The World Is Your Mirror

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure 
For a long and lordly train, 
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Solitude

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

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

The poet dreams of the mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking
The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.

I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.

All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

November ender notes

—I write

and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,

yet magically it’s better

than nothing—I know

you must be quite

changed by now, but you,

are just the same, too,
like those stars that keep
shining for a long time after
they go out—but it’s just a light

they touch us with this

evening amid the fine

rain like mist, among the pines.

—Denis Johnson
“From a Berkeley Notebook” in
The Incognito Lounge: And Other Poems
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994)

In the stream

In the stream,
Rushing past
To the dusty world,
My fleeting form
Casts no reflection.


English version by Steven Heine
Original by Eihei Dogen, Language Japanese

Haiku: Such utter silence!

Such utter silence!
     even the crickets'
singing...
Muffled by hot rocks


English version by Peter Beilenson
Original Language Japanese, by Matsuo Basho

October

The leaves fall from my fingers
Cornflowers scattered across the field like stars,
                                                                         like smoke stars,
By the train tracks, the leaves in a drift

Under the slow clouds
                                 and the nine steps to heaven,
The light falling in great sheets through the trees,
Sheets almost tangible.

The transfiguration will start like this, I think,
                                                                     breathless,
Quick blade through the trees,
Something with red colors falling away from my hands,

The air beginning to go cold …
                                                  And when it does
I’ll rise from this tired body, a blood-knot of light,
Ready to take the darkness in.

—Or for the wind to come
And carry me, bone by bone, through the sky,
Its wafer a burn on my tongue,
                                              its wine deep forgetfulness.

—Charles Wright, from The Southern Cross (Random House, 1981)