Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the
water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so
quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the
same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
It’s a question a blogger friend asked one day in response to my comment that I would like to try to paint my poems.
Often my poems start with a strong visual image, and as I’m reading them I’m seeing these images flash through my mind.
When I wrote “Hot Hills in Summer Heat” I was travelling on Highway 101, looking up at the golden hills profiled against the blue sky as they cascaded down to the sea.
I watch them every summer, the hot hills
Crouched like a lion beside the road.
Something masculine and sensual about that image gripped me, and a poem was born.
I’m not sure if my poem “A Pleasing Design” was inspired by, or inspired, an abstract drawing of the male and female forms that I created long ago.
Both appeared around the same time. I don’t remember which came first.
I like the intricate pattern we create,
Stripped bare and essential,
The piling planes and lacing lines,
The way we meet and mingle.
My poem “Walking Among Flowers” was inspired by the image at the top of this post, drawn by a Zen monk from the 17th century. Something about its blunt beauty, or stark un-beauty, struck me fiercely, as if tearing open something deep within.
Walking among flowers
Drowning in scent
Petals assault me
Cool and bent
But the poem itself was written as we lay anchored in a bay in Moorea, looking up at a house on the bluff with a garden spilling over the edge. I wanted to roam that garden, to let the deep, dark beauty I imagined there tear me apart so I could be reborn. I wanted to swoop down from the high garden wall and swallow it whole.
Even now, I want to paint that garden with the rough, blunt strokes of Pa-ta Shan-jen.
A poem, after all, is just a vehicle to express something deeply felt, some emotion or insight or new way of seeing. And a painting is another way to express the very same things. Each would be distinct, it’s own unique creation. And neither would ever quite capture what you wanted to share. Both mediums are limited.
Poems inspired by paintings are common. But the other way around less so.
Recently, though, another blogger friend led me to the website of Lena Levin, an artist who does just that. She’s created a whole series of paintings inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets. Her blog on the Art of Seeing is well worth reading as well.
I don’t know if I will ever paint my poems, or how successful they might be if I try. Words and images tangle in my mind, and it’s hard to sort them out. In the past the only way I could capture what I was seeing/feeling was through poetry. Now I want to see if I can use color and contours, images empty space like words, shaping them into phrases to be felt and understood.
Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to the works of the French Symbolist, Odilon Redon, and his “Mysterious and Poetic Paintings.” Viewing them is like reading between the lines of a poem. It says more than words can tell.
I don’t know if I have the expertise at this stage of my learning curve to be able to do such a thing. But I do know I want to try.
You can read the full text of the poems mentioned in this post at the links below:
The first poem I shared on my new blog five years ago was scribbled in the starlight on a moonless night while crossing the Sea of Cortez.
A few months later I received an email from Troy Armstrong, a classical composer who said he had set my poem to music to be performed by a choir. As I listened to the music, tears were streaming down my cheeks, for I knew this is what I would have heard that night had I ears to hear, sailing among the stars.
Poetry, as well as music, has the power to capture that state of wonder we all feel at times when confronting the beauty and majesty of nature, and its power to move us beyond ourselves.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’m sharing the original post below with the poem and a link to the music.
Sailing Among the Stars
Last night I swam among the stars. The air and water temperatures were both 78 degrees, so it felt like I was moving from one warm atmosphere into another more dense when I stepped in my pool. There was no moon and the Milky Way was strewn across the sky like scattered bones of light. When I lay on my back to watch them, it felt like I was floating among the stars.
And then I realized–I was! We all are.
We sail across the universe on the back of a tiny planet at the edge of a galaxy that swirls around us. Too often we forget that–how embedded we really are in the universe.
I became acutely aware of this one night when we were crossing the Sea of Cortez from Baja to mainland Mexico. There was no wind, no moon. The sea was perfectly still like the surface of a dark mirror, marred only by our trailing wake.
Above us the bare mast stirred a billion stars, which were reflected in the sea’s surface below. I felt like we were on a starship sailing through the cosmos.
Later that night I wrote this:
Night Crossing, Sea of Cortez
The sea appears so simple
With a dark, indulgent face,
The stars there twice reflected
Like a world spun out of space.
Our sloop shoots through the cosmos,
Through a mute and moonless night,
Our wake a fiery comet
Streaming effervescent light.
With all the universe inert
We slip from star to star,
Then reach across the Milky Way
Toward galaxies afar.
Eons swirl, light-years unfurl
And none can still our flight,
Leaping toward the infinite
To apprehend the light.
I’m not alone in seeing the overlap between the ocean and the night sky. Various artists are fond of depicting whales and dolphins and other sea creatures swimming among the stars. The ocean and the universe stand at the edge of the wild, the last two true frontiers we have to explore, except for the human consciousness, of course. The ocean and the universe have become symbols for consciousness as well as adventure.
We seem to grasp that there is something that connects all three—some deep, dreamy, ever-flowing, ungraspable, powerful yet nurturing element in which we all are steeped. That calls us to move beyond ourselves, beyond the safe and familiar, the already known. That inspires us to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp.
You can listen to the haunting music Troy Armstrong wrote at this link:
In celebration of April as the National Month of Poetry, I’ve been looking back at posts on poetry that I’ve written over the years, and thought that I’d share two “firsts” with you:
the first poet I blogged about back in September 2012, and
the first of my own poetry that I shared in July of that year, which, coincidentally, was turned into an exquisite piece of music by a classical composer.
I’ll save that one for next time and start with Dickman under the original title.
I stumbled across him by accident. One thing led to another and another, the way it often happens surfing the internet. And there it was, a video of Matthew Dickman reading at the San Francisco Zen Center.
And I was blown away. Yes, I actually was. The same way Emily Dickinson said poetry affected her—as if the top of her head had been removed—“blown away” I believe is the expression we’d use today.
Now, Dickman’s poetry isn’t Zen, or even spiritual. It’s earthy, sometimes crass and crude, lightly humorous. Hip, you might say, in the way the beat poets were hip, so clued into the “street life” of their age, with such insight and understanding, that they could be said to speak for that generation.
So I think is Dickman’s poetry, though since I’m not from that generation, and don’t normally speak that language, I may be wrong.
So please listen and tell me. Am I right? Does he capture something from today’s youth that expresses its particular angst and yearning , love and loss, in a way that both elevates and exemplifies it?
I’m trying to figure out just what captivates me in listening to him read his poetry. It’s so unpretentious and unassuming:
Like a scrap of paper blown down a dirty sidewalk that takes on a beauty of its own without meaning to.
Like that paper bag being blown around and around in the film “American Beauty.” Remember? It’s like that.
In this way, it may be Zen-like, after all. In that his blunt, sometimes unbeautiful images strike you as an unexpected blow, like that “thwack” from the Master’s stick on the student’s head, that makes you wake up and “see,” but you’re not sure yet what you’re seeing, only that this quick-silver clarity is already fading, while something solid and meaty seeped unawares into your bones and shored them up.
If you’ve felt this way before, you know what I mean.
If you haven’t, don’t stress, you will.
Listen to Dickman reading his poem “Slow Dance”, or read the poem “V” I’ve posted below the video. See if it happens to you. Tell me if it does or doesn’t do what I say. I really want to know. People either love his work or hate it, I’ve heard, so either way I’m open.
Wallace Stevens once famously said: “You can’t get the news from poems, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.”
It may be hard to argue the truthfulness of that statement when we consider the widespread unpopularity of reading poetry. A recent study finds that “since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting in the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre.”
Poetry, it appears, is less popular than knitting, jazz, and dance. Perhaps that’s why we need the month of April to celebrate poetry, to help curb the decline and rekindle a comeback.
But Stevens wasn’t arguing that we die from the lack of reading poetry, but from the lack of what is found in there, the thing that inspires poets to put pen to paper, and artists to pick up their brushes, and musicians to play their instruments.
The thing we find in poetry that saves us, that renews us, that keeps us from dying for lack of, is the “poetry” we find in life, in nature, in human experience. In our deepest feelings and highest aspirations. So much of written poetry is about that, discerning the poetry in ordinary life, in things forgotten and overlooked and dismissed, and unfurling it in words on paper for all to read.
The ability to see poetry in all the aspects of our lives is what saves us. We don’t have to be poets to see the beauty, symmetry, grace in our surroundings, the imperfect perfection of ordinary things; to discern the repetitions in patterns, the rhymes and rhythms that surround us, to hear the alliteration, and the way assonance and dissonance complement and complete each other; to understand the contradictions and similarities of things, the subtle differences and deep complexities, to appreciate the humor and irony, the paradox and profundity that weaves itself through our lives.
In all of this is the poetry that poets write about. It’s what makes life rich and diverse and meaningful. It’s what moves us toward compassion and forgiveness, and inspires us toward greatness, and fills us with hope and humility.
The discernment and appreciation of the subtle and glorious intricacies of this grand tapestry in which we are woven–this is what saves us.
And this is what we find in reading poetry, if it is poetry at all.
I’ll leave you with the following poem.
Poetry
by Pablo Neruda
And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Someone asked me recently what I loved more, my painting or my writing? Or, she added, is that like trying to choose which child you love most?
It is a little bit like that. Writing has always been the love of my life. Like a first child, I never thought I could love another as much as I loved him. And then number two came along and I learned that I could. Just as much, but differently.
Some children are easier to raise than others. My writing, like my first child, has wild mood swings. It’s like riding a roller coaster, one moment were up, up, up, dizzy with exhilaration, and the next were down, down, down, hating each other and sure we will never write another word again. But painting, like my second child, couldn’t be easier to live with, and there’s never been a cross word between us. She’s always ready to play when I am, and she keeps me delighted for hours.
Painting gives me more pure pleasure than writing. There’s pleasure in looking for a new project and in planning it. Pleasure in the process of painting and in the finished product. Pleasure hanging it, and every time I enter the room to view it anew.
There’s pleasure in writing too, especially in those first few hours, or days, or weeks, when the writing is hot and flowing out of me like I’m taking diction from some inspired muse. There’s even pleasure in the revision process where I’m weeding out what is extraneous and trying to make it as lean and luscious as possible. There’s pleasure in reading what I’ve written when it goes well, when I’m in the right mood, when I’m feeling confident or inspired.
Those are the peak moments. But in between all this pleasure are deep, deep lows. The sense of futility and frustration and despair can seem overwhelming. And then there are the long droughts when nothing inspires me. And the long, cold slogs when nothing is going well. And the times when I cannot force myself to sit down and try again, to keep it going. When I’d rather clean the toilet or go to the dentist or pull out my own teeth with pliers than sit down and write.
With painting, I never have to force myself to start or finish a project. If anything, I have to force myself to leave it be so I can do the laundry or prepare dinner. It’s not that I absolutely love everything I paint. But at the end of the day, it’s deemed good enough. And I feel my time was well spent. Sometimes I’m thrilled with the results and hang them on the wall. Other times I’m mildly pleased and lean them against some bookcase or pin them on bulletin board. Either way they keep me company. They suffice.
But writing, when I’m finished, disappears from sight. I might get pleasure re-reading it from time to time, but mostly I don’t bother. The few pieces that get published seem to go into a dark vault and are forgotten. Worse are the pieces that were much-loved but remain unread, unpublished. Instead of pleasure is a sense of loss and regret, of unrequited love, of stillborn life.
Given all that, you might wonder why I bother to write at all. Why not give it up for painting?
Because I can’t imaging life without writing. In some ways, for me, it’s like breathing. It seems a natural, intrinsic part of me. I can’t live without it, as difficult as it might be. I’m writing in my head all the time. Thinking and writing gets all rolled up together. Writing–putting thoughts on paper–takes me to a deeper place, and sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write it. It’s like the act of writing pulls up astonishing things from my unconscious and twirls them before my eyes so I can see what I’ve never seen before and be amazed. How could I give up something like that?
Writing this blog gives me pleasure and is a great outlet for my need to write. And your “likes” and comments help to sustain that pleasure, make it seem worthwhile. I don’t feel like the writing has dropped into a black hole or disappeared into cyberspace. I don’t feel I’m engaged in a futile exercise.
But my novel. My poor, poor novel. Unless I return to it, it will remain stillborn. And that I can’t bear. Pleasure or no, I must do it justice and publish it myself if nothing else. But all that takes time. Days, weeks, months of dedicated painstaking work. And I’ve become bewitched by painting. I can hardly stand to be away from her for a minute, let alone days, weeks, months.
So if you were me, what would you choose? Pure pleasure, or high anxiety and uncertain results? The answer seems obvious.
And yet, and yet, in the still of night my novel still calls to me. In soft, wistful whispers.
These words from the Tao Te Ching are my mantra. They inspire me to identify with and live larger than what I appear to be individually. I turn to this felt-sense of self when I want to have a clearer, purer, more expansive sense of who I am at heart, when all that’s extraneous is removed.
The words refer to the Tao, that which is all-pervading, all-embracing, unchanging and unceasing. But I take them in a more personal way, as something to aspire toward–as a mother, a writer, a homemaker, artist, citizen. The world has much need of our mothering.
Each part of the mantra inspires me.
“Able to be” speaks to the capacity, the potentiality, of all humans, male or female, to aspire to something more, something beyond our current understanding of who we are or can be. “Something more”–that intangible, mysterious Other we yearn toward.
“Mother” is the symbol of all things round and fertile, life-giving and nurturing. Unconditional love and acceptance. The ground or source of being. The creator.It refers to inscrutable urge to turn ourselves inside out, to bring that which we love into fruition.
“World” refers to the entirety of creation, the universe and all that lies within. But it also refers to all that is yet to be. All those intangible, interior unwritten landscapes. It refers to that hidden nebulous thing within which longs to be brought into full, vibrant, elegant being.
The mantra leans toward the female but the male is not excluded (note how the words male and man are included within the words female and woman).It’s impetus is the male and female in blissful, rapturous union. The male rooted within the female, the female pierced by the male, the two wrapped together, one being. No “mother,” no “creator,” emerges without this union. No creation, no art, no worldly domain. No new life or exterior being.
There’s a sense of fullness here, within the mantra. A sense of completion, satisfaction, fulfillment. A sense of power and presence. Powerful presence. There’s nothing static or final about it, despite the fullness, the sense of completion. It doubles back to the “able to be” part: Capacity. Potentiality. Ever fertile. Ever reaching toward the intangible, the unknown, to bring it into being. Ever reaching toward that “something more” waiting to be born.
When I meditate on this mantra and feel its full potential within, feel myself as some reflection or expression of that woman “able to be the mother of the world,” I know I’ve come home. Home within myself, and within this world that embraces me.
I came across two quotations about the creative process recently and found such striking similarities I had to explore them further. The first is by the poet Mary Oliver, and the second by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Both are attempting to articulate how they create, how they make the unknown known. Both make reference–one obliquely, the other explicitly–to the need of stepping over “the edge” into something vague and nearly inarticulate: “formlessness” for one, the “unknown” for the other.
Where does the “extraordinary” that precipitates the creative act take place, Mary Oliver asks:
No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
How do we create something out of nothing, O’Keeffe asks:
I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known. By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.
Both speak of the need to step over the edge of the known into the unknown to create.
For O’Keeffe, the idea is to keep reaching for the thing just beyond one’s grasp, something felt, but not understood. That’s how you make the unknown known. How you create form out of formlessness.
For Oliver, one’s concern must be always directed toward the edge, toward bringing out the form from the formlessness beyond the edge.
That need to be always living at the edge of things, and being willing to step over the edge, is what really interests me, and has been a motif in my writing, my urge to create, for a long time. This blog, “Living on the Edge of the Wild,” was an attempt to explore this vague and mysterious something lying just out of sight, just beyond our fingertips: The Wild. The Unconscious. The Unknown.
God, perhaps, if God is that vast unknowable spirit from which all things are newly sprung.
It’s the urge to push consciousness over the edge, beyond the ordinary perception or understanding of things as they seem to be, to discover what else lies out there just beyond our grasp.
It comes like a tickle in the back of the mind–an inkling of something exciting, extraordinary, brand new. and undiscovered, just out of reach. The conscious mind cannot make the leap into the great unknown. It’s too slow and cumbersome, too full of itself and its preconceptions. Too fearful of what’s not itself. But we sense that something else can. Some deeper part of ourselves that we rarely tap into can make that leap, if we are willing to risk letting go and allow it. It’s like flying from one trapeze to another. We have to be willing to let go of what we so desperately cling to, to leap out into empty air with nothing to support us, and trust the thing we are reaching for will be there. Without that risk-taking and that trust, nothing extraordinary happens.
The thing that tickles our mind, that intrigues and arouses us, that we want to grasp, seems vague at first, formless. Like a tree hidden in the mist, we catch odd glimpses of a form we cannot recognize at first. But as we pursue our art, our painting or our poem, it becomes clearer, almost as if we are reclaiming it from the mist that has obscured it. As if it already existed perfectly formed, and we are simply the tool used to reveal it, or, at least, reveal some small aspect of what we originally glimpsed.
What we bring forth may not be perfect, may not be the thing-in-itself, but merely hint at it. And that’s enough. To have touched, to whatever degree, that which intrigues us; to have given some slight form to that vague reality which tickled the mind, which once had lain unperceived among the formless, is enough to sate us, to satisfy the creative urge. At least for a while.
For having once tapped into that deeper part of ourselves, having once stepped over the edge and touched the form within the formless, we spark anew, again and again, the urge to create. To risk letting go and trust the empty air before us will bring to our fingertips the very thing we hoped to grasp.
Writing has always been the primary passion in my life, the thing I love most to do and identify with. I began blogging as a way to share my writing and the things I’m inspired to write about. Art has been one of those inspirations, particularly the paintings I fall in love with.
In one post I compared writing with painting: “Images and ideas are the paint, words the loaded brush, and sentences our brushstrokes. The mind and imagination of both writer and reader is the blank canvas.”
Writers paint portraits of our characters in the minds of readers and place them in dramatic scenes. We use lighting and color to evoke mood and atmosphere, and prop “still lifes” about them, revealing tiny details that suggest associations and symbols and themes.
The idea of painting has always intrigued me and I longed to try my hand at it one day. That desire became particularly loud when I was sick to death of words. Yes, even writers weary of words. Then the idea of painting, working with pure pigment and brush strokes on a blank page instead of words, words, words–so fraught with meaning–seemed utterly refreshing.
Writing with no words–that’s what my soul sought.
Watercolor drew my interest. I loved the lightness, the fluidity, the transparency of the medium. But when I was finally ready to paint, the only class I could find was in pastel. So I began playing with pastel about a year ago. While a few paintings were successful and deemed wall-worthy, more often I felt frustrated by my efforts.
Finally a class in watercolor opened up and I feel now I’ve found my medium. Nearly everything I’ve painted so far gives me pleasure. Finally my walls are beginning to feel the presence of my new passion.
I’ve found with painting the kind of satisfaction I’ve rarely found in writing. I always wanted my writing to find a place in the world. I wrote for myself, but also for something beyond me. I wanted my writing wedded to a world apart. Few pieces have found that bliss, and even those that have I still view with misgivings as I wrote about in one post.
But painting doesn’t feel that way. It’s a child that never has to find a place outside my own home. I paint for the pleasure of the process, and also the pleasure I feel from the finished product. It’s something I can enjoy that needs no outward approval.
Much of my writing remains an unwedded bride, an unsung song, a bright promise languishing in a dark corner.
But my painting is a child who needs no one but me to love and enjoy her to feel fulfilled.
In these seemingly dark and troubling times, I’m finding that reflecting on the following words of wisdom to be a soothing and enlightening antidote. It’s from a well-worn book that I’ve treasured over the years: Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, by D. T. Suzuki, first published in 1949. The following selected passages come from a liberal translation of a poem written by the Zen master Tao-hsin in the 6th century.
Inscribed on the Believing Mind-Heart
The Perfect way knows no difficulties Except that it refuses to make preference: Only when freed from hate and love, It reveals itself fully and without disguise.
To set up what you like against what you dislike— The is the disease of the mind: When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood Peace of mind is disturbed and nothing is gained.
Pursue not the outer entanglements, Dwell not in the inner void; When the mind rests serene in the oneness of things, The dualism vanished by itself.
Tarry not with dualism, Carefully avoid pursuing it; As soon as you have right and wrong, Confusion ensues, the mind is lost.
The two exist because of the one, But hold not even to this one; When the one mind is not disturbed, The ten thousand things offer no offence.
The Great Way is clam and large-minded, Nothing is easy and nothing is hard: Small views are irresolute, The more in haste the tardier they go.
Clinging never keeps itself within bound, It is sure to go in the wrong way: Let go loose, and things are as they may bee, While the essence neither departs nor abides.
Obey the nature of things, and you are n concord with the Way, Calm and easy and free from annoyance; But when your thoughts are tied, you turn away from the truth, They grow heavier and duller and are not at all sound.
Gain and loss, right and wrong— Away with them all.
In the higher realm of True Suchness There is neither “other” nor “self”: When a direct identification is asked for, We can only say, ‘Not two.”
The infinitely small is large as large can be, When external conditions are forgotten; The infinitely large is as small as small can be, When objective limits are put out of sight.
One in all, All in one— If only this is realized, No more worry about your not being perfect!
No more worry about the world we live in not being perfect. When was it ever?
No more worry about Hillary losing and Trump winning, when viewing the world from the larger perspective. His presidency will last at most 8 years. In a thousand years what will it matter?
What matters now are creating minds and hearts free from hate, free from clinging, free from worry. When have these negatives ever helped us create a better world?
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be working as hard as we can to create that better world–however we may envision it. It’s just that so many who don’t envision it the way we do are working just as hard.
The trick is to work without attachment to the result. For attachment creates clinging, opposition, frustration, hate and war when things aren’t going our way. And when it is going our way, it creates smugness, complacency, and self-righteousness superiority. And then, after all our striving, the world will turn, and everything is upside-down again.
How to end this vicious circle? Only within our own minds and hearts. It’s the only place we can truly reign, the only place where the good fight can truly be won–not in the outside world.
Working toward our goals with true “oneness” in mind, seeing others as ourselves, as “not-two,” we help free the world just a little bit from the hate and fear and selfishness and greed that cause so much pain and suffering. And the more who do so, the wider the influence. But it starts with us, with the One. We are that one.
So why do I keep forgetting this over and over and over again?
Why do I strive and cling, and then rebel when things don’t go my way?
The first poem I shared on my new blog five years ago was scribbled in the starlight on a moonless night while crossing the Sea of Cortez.
