The adorable one who is seated
In the heart rules the breath of life.
Unto him all the senses pay their homage.
When the dweller in the body breaks out
In freedom from the bonds of flesh,
What remains? For this Self is supreme!
We live not by the breath that flows in
And flows out, but by him who causes the breath
To flow in and flow out.
–The Katha Upanishad
Death as Teacher
Eknath Easwaran translation
I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?
It said, "Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead"
I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?
You know, it said, "Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?"
So, I grabbed up my suitcase, and took off down the road
When I got there she was layin' on a coolin' board
I grabbed up my suitcase, and I said and I took off down the road
I said, but when I got there she was already layin on a coolin' board
Well, I walked up right close, looked down in her face
Said, the good ol' gal got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
Looked like there was 10, 000 people standin' round the buryin' ground
I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down
Looked like 10, 000 were standin' round the buryin' ground
You know I didn't know I loved her 'til they damn laid her down
Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold
I said, Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
You know I wouldn't mistreat nobody, baby, not for my weight in gold
Well, I folded up my arms and I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell honey, I'll see you on Judgment Day"
Ah, yeah, oh, yes, I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell, farewell, I'll see you on the Judgment Day"
You know I went in my room, I bowed down to pray
The blues came along and drove my spirit away
I went in my room, I said I bowed down to pray
I said the blues came along and drove my spirit away
You know I didn't feel so bad, 'til the good ol' sun went down
I didn't have a soul to throw my arms around
I didn't feel so bad, 'til the good ol' sun went down
You know, I didn't have nobody to throw my arms around
I loved you baby, like I love myself
You don't have me, you won't have nobody else
I loved you baby, better than I did myself
I said now if you don't have me, I didn't want you to have nobody else
You know, it's hard to love someone that don't love you
Ain't no satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Yeah, it's hard to love someone that don't love you
You know it don't look like satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Got up this mornin', just about the break of day
A-huggin' the pillow where she used to lay
Got up this mornin', just about the break of day
A-huggin' the pillow where my good gal used to lay
Got up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
You know, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
Got up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
Yeah, you know bout that, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
You know, I cried last night and all the night before
Gotta change my way a livin', so I don't have to cry no more
You know, I cried last night and all the night before
Gotta change my way a livin', you see, so I don't have to cry no more
Ah, hush, thought I heard her call my name
If it wasn't so loud and so nice and plain
Ah, yeah
Mmmmmm
Well, listen, whatever you do
This is one thing, honey, I tried to get along with you
Yes, no tellin' what you do
I done everything I could, just to try and get along with you
Well, the minutes seemed like hours, hours they seemed like days
It seemed like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
Minutes seemed like hours, hours they seemed like days
Seems like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
You know, love's a hard ol' fall, make you do things you don't wanna do
Love sometimes leaves you feeling sad and blue
You know, love's a hard ol' fall, make you do things you don't wanna do
Love sometimes make you feel sad and blue
A sigh isn’t just a sigh.We inhale the world and breathe out meaning.While we can.
While we can.
–Salman Rushdie
When we are gone
our lives will continue without us
- or so we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine
the gaps we will leave being filled
with the brilliance of others:
someone else gathering plums
from this tree in the garden,
someone else thinking this thought
in a room filled with stars
and coming to no conclusion
other than this -
this bungled joy, this inarticulate
conviction that the future cannot come
without the grace
of setting things aside,
of giving up
the phantom of a soul
that only seemed to be
while it was passing.
–John Burnside
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.Names 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 Tranströmer
Robert Bly translation
I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.
My name, my girls, my job, allslipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,further and further away. I was a nobody:a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.
The headlights of the oncoming carsbore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slickof terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me –stretching huge as hospitals.
I almost felt that I could restand take a breathbefore the crash.
Then something caught: some helpful sandor a well-timed gust of wind. The carsnapped out of it, swinging back across the road.A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,spinning away in the darkness.
And it was still. I sat back in my seat-beltand watched someone tramp through the whirling snowto see what was left of me.
–Tomas Tranströmer
In your clay body, things are coming to expression and to light
that were never known before, presences that never came to
light or shape in any other individual.
To paraphrase Heidegger, who said, "Man is a shepherd of being,"
we could say, "Man is a shepherd of clay."
You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.
Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography
but to the clay out of which you are formed.
At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you,
like a dark mist over a landscape.
This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you.
It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling.
It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more
to your clay than to your mind.
It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass;
it is on its way elsewhere.
Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient,
sisters and brothers of the one clay.
In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous.
To truly be and become yourself,
you need the ancient radiance of others.
–John O'Donohue
(© John O'Donohue. All rights reserved.)
for more: johnodonohue.com
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
–T. S. Eliot
Here's what happens every day: The past has tangible presence and isn't gone.
People are born, and people die and there are signs.
–Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise
(highly recommended)
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing.People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
—Albert Einstein
i shall imagine life
is not worth dying,if
(and when)roses complain
their beauties are in vain
but though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose,roses(you feel
certain)will only smile
–E. E. Cummings
There is nothing that exists in a substantial and real way outside the mind. The way that we define any object, as well as our experience of it, is simply our mind’s projection.
Whether fearful or blissful, our experiences arise from our mind. Whatever after-death experiences we may have, they are also simply projections of our mind.
If we can transcend our confusion through understanding the nature and qualities of mind, then our experience of all appearances becomes very workable.
–Dzogchen Ponlop
Mind Beyond Death
How
Fascinating the idea of death
Can be.
Too bad, though,
Because
It just is not
True.
–Hafiz
I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time.
–Walt Whitman
A detached person, who knows she has no possibility of fencing off her death, has only one thing to back herself with: the power of her decisions. She has to be, so to speak, the master of her choices. She must fully understand that her choice is her responsibility and once she makes it there is no longer time for regrets or recriminations. Her decisions are final, simply because her death does not permit her time to cling to anything.
And thus with an awareness of her death, with her detachment, and with the power of her decisions a warrior sets her life in a strategical manner. The knowledge of her death guides her and makes her detached and silently lusty; the power of her final decisions makes her able to choose without regrets and what she chooses is always strategically the best; and so she performs everything she has to with gusto and lusty efficiency.
–Don Juan Matus
A Separate Reality
Death gave her a friendly smile.
Actually he was nice (if you forgot for a moment who he was).
Really quite nice.
It is very much the longing to be born anew, the way nature is. All these elements fit together.
Easter is calculated as the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It is evidence of a concern centuries before Christ to coordinate the lunar and solar calendars.
What we have to recognize is that these celestial bodies represented to the ancients two different modes of eternal life; one engaged in the field of time, like throwing off death - as the moon it’s shadow - to be born again; the other, disengaged and eternal.
The dating of Easter according to both lunar and solar calendars suggests that life, like the life that is reborn in the moon and eternal in the sun, finally is one.
—Joseph Campbell
Thou Art That
