dive for dreams

.

dive for dreams

or a slogan may topple you

(trees are their roots

and wind is wind)

trust your heart

if the seas catch fire

(and live by love

though the stars walk backward)

honour the past

but welcome the future

(and dance your death

away at the wedding)

never mind a world

with its villains or heroes

(for good likes girls

and tomorrow and the earth)

in spite of everything

which breathes and moves, since Doom

(with white longest hands

neating each crease)

will smooth entirely our minds

-before leaving my room

i turn, and (stooping

through the morning) kiss

this pillow, dear

where our heads lived and were.

.

 

silently if, out of not knowable

night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess

(only which is this world)more my life does

not leap than with the mystery your smile

sings or if(spiralling as luminous

they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,

less into heaven certainly earth swims

than each my deeper death becomes your kiss

losing through you what seemed myself,i find

selves unimaginably mine;beyond

sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit's born:

yours is the darkness of my soul's return

-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

—E. E. Cummings

silently if, out of not knowable 

.

sum

 

.

In the moment of transition between life and death only one thing changes: 
you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery
running. In the moment before death you are still composed of the same
thousand trillion, trillion atoms as in the moment after death. 

As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: 
the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail-shell, a kernel of maize, 
a beetle's mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan's tail feather. 

But it turns out your thousand trillion, trillion atoms were not an 
accidental collection, each was labeled as composing you, 
and continues to be so wherever it goes. 

So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms.

Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, 
now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk and the
inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. 

Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing 
on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulo-nimbus,
a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river-pebble gliding around an eddy. 

From your present clumped point of view this afterlife may sound 
unnervingly distributed, but in fact it is wonderful. 

You can't imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across 
vast territories, ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and 
flexing an egret's wing while pushing a crab towards the surface 
through coruscating shafts of light.

Love-making reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness 
of human corporality. 

Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once, 
you weave your versatile hands over your lover's multiflorous figure. 
Your rivers run together. 

You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, 
entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts 
that climax into thunderstorms.


—David Eagleman

.
Kai Fagerström 
.

canticle

.

What death means is not this—
the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,
praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can’t justify and explain itself,
death can’t justify and explain it.  

 
—Wendell Berry

.

 

each day is a journey

.

Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey and the journey itself is home. 


—Basho

.

Written kisses don’t reach their destination,

rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. 

—Franz Kafka

Letters to Milena

. 

don't move

. 

Don't move.

Just die over and over.

Don't anticipate.

Nothing can save you now,
because this is your last moment.

Not even enlightenment will help you now,
because you have no other moments.

With no future, be true to yourself
—and don't move.


—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

.

this existing, that arises ... there is no real production, only interdependence

 

. 

 

In the Mahayanist interpretation of the Chain of Interdependent Originations* ... birth, decrepitude, death, are no longer represented as the stages of life in the human individual who is born, develops, grows old and dies ... in the sun or in the grain of dust, each atom which constitutes it individually lives the perpetual drama of birth, old age and death.

. . . 

The cycle ... takes place in everything, everywhere, in the infinitely small as in the infinitely great. 
Its development does not take place in time: the twelve causes listed are always present, co-existent and interdependent, their activity is interconnected and they only exist one with the other.

In fact, the "Interdependent Origins" are in no way a description of incidents occurring to a being which would exist apart from them. Each being is the "chain of interdependent origins" as this latter is the universe and outside its activity neither being nor universe exists.

*The Chain of Interdependent Origins
(The 12 Causes)

Ignorance
Samskara (mental formation or compounds)
Consciousness
Name and form (Body and Mind)
Sphere of the Senses (senses and their objects; the mind being counted as the sixth sense)
Contact
Sensation
Desire–thirst
Prehension
Existence (becoming)
Birth
Old age–Death

—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

.

standing deer

 

.

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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