This tree listened
when my husband died.
I leaned my headagainst its trunkand cried.
No words passed,
but I took its strength
and knew
that life at last
secretly transforms
until what is seen
becomes unseen,
and what has beenis still to be.
—Moyra Caldecott
Truly, truly I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it remains nothing but a grain of wheat.
—John 12:24
The loved ones of my heart where are they? Say, by
God, where are they?As thou sawest their apparition, wilt thou show to me
their reality?
How long, how long was I seeking them! and how often
did I beg to be united with them,
Until I had no fear of being parted from them, and yet
I feared to be amongst them.
Perchance my happy star will hinder their going afar
from me,
That mine eye may be blest with them, and that I may
not ask,’ Where are they?’
—Ibn al-Arabi, from section XLV
The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq: A Collection Of Mystical Odes
.
I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space.
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
—Jack Kerouac
This is a place where a door might behere where I am standing
In the light outside all the walls
there would be a shadow here
all day long
and a door into it
where now there is meand somebody would come and knock
on this air
long after I have gone
and there in front of me a life
would open—W. S. Merwin
Tie your heart at night to mine, Love,
and we will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.—Pablo Neruda
I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.
Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.
Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.
What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.
Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.
Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.
Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don't care
what they're up to
down there.
And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.
They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.—Wisława SzymborskaStanislaw Baranczak/Clare Cavanagh version
.It's as if we're always preparing
for something, the endless roll of the earth
ripening us.
Even on the most tranquil
late August afternoon when heavy heads
of phlox bow in the garden
and the hummingbird sits still for a moment
on a branch of an apple tree—
even on such a day,
evening approaches sooner
than yesterday, and we cannot help
noticing whole families of birds
arrive together in the enclosure,
young blue birds molted a misty grey,
colored through no will of their own
for a journey.
On such an evening
I ache for what I cannot keep—the birds,
the phlox, the late-flying bees—
though I would not forbid the frost,
even if I could. There will be more to love
and lose in what's to come and this too: desire
to see it clear before it's gone.
—Mary Chivers
from Claire B. Willis'
Lasting Words: A Guide to Finding Meaning
Toward the Close of Life
.
