You Are Not Your Eyes
Those who have reached their arms
into emptiness are no longer
concerned with lies and truth, with
mind and soul, or which side of
the bed they rose from. If you
are still struggling to understand,
you are not there. You offer your
soul to one who says, “Take it to
the other side.” You’re on neither
side, yet those who love you see
you on one side or the other. You
say Illa, “only God;” then your
hungry eyes see you’re in “nothing,”
La. You’re an artist who paints
both with existence and non. Shams
could help you see who you are, but
remember, You are not your eyes.
– You Are Not Your Eyes, Rumi
Resurrection Day
Let us go forth in the power of the resurrection.
Not in the basket or the empty canteen.
Forsaken by proverbs unheard and unseen.
Neither by river nor rising to hills.
But in the open palms that we hope to be filled.
Fill them with the sands that we find within view.
The driftwood discovered that’s not lost its hue.
A grain shaped and drawn out to pull my eyes from what was to what’s new.
Christós Anésti.
comma,
As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O brothers let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down,
Come on brothers let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.
As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
Laura Dart
Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you:You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you;
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
On Beauty
And a poet said, “Speak to us of Beauty.”
…
The tired and the weary say, “beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”
…
All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
…
[B]eauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Beauty (abridged)
The Final Harbor, The Repose of Mutual If
The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter CXIV
Dustin and I spoke tonight of progression. By the time two Horse Brass beers apiece had fogged our proverbial mirrors, we’d referred in repetition to the journeys traveled and the search for the great peace of the soul that we may perhaps find glimpses of, but will effectively face countless books and conversations with the same ifs until we too find it in the grave. I suppose it doesn’t prevent us from scratching around in the dirt on the way down that road, hoping it could be found there among the ruts.
I told my roommate Michal last night that among my theology is included the shrug. I didn’t use that actual term but its one that had escaped me when I needed it most. (shrugs are so passive, just when you need them most..) But really, the shrug. Why demand an answer who’s availability died that same moment humanity’s innocence became a question?
I have a willingness to leave questions unanswered. Yes, theological questions. Many of the same questions on which are spent books of writing and thought, the same questions that drive communities into separate churches, the same questions that build walls between friends, the same questions that drove men like Kierkegaard into social exile.
I have a gloomy mind at times, seeing first the negative aspects in progression. But among the reasons I am ok with a shrug answer is that I believe others are reacting just the same. Dustin is an ally in this. So is Michal. The social and technological progressions we have waltzed through have left us more room to consider the steps. More room to peacefully see each others’ shrugs and to notice the silly off-color dance it creates when the collective can be ok with itself in being a little off-color, because after all, the dusty ruts are no place to find answered ifs. But they are the place to find the best we have to work with: the repose of mutual if.
Harrowing
Harrowing
Parker Palmer
(from Let Your Life Speak)
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons–
The farmer plows to plant a greening season.
Come Tortoise, Standing Still
I’ve traveled quite a distance in the past month or two. I have traveled to different parts of the country recently, though these are not the travel I refer to. Really, where I stand now is not so noticeably different from whatever vague moment could be considered a beginning. I only mention this because I’ve been what feels to me like racing through time, thoughts, emotions.Less of a journey through space, however, more of a journey through circumstances, intuitions, and feelings.
Travel of any kind always feels like a video on fast-forward, a feeling only reinforced by the speed with which a setting passes while driving in a car or the speed with which one experience or thought, feeling as though it will carry reverberation with you for a life time, is soon replaced with the next feeling deserving the same consideration as the last. It seems it was the rainy winter of Portland only a few days ago, and somehow all these memories from the past several months were only packed into the passing notions of a spontaneous song, soon to be forgotten as soon as my mind moves on to what’s next. I don’t desire to live life this way, and hopefully steps I take to form a better life for myself and for those around me will do just that. Slowness is my honest desire.
What I’m most troubled by is that I have no idea how this works. I have no idea to achieve that, and as the cliché goes, I’m stumbling blindly. So blind, in fact, I’m not sure whether I’m moving at all or simply standing with a hand reaching out for another’s.
I spent time in Laurelhurst Park this evening near my house, a large park with a duck pond. The ducks and I are commonly acquainted, and they often suggest ideas to me I haven’t yet considered.
It occurred to me while at the park how good people are, particularly in my neighborhood. This is one reason this was on my mind, and here is a picture I took of Pax. This goodness is a goodness I’m not use to. Small town Nebraska, ultra-conservative Colorado Springs, yuppie-ville Hood River. This isn’t a rag on those places, because they are good places too. They may lack this certain kind goodness, but there are things Portland lacks as well, and there’s something about this place that feels like home without my having to coerce my mind into believing so. Its something about my life I likely cannot explain to those other places and may not have understood before I arrived where I now stand.
This goodness I’ve found in places here where I now live is a goodness I would only have speculated about or understood in idealism. Consequently I feel much less than adequate or worthy of living in such a place. That sounds extra cheap, I’m sure. Self-pitiful, whatever. What does one do when they know not how to acclamate old lives with new ones, the new ones they’ve searched for and somehow found? What does one do when they feel the momentum of past expectations and behaviors dragging them beyond what those constructs were suppose to bring them to? or when they cannot turn sharp enough to escape the ruts circling the campfire to get to the campfire itself?
I have no answer for that. I only have friends near and far who’ve heard my joys and sorrows, and the words of those who express what I otherwise cannot.
come tortoise, standing still
go hummingbird, my will
come tortoise, stumbling blind
go hummingbird, my eyes
come tortoise, empty hand
go hummingbird, my plan
come tortoise, undefined
go hummingbird, my mind
come tortoise, letting go
go hummingbird, I know
come tortoise, come and die
go hummingbird, my I
goodbye, I
Take Heart, O Bulkington!
Herman Melville begins the unreasonably short chapter 23 of Moby Dick by mentioning Bulkington, a man who had landed just a few months ago from a previous four-year whaling voyage, and was already back at sea with the launching of the current expedition. As though land scorches his feet, Bulkington avoids the safety and comfort of port like the plague.
Melville calls the land pitiful to the seaman. Safety, warmth, supper, “all thats kind to our mortalities,” all that brings a man back to port after such a journey. But he goes on,
In the gale, [land] is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
And he soon continues:
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
The howling, infinite sea is the same fury of truth, the God, all that one cannot comprehend and one of the right mind would avoid. Yet it be not the mind that push one out to sea..
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
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