In Blackwater Woods

.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

–Mary Oliver

.

.

With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, surrounding plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from the animal's gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects - not the Open, which is so deep in animals' faces. Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.

 

Never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open.  Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows.  

A child may wander there for hours, through the timeless stillness, may get lost in it and be shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.

For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze. Lovers, if the beloved were not there blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...

As if by some mistake, it opens for them behind each other... But neither can move past the other, and it changes back to World.

Forever turned toward objects, we see in them the mere reflection of the realm of freedom, which we have dimmed. Or when some animal mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

That is what fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

 

 

–Rainer Maria Rilke

.

image via in love i persevere

.

  

.

Ode 959

.

If you could not feel tenderness and hurt.

If you could live in the poorhouse of non-wanting

and never be indignant.

If you could take two steps away from the beautiful one

you want so much to lie down with.

If you could trust there's a spirit-wife

for you somewhere, a whole harem of wives,

a nest, a jewel-setting where

when you sit down, you know

you've always wanted to be.

If you could quit living here and go there.

If you could remember clearly what you've done.

But strong hooks hold you in this wind.

So many people love you,

you mix with the color and smell and taste of surroundings.

Champion lovemaker and leader of men!

You can't give up your public fascination,

or your compassion for the dying.

There's another compassion you don't know yet,

but you may, when griefs disappear.

It's a place,

with no questioning thorns in the pasture grass.

If you could remember you're not a crow,

but the mystic osprey that never needs to light,

you could be walking there

with Shams.

–Rumi

version by Coleman Barks

.

.

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more.

The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in its nature.

This ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true system of metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of things than is to be met with in the domain of nature.


–Arthur Schopenhauer
On The Vanity of Existence

.

via bufflehead cabin
image via vivre !

.

 

heavy

.

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God 

had His hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter, 

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it-

books, bricks, grief-

it's all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down."

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard 

the laughter

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled-

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?

–Mary Oliver

.

remembering you

.

in time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)

in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time

shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me

–E. E. Cummings

.




image via vivre !




.