HAIKU BY SARYU
Without a brush
The willow paints the wind
Zen Haiku, selected and translated by Jonathan Clements
London: Frances Lincoln, 2000
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: Contemplative poetry
April 18, 2019
RUMI: BEING HUMAN
This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all,
even if they’re a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest as honourable.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
I discovered this poem when learning Focusing, a peer and reciprocal support system described by one group of practitioners as based on a ‘bio-spirituality’. As such ‘a guide from beyond’ would be described, rather, as ‘a guide from within’. From the perspective of the discursive mind, I find, it amounts to the same thing.
Focusing works on the understanding that we can hold every experience within a larger presence that is loving but not identified with the experience or lost in it. I am not ‘the dark thought, the shame, the malice’, but I can acknowledge it as something in me that I can lovingly welcome. I can keep it company. This welcoming and keeping company is the essence of the practice, discovering what unfolds – rather than trying to fix or banish the initially unwanted part. For there is a wisdom in the wound. As Leonard Cohen famously put it, ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light comes in’.
For more information about Focusing, there are several useful websites:
https://focusingresources.com/
https://www.livingfocusing.co.uk/
June 26, 2018
STILL POINT
My last post developed out of the phrase: the movement of the breath and stillness in the breath. My wondering about ‘stillness’ began when I was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at the age of about sixteen, finding its language and imagery clear and strong. They were a little beyond my reach, but continued to haunt me.
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless.
Neither from not towards; at the still point where the dance
Is,
But neither arrest or movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
…
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”
1) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/pneuma-the-divine-breath/
2) T. S. Eliot Four Quartets London: Faber & Faber, 1946 (Extract from Burnt Norton, the first quartet)
April 29, 2018
URSULA LE GUIN: HYMN TO TIME
Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.
Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.
Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
Quoted by Maria Popova in https://www.brainpickings.org/newsletter/
April 19, 2018
POEM: HERMITAGE HOSPITALITY
At dusk I came down from the mountain,
The mountain moon as my companion,
And looked behind at tracks I’d taken
That were blue, blue beyond the skyline;
You took my arm, lead me to your hut
Where small children drew hawthorn curtains
To green bamboos and a hidden path
With vines to brush the travellers’ clothes;
And I rejoiced at a place to rest
And good wine, too, to pour out with you:
Ballads we sang, the wind in the pines,
Till our songs done, Milky Way had paled;
And I was drunk and you were merry,
We had gaily forgotten the world!
Li Po and Tu Fu Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 (Poems selected and translated with an introduction and notes by Arthur Cooper)
The poem above was written by Li Po (701-762) and its full title is ‘Coming down from Chung-Nan Mountain by Hu-Szu’s Hermitage, he gave me rest for the night and set out the wine’. The editor says: “this is typical of Li Po’s occasional poems, a ‘bread-and-butter letter’ to a friend who had entertained him. The ‘hermitage’ is not to be taken too seriously and need mean no more than a country cottage. In a world of intriguing courtiers, everyone was pleased to be called a retired hermit; though the word used for ‘hermit’ here is in fact also a high Taoist Degree of Initiation. (‘The world’ at the end of the poem, though a fair translation of the word used, translates something that can itself mean ‘intrigue’.)
December 20, 2017
POEM: A WINTER EDEN
Warmest wishes to everyone for the festive season and the coming year. Here and now I don’t have a ‘deep midwinter’ feeling, despite the short days. I’ve been walking by my local canal in a largely green world, with a defining image of sunlight on ivy. Alders are growing catkins. Midges abound. Robert Frost’s poem below, in a snowy New England setting, celebrates the exuberance of life whenever it gets a chance.
A winter garden in an alder swamp,
Where conies now come out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.
It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.
It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feat
On some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,
What well may prove the year’s high girdle mark.
So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.
A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
This Eden day is done at two o’clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.
Robert Frost
December 4, 2017
KABIR: ECSTATIC FLUTE
I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,
But I don’t know whose flute it is.
A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.
A lily pad blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!
Where one flower opens, ordinarily dozens open.
The moon bird’s head is filled with nothing but thoughts of the moon,
And when the next rain will come is all that the rain bird thinks of.
Who is it we spend our entire life loving?
Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 (The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley).
October 31, 2017
ORPHIC HYMN TO PERSEPHONE
An Orphic hymn to Persephone addresses her as the ‘much honoured spouse of Plouton’, who commands ‘the gates of Hades in the bowels of the earth’. ‘Queen of the nether world’, she reigns underground through four months of winter, but the rest of the year, she is the ‘maiden rich in fruits, brilliant and horned, only beloved of mortals’. She nourishes us all, always, and kills us too. The hymn comes from a collection likely to have been compiled in the third century CE in Pergamum, a city in modern Turkey. It offers a glimpse of Greek-inspired pagan religion in what turned out to be its last phase.
Persephone, blessed daughter
of great Zeus, sole offspring
of Demeter, come and accept
this gracious sacrifice.
Much honoured spouse of Plouton,
discreet and life-giving,
you command the gates of Hades
in the bowels of the earth,
lovely-tressed Praxidike,
pure bloom of Deo,
mother of the Erinyes,
queen of the nether world, secretly sired by Zeus
in clandestine union.
Mother of loud-roaring,
many-shaped Eubouleus,
radiant and luminous,
playmate of the Seasons,
revered and almighty,
maiden rich in fruits,
brilliant and horned,
only beloved of mortals,
in spring you take your joy
in the meadow of breezes,
you show your holy figure
in grasses teeming with grass-green fruits,
in autumn you were made
a kidnapper’s bride.
You alone are life and death
To toiling mortals,
O Persephone, you nourish all,
Always, and kill them, too.
Hearken, O blessed goddess,
send forth the fruits of the earth
as you blossom in peace
and in gentle-handed health
bring a blessed life
and a splendid old age to him who is sailing
to your realm, O queen, and to mighty Plouton’s kingdom
Apostolos N. Athanasskis and Benjamin M. Wolkow The Orphic Hymns: Translation, Introduction and Notes Baltimore: MD: The John Hopkins Press, 2013.
In his introduction to this collection, Apostolos Athanassakis talks about Orphic hymns as instances of a devotional mysticism that uses “the power of clustering epithets” for the creation of “an emotional and spiritual crescendo that might raise our human spirit and help approach the divine”. They remind him of Vedic hymns, Rumi’s verses within the Islamic Sufi world, and aspects of his own Christian Orthodox upbringing. The hymns are beautiful to read – though it is worth remembering that they are designed for group practice in a charged, incense laded atmosphere, with repetition upon repetition, perhaps accompanied by swaying, movement or dance of various kinds.
The Orphic hymns date from a time of philosophical and religious change in the Roman Empire. They were popular for as long as it was possible to maintain a syncretistic religion forged of traditional pagan elements in those parts of the world (chiefly the Eastern Roman sphere) where it was practised. The hymns name specific pagan deities, yet appeal to universal spiritual powers. Devotees are not praying directly for a change in their fate, but in their own thoughts and feelings, in the hope that the energy of the goddess may assist them.
October 23, 2017
POEM: THE GOOD DARKNESS
There is great joy in darkness.
Deepen it.
…..
Keep your deepest secret hidden
in the dark beneath daylight’s
uncovering and night’s spreading veil.
Whatever is given you by those two
is for your desires. They poison,
eventually. Deeper down, where your face
gets erased, where life water runs silently,
there’s a prison with no food and drink,
and no moral instruction, that opens on a garden,
where there’s only God. No self,
only the creation word BE.
You, listening to me, roll up the carpet
of time and space. Step beyond,
Into the one word.
In blindness, receive what I say.
Take ‘There is no good…’
for your wealth and strength.
Let ‘There is nothing’ be
a love-wisdom in your wine.
Sanai, in The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia. New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1993. (Translations from the poems of Sanai, Attar, Rumi, Saadi and Hafiz by Coleman Barks.
October 13, 2017
MINDFULNESS AS A WAY OF LIFE
According to Thich Nhat Hahn’s Community of Interbeing (1) “mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply.” This approach turns mindfulness from a set of practices into a way of life, and this view of mindfulness has helped to draw me in to the local sangha of the COI as a fellow traveler.
That said, we have five formal practice arenas: mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of eating, mindfulness of walking, mindfulness of the body and mindfulness of bells. A lot of this is familiar to me. For the last seven years my daily practice has included some form of sitting meditation, walking meditation and body/energy work. I already include outside walking meditation and exercise. I use bells in my dedicated sacred space at home, and love the liminal after echo as they pass out of hearing. But bringing things together within this community encourages me to refine and deepen this work.
Checking in with myself, I notice that I have been only half-conscious about eating. In this community, eating mindfulness is not just about slow and appreciative eating. It is also about the global context, “reflecting deeply on what we buy and what we eat”. The COI gold standard is to be vegan. This is a hot button topic in Druidry and Paganism too. It’s an area that I feel nudged to look at again.
I also notice that I’ve done less conscious relaxation than I would like. Yet I know its softening, opening, and enabling effects – a balance to rectify there, I feel. Mindfulness may sound like an effortful regimen, but it doesn’t have to be that way. On sitting meditation specifically, the COI website approvingly quotes Matsuo Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese poet, when he writes:
Sitting quietly
Doing nothing
Spring comes
And the grass
Growsc
By itself.
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