Poems & Quotes

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Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

Mary Oliver

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The book says that sadness and anger cannot
travel down the neural path together.
Each must dominate the path
or relinquish it to the other.
So I swerve
in my grief
giving way to deep, dark, painful blue
then leaping in with red hot anger.

My mind tries to mediate
remembering Buddha: "Take the middle path".

My brain short circuits
sending out sparks of searing sadness.

Then I paint - reds, blues, and bruised purples.

by Lynn Nelsen

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You are lost the instant you know what the results will be.

Juan Gris

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Unless I love something
It cannot reveal itself to me
And every revelation fills me with thankfulness
For I am made richer by it.

Rudolph Steiner

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Sometimes

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

David Whyte

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He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

William Blake (1863)
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"We have seen God in his splendors
Heard the text that Nature renders
We have reached the naked soul of Man"

Ernest Shackleton
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"There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe."

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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In Tibetan there is an interesting word: ye tang che.
The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means” exhausted.” Altogether ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope - that there is some thing or some place better to be - we will never relax where we are.

Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. It comes from a sense of poverty - that we lack something. And it’s only when we can question the hope that there is anywhere to hide that the suffering begins to dissolve.

What happens when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic where you instantly grab for something. That grabbing is based on hope. Not grabbing is called hopelessness.

So what does it mean to admit that we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about it? That’s the compassionate thing to do. We can actually know the nature of intense dislike, shame, and embarrassment without believing there is something wrong. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who will one day emerge. It’s better to look straight at our hopes and fears - then some kind of basic sanity arises.

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with ourselves, to return to the bare bones no matter what’s going on. If we totally experience hopelessness, then we give up all alternatives to the present moment, and we can have a joyful, honest, direct relationship with our lives.

Hopelessness
from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
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If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give up everything.

Tao Te Ching

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I took the lamp.
And leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear,
I went down into my inmost self, to the abyss whence I feel dimly
that my power of action emanates.
But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties
by which social life is superficially illuminated,
I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.
At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me
of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.
And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps,
I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came - arising I know not from where -
the current which I dare to call my life."

Teilhard de Chardin
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Not Here

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What?s the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

Rumi


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From Dagmar’s Daughter by Kim Echlin


Meggie Dobb, with her little tucked chin and her sloped shoulders and her webbed elbows, did not grow tall. She collected blueberries and squashed them and painted pictures of blue cows with a frayed stick on the stalls of her mother’s barn. When blueberry season was over she visited Norea and asked for beets to make deep red. She wouldn’t stop painting red pictures and blue pictures.
Well, said Meggie Dobb to the child, you’ve found your two ardours.
What does that mean?
I mean red for fire and blue for love—it all comes back to that.
But I want different colors.
That winter Meggie bought colour for the girl and soon she covered every surface of her mother’s small house on stilts with her flat pictures. She recast the sights of Millstone Nether: skating parties and summer bonfires and trenching potatoes and men dragging nets off boats. She gave each drawing a strange title and painted the words into the borders. On her picture of a man being blown off a ship she wove in the border Happy-Go-Lucky and on the scene of a bawn filled with goats she wrote Purple Cow Lost.

If there were ever a conflict between instinct and consciousness in her choices of what to paint and how, instinct won out. Her dogs flew and her winter trees were laden with fruit. There were fish in the clouds and babies under the sea. She couldn’t say why. Once, when asked why she drew a two-faced head, she said, I didn’t have two pieces of paper.
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When I paint,
I liberate monsters,
My own monsters, and for those I am responsible.
One does not choose the content,
One submits to it.

Pierre Alechinsky

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I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling
or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live
so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova
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"The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture--
however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results,
is a by-product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign
of what has passed. The object, which is back of every true work of art,
is the attainment of a state of being, a high state of functioning,
a more than ordinary moment of existence."

Robert Henri
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"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success,
and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work
from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world
like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water,
yet which if you give them time,
will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."

William James
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TIME

Time like a lake breeze
Touched his face,
All thought left his mind.

One morning the sun, menacing,
Rose from behind a mountain,
Singeing-like hope-the trees.

Fully awakened, he lit his pipe
and assumed the sun-inhaling pose:
Time poured down like rain, like fruit.

He glanced back and saw a ship
Moving toward the past. In one hand
He gripped the sail of eternity,

And stuffed the universe into his eyes.


Shinkichi Takahashi
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" Once you name something you stop knowing it"

Joseph Cambell

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"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize
the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand."
      
Pablo Picasso

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Ich glaube an Alles noch nie Gesagte

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

Rilke's Book of Hours, Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

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The Way It Is

There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

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Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come up from grace
   to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

Rumi

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"Traveling from the known to the unknown requires crossing an abyss of emptiness.
We first experience disorientation and confusion.
Then, if we are willing to cross the abyss in curious and playful wonder,
we enter an expansive and untamed country that has its own rhythm.
Time melts and thoughts become stories, music. poems, images, ideas.
This is the intelligence of the heart, but by that I don't just mean emotions.
I mean a vast range of receptive and connective abilities:
intuition, innovation, wisdom, creativity, sensitivity....and meaning."

from 'I Will Not Die an Unlived Life'  Dawna Markova

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"There is a guidance for each of us, and by lowly
listening we shall hear the
right word... Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom
which flows into your life. Then, without effort, you
are impelled to truth
and to perfect contentment."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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To do a good portrait, it goes without saying, one must be able to see into the soul of the sitter. To do a good self-portrait, one must look into the ashes. Man builds on the ruins of his former selves. When we are reduced to nothingness, we come alive again. To season one’s destiny with the dust of one’s folly, that is the trick. In the ashes lie the ingredients for portrayal of self.

Excerpt from Henry Miller: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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It's not only what we do,
but also what we do not do
for which we are accountable.

-- Moliere
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"There are two ways to slide easily through life:
to believe everything or to doubt everything.
Both ways save us from thinking."

-- Alfred Korzybski
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I carry your heart with me
I carry it in my heart
I am never without it
Anywhere I go you go
My dear
And whatever is done by only me
Is your doing
My darling
I fear no fate
For you are my fate
My sweet
I want no world
For beautiful you are my world
My true
And it‚s you are whatever a moon
Has always meant
And whatever a sun will always sing is you
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
Here is the root of the root
The bud of the bud
And the sky of the sky of a tree called life
Which grows higher than soul can hope
Or mind can hide
And this is the wonder
That‚s keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart
I carry it in my heart

ee cummings