Recollections

Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call
     Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
     My heart is at your festival,
       My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.

William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850,
'Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'

Be Curious, Be Aware

Our business in living
is to become fluent
with the life we are living,
and art can help this.

― John Cage

Nature's Portraits

Our intention is to affirm this life,
not to bring order out of chaos,
nor to suggest improvements in creation,
but simply to wake up
to the very life we're living,
which is so excellent once
one gets one's mind
and desires out of its way
and lets it act of its own accord.


― John Cage

Focus on the positive

Life can seem a tangle, in and out of focus.
Don't concentrate on the tangle.
Concentrate on the places
where one line in the tangle
crosses another line in the tangle.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Live your best life

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, "As Much As You Can"

Time Is Living You

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. 

You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last - 

Seneca, On the Shortness Of Life

Lightly

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly.
Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.

And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.


Aldous Huxley, Island

Rise to life

Those who cannot live fully 

often become 

destroyers of life.

― Anaïs Nin

the unseen

And they tell me that

This life is good

They tell me to live it gently

With fire, and always with hope.

There is wonder here

And there is surprise

In everything the unseen moves.

The ocean is full of songs.

The sky is not an enemy.

Destiny is our friend.

 -- Ben Okri

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

― John O'Donohue

Beauty

Photograph: Tarhata Estacaan, "The Real", December 2012

Among the grasses,

An unknown flower

Blooming white.

―Zen Haiku

The Sacred in Everyday Life

Photograph: Tarhata Estacaan "Rustic Kitchen", March 2012

  “Daily”

A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

What inspires you?

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; 

don’t try to make it logical; 

don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.  

Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”  

―Franz Kafka

how to feel blessed all the time

When life is sweet, 

say thank you and celebrate. 

And when life is bitter, 

say thank you 

and grow.

 Shauna Niequist

Fluent

I would love to live

Like a river flows

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

—John O’Donohue

Carl Gustav Jung

Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… all these are undoubtedly great virtues…

But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself-that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved-what then?

—Carl Gustav Jung

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;   
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;   
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who  more faithless?)   
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;   
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;          
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;   
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?   
   
                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;   
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

- Walt Whitman

The Layers

In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way, 
bitterly stings my face. 
Yet I turn, I turn, 
exulting somewhat, 
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go, 
and every stone on the road 
precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

-Robert Pinsky

Elegy in Joy

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children: 
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace.  Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world.  One life, or the faring stars.


- Muriel Rukeyser