妈妈 (Child)

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A poem, 'simultaneously unbearable and exquisite,'

in Chinese with English translation by Alex Tang,

a Toronto-based earthquake engineer.

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孩子（Mom)

快 (Hurry up)

抓紧妈妈的手 (Tightly hold your Mom’s hand)

去天堂的路 (The road to heaven)

太黑了 (is too dark)

妈妈怕你 (Mom is afraid that)

碰了头 (you hit your head)

快 (Hurry up)

抓紧妈妈的手 (Tightly hold your Mom’s hand)

让妈妈陪你走 (Let Mom keep you company)

妈妈 (Child)

怕 (I am afraid)

天堂的路 (The road to heaven)

太黑 (is too dark)

我看不见你的手 (I cannot see your hand)

自从 (since)

倒塌的墙 (the wall collapsed)

把阳光夺走 (it took the sun light away)

我再也看不见 (I cannot see )

你柔情的眸 (your lovely eyes again)

孩子 (Mom)

你走吧 (You can go)

前面的路 (the road in front of you)

再也没有忧愁 (has no sorrow any more)

没有读不完的课本 (there are no books that you cannot finish reading)

和爸爸的拳头 (and your father’s fist)

你要记住 (you have to remember)

我和爸爸的摸样 (my face and your father’s face)

来生还要一起走 (let’s finish walking this road together in our next life)

妈妈 (Child)

别担忧 (do not worry)

天堂的路有些挤 (the road to heaven is a bit crowded)

有很多同学朋友 (I have a lot classmates and friends)

我们说 (we all say)

不哭 (don’t cry)

哪一个人的妈妈都是我们的妈妈 (anyone’s Mom is our Mom)

哪一个孩子都是妈妈的孩子 (any child is Mom’s child)

没有我的日子 (the days without me)

你把爱给活的孩子吧 (give your love to the children alive)

妈妈 (Mom)

你别哭 (don’t cry)

泪光照亮不了 (tears cannot light up the road)

我们的路 (our road)

让我们自己 (let us)

慢慢的走 (walk slowly)

妈妈 (Child)

我会记住你和爸爸的模样 (I will remember your face and father’s face)

记住我们的约定 (remember our appointment)
来生一起走 (of walking together in our next life)

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via Andrew C. Revkin,
the NY Times Earth Blog
May 22, 2008

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Sequoia

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 All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
 Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
 Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
 And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
 Of an old year coming to an end.

 In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-
 An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
 I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's
 orchard,
 A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
 A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

 But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
 Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
 Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
 All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
 A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

 We will give you what we can-our labor and our soil,
 Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
 Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
 We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
 A slender shoot against the sunset.

 And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
 Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
 His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
 I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
 Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

 
–Dana Gioia 

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we are that

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No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

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saturnrising
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make a beginning

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... stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on.

Just try, make a beginning – it is not as hard as you think.


–Nisargadatta Maharaj

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the lazy son

 

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A man on his deathbed left instructions

for dividing up his goods among his three sons.

He had devoted his entire spirit to those sons.

They stood like cypress trees around him,

quiet and strong.

He told the town judge,

"Whichever of my sons is laziest,

give him all the inheritance."

Then he died, and the judge turned to the three,

"Each of you must give some account of your laziness,

so I can understand just how you are lazy."

Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it,

because they continually see God working all around them.

The harvest keeps coming in, yet they

never even did the plowing!

"Come on. Say something about the ways you are lazy."

Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self.

A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice

of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns.

Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong,

the listener hears the source. One breeze comes

from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap.

Think how different the voices of the fox

and the lion, and what they tell you!

Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot.

You learn what's for supper. Though some people

can know just by the smell, a sweet stew

from a sour soup cooked with vinegar.

A man taps a clay pot before he buys it

to know by the sound if it has a crack.

The eldest of the three brothers told the judge.

"I can know a man by his voice,

and if he won't speak,

I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively."

The second brother, "I know him when he speaks,

and if he won't talk, I strike up a conversation."

"But what if he knows that trick?" asked the judge.

Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child,

"When you are walking through the graveyard at night

and you see a boogeyman, run at it,

and it will go away."

"But what," replies the child, "if the boogeyman's

mother has told it to do the same thing?

Boogeymen have mothers too."

The second brother had no answer.

The judge then asked the youngest brother,

What if a man cannot be made to say anything?

How do you learn his hidden nature?"

"I sit in front of him in silence,

and set up a ladder made of patience,

and if in his presence a language from beyond joy

and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest,

I know that his soul is as deep and bright

as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.

And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm

of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,

and how I say it, because there's a window open

between us, mixing the night air of our beings."

The youngest was, obviously,

the laziest. He won.


–Rumi

Coleman Barks version

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into the west

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Lay down
Your sweet and weary head
Night is falling
You’ve come to journey's end

Sleep now
And dream of the ones who came before
They are calling
From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
All of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms
You're only sleeping  

[Chorus]
What can you see
On the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home

And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
All souls pass 

Hope fades
Into the world of night
Through shadows falling
Out of memory and time

Don't say: 'We have come now to the end'
White shores are calling
You and I will meet again
And you'll be here in my arms
Just sleeping

[Chorus]

And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
Grey ships pass
Into the West

–Fran Walsh, Howard Shore, Annie Lennox

Lord of the Rings soundtrack

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not to worry

time lapse, Aeshna cynea freshly slipped

Böhringer Friedrich 

for a zoomable version with astonishing detail, 
click here 

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might as well, sweet pea

 

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love is

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love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky


–E. E. Cummings

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Beannacht

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I wake to sleep

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I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

 I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.


–Theodore Roethke

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Lilac Wine

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largerloves
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black postcards

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I.
The calender all booked up, the future unknown.
The cable silently hums some folk song
but lacks a country. Snow falls in the gray sea. Shadows
fight out on the dock.

II.
Halfway through your life, death turns up
and takes your pertinent measurements. We forget
the visit. Life goes on. But someone is sewing
the suit in silence.


—Tomas Tranströmer 
The Half-Finished Heaven 
translated by Robert Bly

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storm

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Now the walker meets the giant oak.

Stone elk, it's crown is
furlongs wide against September ocean's
murky green.

Northern storm. Rowanberries ripen. 

Awake in the darkness, listening:
high above the tree top,
constellations stamping in their stalls.


–Tomas Tranströmer

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song of myself

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I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge;

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always
substance and increase, always sex;

Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always
a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights,
well entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery, here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that
is not my Soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best, and dividing it from the worst, age vexes age;

Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things,
while they discuss I am silent,

and go bathe and admire myself.


–Walt Whitman

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What Everybody Needs –Maria Popova

“The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”

In 1994, Sherwin Nuland (1930–2014) — a remarkable surgeon and Yale clinical professor who in his nearly four decades of practice cared, truly cared, for more than 10,000 patients — received the National Book Award for his humanistic masterwork How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (public library), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is one of the most existentially elevating books I’ve ever read — a inquiry as much into how we exit this life as into how we fill its living moments with meaning, integrity and, ultimately, happiness. Four years later, Nuland followed up with How We Live (public library), addressing the art of aliveness — that spectacular resilience of which the human body and mind are capable — with equal wisdom and warmth.


Shortly after Nuland’s death in the spring of 2014, Krista Tippett — host of the sublime public radio show On Being and enchantress of the human spirit through the communion of conversation — shared her talk with Nuland, recorded several years earlier. The entire episode is absolutely fantastic, but one particular passage both illuminates the heart of Nuland’s legacy and articulates beautifully an essential, elemental truth — the same one at which Tolstoy and Gandhi arrived — that we, both as individuals and as a civilization, so easily let ourselves forget:

Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don’t mean universal only within our culture… There’s a lot of balderdash thrown around — “You don’t understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don’t know that culture.”
Well, there’s an element of that — but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.

To illustrate the inextricable connectedness of these deeper human truths, Nuland turns to a maxim that scholars attribute to the first-century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” The phrase, the spirit of which Lucinda Williams echoed in her sublime paean to compassion, appears in the epitaph of Nuland’s excellent memoir of his father, Lost in America. He tells Tippett:

When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears — disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you’re talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you’ve got to talk about love… And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It’s almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it’s really coming out of our deepest physiological nature.

Listen to the full episode of On Being below and be sure to subscribe to this ennobling gift Krista Tippett puts into the world, then treat yourself to Nuland’s indispensable How We Live and How We Die. Dive deeper into the latter here.

 

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Maria Popova
brainpickings
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not to worry

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wish you were here

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