
which is always at ready
an answer returns:
not dogs, not cats, not plants or rocks
and amazingly not our divided selves..
The quantum question receives its answer:
only consciousness is conscious..
This fearful response
settles into freedom
for all those dogs and cats and all...





(from a friend, CP..)

Poems of Simplicity












WENDELL BERRY 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



DAVID WHYTE







In the Beginning

Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning
you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn’t sit by the fire, you couldn’t live
so close to the live flame of that compassion
you had to go out in the world and make it your own
so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen…
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love…
It is all here, it is all here.
---David Whyte


Everything is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
---David Whyte































Thursday, September 22, 2016

Heady Minds


HEADY MINDS

Our minds project and name:
this realization is rumbling
underneath our shadows and struggle..
Is it not amazing
that externals are mind's projections
awaiting..but not long.. for their names
eagerly provided by heady minds..
This realization reverses
our notions..those heady beliefs
of separation as wisely undeniable..
Although the rumbling often seems 
fleeting and faint
not reportable in shadowy newsdays
real Happiness is found seeping in...


Sunday, September 11, 2016

The Purple Pumpkin


The Purple Pumpkin

Waiting for the white paper
which underlies this writing
to loose a flow of words
finding Peace
in the facing-off:
a pumpkin and a purple cushion..
Henry David Thoreau chose
to sit on a solitary pumpkin
not a crowded purple cushion..
Many we know might charge him
with most slothful neglect..
Our venerable teachers 
have exhorted us to
lift up the purple
with their assumption:
what is real is purple..
Yet we..startled by experience
find that very often
purple is pain..
We long to sit on that pumpkin
long since overgrown
with dead purple vines..
At last in our longing
the pumpkin may speak
of what lies in hiding
.. 'til just now..
with Peace emerging
the Pumpkin is Purple...



Thursday, September 1, 2016

Better...


Better...

With our thoughts and perceptions
we give credence to separation:
a self which experiences the world
the world we have always known..
Better however..an apparent self
seeming to experience an
unfolding world..
Even Better..an unperturbed Self
colored and shaped
but knowing only My Self..
But perhaps Best..simply I am...