Little Father

 

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I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.

I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.

—Li-Young Lee

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Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference —Karl Friston

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we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time. 

worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is.
how strong life is.
we know.


—lucille clifton
new bones

. . .

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.


—Kahlil Gibran

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wait - what ?

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The Little Prince, excerpt

 

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... when the hour of his departure drew near— 

"Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.” 

"It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you …” 

"Yes, that is so,” said the fox. 

"But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince. 

"Yes, that is so,” said the fox. 

"Then it has done you no good at all!” 

"It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” 


―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Traveling Light

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Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.

There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.


—David Wagonner

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there are less of you than you think, and more

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What I feel and I know is that I am here now, at this moment in the grand sweep of time. I am not part of the void. I am not a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. Even though I understand that someday my atoms will be scattered in soil and in air, that I will no longer exist, I am alive now. I am feeling this moment. I can see my hand on my writing desk. I can feel the warmth of the Sun through the window. And looking out, I can see a pine-needled path that goes down to the sea.

[...] A hundred years from now, I'll be gone, but many of these spruce and cedars will still be here. The wind going through them will still sound like a distant waterfall. The curve of the land will be the same as it is now. The paths that I wander may still be here, although probably covered with new vegetation. The rocks and ledges on the shore will be here, including a particular ledge I'm quite fond of, shaped like the knuckled back of a large animal. Sometimes, I sit on that ledge and wonder if it will remember me. Even my house might still be here, or at least the concrete posts of its footing, crumbling in the salt air. But eventually, of course, even this land will shift and change and dissolve. Nothing persists in the material world. All of it changes and passes away.


—Alan Lightman
Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

. . .

Our universe is what it is simply because we are here.

The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water.

Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion.

Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.

—Alan Lightman
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

. . .

Who do you think you are? Imagine there's a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. 

We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. 

Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don't always have your own best interests at heart. It's true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy . . . Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you.

—Charles Yu
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

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the wonderful

whiskeyriver

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two kinds of vision

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It happens sometimes that the Angel of Death, when he comes for a soul, sees that he has come too soon, that the man’s term of life is not yet expired; so he does not take the soul away, does not even show himself to it, but leaves the man one of the innumerable pairs of eyes with which his body is covered. And then the man sees strange and new things, more than other men see and more than he himself sees with his natural eyes; and he also sees, not as men see but as the inhabitants of other worlds see: that things do not exist “necessarily”, but “freely”, that they are and at the same time are not, that they appear when they disappear and disappear when they appear.

The testimony of the old, natural eyes, “everybody’s” eyes, directly contradicts the testimony of the eyes left by the angel. But since all our other organs of sense, and even our reason, agree with our ordinary sight, and since the whole of human “experience,” individual and collective, supports it, the new vision seems to be outside the law, ridiculous, fantastic, the product of a disordered imagination. It seems only a step short of madness; not poetic madness … but the madness for which men are pent in cells.

And then begins a struggle between two kinds of vision, a struggle of which the issue is as mysterious and uncertain as its origin.


—Lev Shestov

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question

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What is the deep listening? Sama is
a greeting from the secret ones inside

the heart, a letter. The branches of 
your intelligence grow new leaves in

the wind of this listening. The body
reaches a peace. Rooster sound comes,

reminding you of your love for dawn.
The reed flute and the singer's lips:

the knack of how spirit breathes into
us becomes as simple and ordinary as

eating and drinking. The dead rise with 
the pleasure of listening. If someone

can't hear a trumpet melody, sprinkle
dirt on his head and declare him dead.

Listen, and feel the beauty of your
separation, the unsayable absence.

There's a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it. Give

more of your life to this listening. As
brightness is to time, so you are to

the one who talks to the deep ear in
your chest. I should sell my tongue

and buy a thousand ears when that
one steps near and begins to speak.

—Rumi
from The Glance

Coleman Barks version

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all things change, no(thing perishes

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Everything must change
Nothing remains the same
Everyone must change
No one and nothing remains the same

The young becomes the old
Oh, mysteries unfold
Cause that's the way of time
Nothing and no one remains the same

There is so little in life you can be sure of 
Except the rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And, Hummingbirds do fly

The young becomes the old
And, mysteries do unfold
That's the way of time
Nothing, no one remains unchanged

There are so little things, so few things in life you can be sure of
Except
Rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And Hummingbirds do fly
Everything must change

Everything
Everything must change


—Bernard Ighner 

. . . 

 

Souls never die, but always on quitting one abode pass to another. All things change, nothing perishes. The soul passes hither and thither, occupying now this body, now that … As a wax is stamped with certain figures, then melted, then stamped anew with others, yet it is always the same wax. So, the Soul being always the same, yet wears at different times different forms.

―Pythagoras 

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what is given

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More than once, I have discovered some hint of the value of being in the testimony of people who are approaching death, many of whom apparently find something they could never have anticipated. Listen to these words lifted from the journal of an old man, dying of esophageal cancer, which appeared in Ira Byock’s article ‘The Meaning and Value of Death’: 

To live in the bright light of death is to live life in which colors and sounds and smells are all more intense, in which smiles and laughs are irresistibly infectious, in which touches and hugs are warm and tender almost beyond belief … I wish that all your stories could have a final chapter in which you are given the gift of some time to live with your fatal illness.

The gift of some time to live with your fatal illness, he writes.

To be means there is no longer any compulsion to get what I want and to hold on to it. To be means to be content with what is given. Being is the source of love because learning to love means learning to be content with the life you have been given. Being fully present to what is — without judging or evaluating or wanting something different — is the most basic act of love.

Love is not only a kind of offering of the self to another person, as when my students sit quietly with their hospice patients. Love is ultimately about unconditional surrender to what the writer Wendell Berry calls 'the miracle of life.’ To love in this sense is to surrender the compulsion to make things better, to let go of the need to explain, fix, or do anything. It is to experience this world, this life, as good enough. To find in this world, in this life, a place to rest. A home.

It’s in this peculiar sense that in becoming old we are often able to recapture the freshness of the world that we knew as children, to see the world we have learned to take for granted as if we were seeing it for the first time.

—C. W. Huntington, Jr.

The Miracle of the Ordinary

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astranemus

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Guiding Light

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Well the road is wide,
And waters run on either side,
And my shadow went with fading light,
Stretching out towards the night.

'Cause the Sun is low,
And I yet have still so far to go,
My lonely heart is beating so,
Tired of the wonder.

But there's a sign ahead,
Though I think it's the same one again,
And I'm thinking 'bout my only friend,
And so I find my way home.

When I need to get home
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

Well the air is cold,
And yonder lies my sleeping soul,
By the branches broke like bones,
This weakened tree no longer holds.

But the night is still,
And I have not yet lost my will,
Oh and I will keep on moving 'till,
'till I find my way home.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

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inside love

 

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The Guest is inside you, and also inside me; 
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed. 
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far. 
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside. 

The blue sky opens out further and farther, 
the daily sense of failure goes away, 
the damage I have done to myself fades, 
a million suns come forward with light, 
when I sit firmly in that world. 

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken, 
inside ''love" there is more joy than we know of, 
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds, 
there are whole rivers of light. 
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love. 
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies! 

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail. 
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love. 
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away. 
How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy 
he sings inside his own little boat. 

His poems amount to one soul meeting another. 
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss. 
They rise above both coming in and going out.


—Kabir
Robert Bly version
Kabir: Ecstatic Poems

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I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman

 

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It seems to me that the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your captains and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. 

While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. So man appears on earth for a little while – but of what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing.


—The Venerable Bede
History of the English People, 731 AD

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light enough

 

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The wind and I could come by and carry
you the last part of your journey,

if you became light enough,
by just letting go of a few more of those things

you
are clinging to…that still believe in

gravity.


—Hafiz

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the transformation of things

 

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Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a fluttering butterfly. What fun he had, doing as he pleased! He did not know he was Zhou.

Suddenly he woke up and found himself to be Zhou.

He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly had dreamed he was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction.

This is what is meant by the transformation of things.

—Zhuang Zhou

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The Last Time

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The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white table clothes, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, what surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.


—Marie Howe

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wait - what ?

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how to grow old

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Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. 

An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. 

Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
 

—Bertrand Russell
Portraits from Memory and Other Essays

. . .

 

All human beings should try to learn before they die 

what they are running from, and to, and why.

—James Thurber

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The Waking

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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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the beauty of death

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Part One - The Calling


Let me sleep, for my soul is intoxicated with love and
Let me rest, for my spirit has had its bounty of days and nights;
Light the candles and burn the incense around my bed, and
Scatter leaves of jasmine and roses over my body;
Embalm my hair with frankincense and sprinkle my feet with perfume,
And read what the hand of Death has written on my forehead.

Let me rest in the arms of Slumber, for my open eyes are tired;
Let the silver-stringed lyre quiver and soothe my spirit;
Weave from the harp and lute a veil around my withering heart.

Sing of the past as you behold the dawn of hope in my eyes, for
It's magic meaning is a soft bed upon which my heart rests.

Dry your tears, my friends, and raise your heads as the flowers
Raise their crowns to greet the dawn.
Look at the bride of Death standing like a column of light
Between my bed and the infinite;
Hold your breath and listen with me to the beckoning rustle of
Her white wings.

Come close and bid me farewell; touch my eyes with smiling lips.
Let the children grasp my hands with soft and rosy fingers;
Let the ages place their veined hands upon my head and bless me;
Let the virgins come close and see the shadow of God in my eyes,
And hear the echo of His will racing with my breath.



Part Two - The Ascending


I have passed a mountain peak and my soul is soaring in the
Firmament of complete and unbound freedom;
I am far, far away, my companions, and the clouds are
Hiding the hills from my eyes.

The valleys are becoming flooded with an ocean of silence, and the
Hands of oblivion are engulfing the roads and the houses;
The prairies and fields are disappearing behind a white specter
That looks like the spring cloud, yellow as the candlelight
And red as the twilight.

The songs of the waves and the hymns of the streams
Are scattered, and the voices of the throngs reduced to silence;
And I can hear naught but the music of Eternity
In exact harmony with the spirit's desires.
I am cloaked in full whiteness;
I am in comfort; I am in peace.



Part Three - The Remains


Unwrap me from this white linen shroud and clothe me
With leaves of jasmine and lilies;
Take my body from the ivory casket and let it rest
Upon pillows of orange blossoms.

Lament me not, but sing songs of youth and joy;
Shed not tears upon me, but sing of harvest and the winepress;
Utter no sigh of agony, but draw upon my face with your
Finger the symbol of Love and Joy.

Disturb not the air's tranquility with chanting and requiems,
But let your hearts sing with me the song of Eternal Life;
Mourn me not with apparel of black,
But dress in color and rejoice with me;

Talk not of my departure with sighs in your hearts; close
Your eyes and you will see me with you forevermore.

Place me upon clusters of leaves and
Carry my upon your friendly shoulders and
Walk slowly to the deserted forest.
Take me not to the crowded burying ground lest my slumber
Be disrupted by the rattling of bones and skulls.
Carry me to the cypress woods and dig my grave where violets
And poppies grow not in the other's shadow;

Let my grave be deep so that the flood will not
Carry my bones to the open valley;
Let my grace be wide, so that the twilight shadows
Will come and sit by me.

Take from me all earthly raiment and place me deep in my
Mother Earth; and place me with care upon my mother's breast.
Cover me with soft earth, and let each handful be mixed
With seeds of jasmine, lilies and myrtle; and when they
Grow above me, and thrive on my body's element they will
Breathe the fragrance of my heart into space;
And reveal even to the sun the secret of my peace;
And sail with the breeze and comfort the wayfarer.

Leave me then, friends - leave me and depart on mute feet,
As the silence walks in the deserted valley;
Leave me to God and disperse yourselves slowly, as the almond
And apple blossoms disperse under the vibration of Nisan's breeze.
Go back to the joy of your dwellings and you will find there
That which Death cannot remove from you and me.

Leave with place, for what you see here is far away in meaning
From the earthly world. Leave me.


—Kahlil Gibran

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standing deer

 

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As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished. 

—Jane Hirshfield
The Lives of the Heart

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the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe

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One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last. 

... More and more, in a place like this, we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything.


... This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation’s plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.


—John Muir

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Inviting the Wisdom of Death into Life

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The(se five invitations are my attempt to honor the lessons I have learned sitting bedside with so many dying patients. They are five mutually supportive principles, permeated with love.

Don't wait.

Welcome everything, push away nothing.

Bring your whole self to the experience.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

Cultivate don't know mind.

—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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the miracle of the ordinary

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More than once, I have discovered some hint of the value of being in the testimony of people who are approaching death, many of whom apparently find something they could never have anticipated. Listen to these words lifted from the journal of an old man, dying of esophageal cancer, which appeared in Ira Byock’s article ‘The Meaning and Value of Death’:

To live in the bright light of death is to live life in which colors and sounds and smells are all more intense, in which smiles and laughs are irresistibly infectious, in which touches and hugs are warm and tender almost beyond belief … I wish that all your stories could have a final chapter in which you are given the gift of some time to live with your fatal illness.

The gift of some time to live with your fatal illness, he writes.

To be means there is no longer any compulsion to get what I want and to hold on to it. To be means to be content with what is given. Being is the source of love because learning to love means learning to be content with the life you have been given. Being fully present to what is — without judging or evaluating or wanting something different — is the most basic act of love.

Love is not only a kind of offering of the self to another person, as when my students sit quietly with their hospice patients. Love is ultimately about unconditional surrender to what the writer Wendell Berry calls 'the miracle of life.’ To love in this sense is to surrender the compulsion to make things better, to let go of the need to explain, fix, or do anything. It is to experience this world, this life, as good enough. To find in this world, in this life, a place to rest. A home.

It’s in this peculiar sense that in becoming old we are often able to recapture the freshness of the world that we knew as children, to see the world we have learned to take for granted as if we were seeing it for the first time.”

—C. W. Huntington Jr.

The Miracle of the Ordinary

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astranemus

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