When young, I did not know the taste of sorrow.
I went up the tower.
I went up the tower
to write a poem on pretended sorrow.
By now I’ve completely tasted sorrow, but alreadyI do not want to speak about it.I do not want to speak about it,I only say: what a beautiful, cold autumn.
–Xing Qijia
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
–Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly
Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
—Gretel Ehrlich
The center clears.Knowing comes:The body is not singular like a corpse,
but singular like a salt grainstill in the side of the mountain.
–Rumi
.
There is no death; there is no life.
Indeed, the skies are cloudless
And the river waters clear.
–Toshimoto
Stefanus Rademeyer
This is the essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified…with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier.
–Joseph Campbell
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
–W.S. Merwin
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order thatit may resume.And thereforewho would cry outto the petals on the groundto stay,knowing as we must,how the vivacity of what was is marriedto the vitality of what will be?I don't sayit's easy, butwhat else will doif the love one claims to have for the worldbe true?So let us go on, cheerfully enough,this and every crisping day,though the sun be swinging east,and the ponds be cold and black,and the sweets of the year be doomed.
–Mary Oliver
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.
—Carl Sandburg
I am a pipe the wind blows through,
Be still, it is the wind that sings.
The course of my life and the things that I do
And the seeming false and the seeming true
Are the tune of the wind that neither knows
Good and ill, nor joys and woes.
But the ultimate awe is deeper yet
Than song or pipe or storm;
For pipe and tune are the formless wind
That seemed for a while to take form.
And words are good to escape from words
And strife to escape from strife,
But silence drinks in all the waves
Of song and death and life.
–Arthur Osborne
My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds harvested
in the field where my grandmother was laid to rest.
Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby
from the grandmother I never knew.
I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into the earth,
her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones;
in the great hunger of 1945, my village
was hungry for graves to bury all the dead.
Nobody could find my grandmother’s grave,
so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.
After sixty-five years, my father and I stood
in front of my grandmother’s grave.
I heard my father call “Mum,” for the first time;
the rice field behind his back trembled.
----
My two feet cling to the mud.
I listen in the burning incense to my grandmother’s soul spread;
uniting deep with the earth, taking root in the field,
she quietly sings lullabies, calling rice plants to blossom.
Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count every seed,
each one glistening with the sweat of my relatives,
their backs bent in the rice fields,
the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.
–Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Nguyen Phan Que Mai, Bruce Weigl translation
You cannot become attached to human beings, things, or landscapes without suffering immediately taking up a position at your side. This is probably a trite remark.
Yet a much stranger fate brings you face to face with uprootedness. It is better, then, to accept the suffering at your side. And illuminate it with love.—Pierre-Albert Jourdan
John Taylor translation
How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.
What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?By climbing up through the six days' field,kept in all the body's years, the body'ssorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing throughthe narrow gate on the far side of that fieldwhere the pasture grass of the body's life gives wayto the high, original standing of the trees.By coming into the shadow, the shadowof the grace of the strait way's ending,the shadow of the mercy of light.Why must the gate be narrow?Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.To come in among these trees you must leave behindthe six days' world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.You must come without weapon or tool, alone,expecting nothing, remembering nothing,into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
–Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir
The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Death gives freedom and power.
To be free in the world, you must die to the world.
Then the universe is your own, it becomes your body, an expression and a tool.
The happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description.
–Nisargadatta Maharaj
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sunthrough brush where a few leaves hang on.They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.Naves swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beatbut often the shadow seems more real than the body.The samurai looks insignificantbeside his armor of black dragon scales.
–Tomas Tranströmerfrom The Half-Finished HeavenRobert Bly translation
My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.
They said, Really?
My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.
[…]
Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.
That’s a metaphor, right?
Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully, It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.
Talk? What?
Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
–Grace Paley, at eighty, originally written for the New Yorker in 2002 and included in Here and Somewhere Else: Stories and Poems by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols (public library) — a marvelous celebration of literature, love, and the love of literature by Paley and her husband, published a few months before she died at the age of eighty-five.
Have your being outside of this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person.
–Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
