The Seed Market - Rumi
Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath, the divine wind?
You've been fearful of being absorbed in the ground, or drawn up by the air.
Now your waterbead lets go and drops into the ocean, where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had, but it's still water. The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting. It's a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover, marry, at once, quickly, for Allah's sake!
Don't postpone it! Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason, has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.
translated by Coleman Barks
Big Book Of Poetry
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3 More - Anthony de Mello
[1] REVELATION
The monks of a neighboring monastery asked the Master's help in a quarrel that had arisen among them. They had heard the Master say he had a technique that was guaranteed to bring love and harmony to any group.
On this occasion he revealed it: "Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise."
Having said that, he was gone.
[2] FLOW
When it became clear that the Master was going to die, the disciples were depressed.
Said the Master smilingly, "Don't you see that death gives loveliness to life?"
"No. We'd much rather you never died."
"Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die."
[3] HEALING
To a distressed person who came to him for help the Master said, "Do you really want a cure"
"If I did not, would I bother to come to you?"
"Oh yes Most people do."
"What for?"
"Not for a cure. That's painful. For relief."
To his disciples the Master said, "People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change."
Anthony de Mello, an Indian Jesuist priest, was an great 'sythesizer' of religious traditions, and was later, for all his beautiful work, censured by the Vatican. I suppose speaking truth is deeply disturbing to the entrenched dogma.
Collected Noise
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Short Note on Ms. Bishop
I have been re-reading poems from E. Bishop's "Collected Poems" to soothe myself to sleep. In fact as I wrote a friend earlier this week, the refrain from her perfectly chiselled villanelle "One Art" which goes -
"The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster."
- is in a way the mantra for me to chant as I stumble towards a clear space, like the one that can be discerned in the gaps between breaths.
So I was happy to find another Bishop's poem 'Apartment in Leme', sent out by a poetry mailing list, in my email earlier this morning. This poem is supposed to be a draft, or a fragment, or an unfinished work that she didn't consider worthy of pulblishing, and comes from her recently released book, Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox (the link points to a review of the book in TLS).
It is no wonder that Bishop is considered an essential poet to write poetry in the last fifty years, even though her all of her "Collected Poems", i.e., poems she allowed into print are some 200 odd in number, when she could find flaws in such a beautiful poem as the 'Apartment' (which I am guessing is set in Brazil like a number of her lovely poems) with has lovely lines such as:
"Breathe in. Breathe out. We're so accustomed to those sounds we only hear them in the night. Then they come closer
but you keep your distance."
And this is as good as a reminder to me for today to breathe in, and breathe out.
Book Posts
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