May 21 2021
first language
Remember: Language
is not your first language.
May 16 2021
Daniel Berrigan – Credentials
Credentials
by Daniel Berrigan
I would it were possible to state in so
few words my errand in the world: quite simply
forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order
decrees, says solemnly who he is
in the great thrusting limbs that are all finally
one: a return, a permanent riverandsea.
So the rose is its own credential, a certain
unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fullness and fall.
— from Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters), by Daniel Berrigan / Edited by John Dear
/ Image by Proseuche /
Since the last few poems I’ve sent out have been little morsels, I thought I would send out a bonus poem today…
In this poem we are given a couple of images to illustrate how we should understand ourselves and be in the world. In other words, what are our credentials? By what authority and quality do we come into the world and act in the world?
Like the oak tree, we should offer our leaves “largehandedly,” giving fully of ourselves and our very nature to the world. And, in winter, in bareness, the essential form that we are comes through. By not holding back our true nature, by being fully ourselves, even when when the world demands all of us, that is when we “return” and recognize that we are part of a grand, harmonious unity, “a permanent riverandsea.”
We are our own credentials. Our credentials, our spiritual stamp of approval, is there within us, in our most natural form. Like the rose, we must unfold, be as we are, allowing our innermost heart to become visible, to be seen, to let its beauty be present in the world, bringing healing to the world and to ourselves.
So the rose is its own credential, a certain
unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fullness and fall.
Have a beautiful day, with a blossoming heart.
Recommended Books: Daniel Berrigan
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Daniel Berrigan |
May 16 2021
nothing to do with belief
Faith has nothing to do with belief.
Faith is surrendering
your fears and hopes
to the Divine Life flowing through you.
May 14 2021
Amir Khusrow Dehlawi – The River of Love
The River of Love
by Amir Khusrow Dehlawi
Khusro! the river of love has a reverse flow
He who enters will drown, he who drowns will get across.
/ Image by Maria /
This brief couplet is as much a riddle as the lines of a poem. Reading it, the first response may be that it is beautiful and somehow uplifting, but it doesn’t really make sense… until we dive in ourselves.
Khusro! the river of love has a reverse flow
We all have a flow of consciousness and life energy. That energy tends to flow outward and dissipate, especially when we keep our attention hooked without letup on outward experiences and the pull of the senses. The more we learn to quiet the mind and gather in the awareness through meditation and deep prayer, we can experience how that outward flow reverses, turning inward, tapping into a deep reservoir within. Reversing that flow, we discover the most amazing all-encompassing love and joy.
He who enters will drown, he who drowns will get across.
So much of our lives is spent in resisting the pull of that natural current drawing us in. When we allow ourselves to be swept away, to be engulfed by that joyful love, all of our old notions of self and reality are washed clean. The long held idea of who we are, the ego-self, disappears beneath the waves of that blissful stream. This is how one “drowns.”
But in drowning, we are stunned to find a new self. Something essential and vast awakens within us. We feel we have come home, we are finally ourselves for the first time. Knowing ourselves, we are surprised to be inherently whole and complete. Regardless of the movement and challenges around us, we stand on solid ground for the first time. This is how one drowns to get across to the other shore.
Maybe Khusrow’s riddle is not so much of a riddle as a map, an invitation. It’s a beautiful day — time to take a running leap and jump in.
–
To my many Muslim friends — Eid Mubarak! I hope you had a blessed and restorative Ramadan.
I am sending special blessings out to the region of Palestine/Israel. It is a fraught situation with wider repercussions. May sanity prevail and healing be sent to the situation with the least possible suffering. May we see clearly with open minds and compassionate hearts so we can help where we can.
Recommended Books: Amir Khusrow Dehlawi
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| Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi | ||||
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Amir Khusrow Dehlawi
India (1253 – 1325) Timeline |
May 14 2021
deliberate
When everything is deliberate,
everything works together
to awaken the awareness of liberation.
May 07 2021
Fakhruddin Iraqi – My eyes so fix
My eyes so fix
by Fakhruddin Iraqi
English version by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson
My eyes so fix
upon your image
that whatever I gaze at
I imagine you.
— from Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (Classics of Western Spirituality) , Translated by William Chittick / Translated by Nasr Seyyed Hossein
/ Image by Khashayar Elyassi /
It has been a strange week. I lost access to the Poetry Chaikhana website for a few days when my web host changed my access info without notifying me. In trying to fix that issue, I then could not receive Poetry Chaikhana emails for a couple of days. We finally resolved those issues and the Poetry Chaikhana is back.
–
A new spring day. The birds celebrate the morning in song. And I have a short poem for you from the great Fakhruddin Iraqi…
–
That’s the way, isn’t it?
When we turn our full focus to the Divine, when our entire being hungrily reaches for the Eternal, the world around us conspires to reveal glimpses. The smallest thing, properly gazed upon with the whole self, unmasks itself as the Beloved.
Recommended Books: Fakhruddin Iraqi
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Fakhruddin Iraqi
Iran/Persia/India/Turkey (? – 1289) Timeline |
May 07 2021
the solution
The solution to religious extremism
is to reawaken that sweet, secret, sacred bliss within,
to gently and generously share it with others,
to create environments that invite
the continuing quest.
Apr 23 2021
Matsuo Basho – Skylark
Skylark
by Matsuo Basho
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto
Skylark
sings all day,
and day not long enough.
— from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto
/ Image by Chad Horwedel /
A haiku for us today, one that brings me a smile every time I read it.
This is one of those poems where any attempt at commentary feels absurd. What it says is simple and direct, yet it resonates in the mind and the heart. Reading it, I find myself questioning the importance of busy daily activities. On those weary days when I am just ready for the day to be over, have I misspent my day? Have I held back my song?
=
After a year of pretty good energies, I seem to be dealing with chronic fatigue patterns coming up again. I am always reminded of the need for balance and a clarity of purpose. The more scattered I get and try to accomplish everything at once, the more my system insists that I pause. Our struggles are often our best and most determined teachers…
=
Today might just be a day to burst forth in song!
Recommended Books: Matsuo Basho
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Matsuo Basho
Japan (1644 – 1694) Timeline |
Apr 12 2021
R. S. Thomas – But the silence in the mind
But the silence in the mind
by R. S. Thomas
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean.
We launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?
— from For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics, by Roger Housden
/ Image by MindSqueeZe /
A rare Monday poem email. Since it has been nearly a month since I last sent a Poetry Chaikhana email out, I decided not to wait until the end of the week. There are several reasons for the unannounced pause in the emails.
I live outside of Boulder, Colorado and, as many of you are probably aware, there was a terrible shooting in Boulder a few weeks ago at a local grocery store. When my wife and I first moved to the area years ago, we lived within a few blocks of that store and often shopped for groceries there. We now live several miles away and were not in immediate danger during the shooting. But, of course, we still felt the trauma of the community, magnified by our own personal history with the scene of so much bloodshed.
In the aftermath, I didn’t want to immediately send out a poem. I wasn’t quite ready to talk about the event, and it would have felt wrong to ignore it.
Soon after, I had a birthday and Easter came up. And through it all, my day job has been especially busy.
For all of those reasons I felt it was best to wait.
But with spring blossoming in our area, it feels like it is now time to return to poetry and the reawakening of life. So I have a beautiful poem of silences for us today…
=
But the silence in the mind
is when we live best…
Isn’t this poem delightful in its stillness?
This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean.
I particularly like the image of launching an armada of thoughts out on the bottomless ocean of silent mind.
We launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.
The silence is so vast that the thoughts can never arrive; they just fade into the misty distances. The image puts proper scale to our thoughts. They are small things with barely any substance amidst the great expanse we discover in silence.
The silence is seen, then, not as a negation or emptiness, but as an overlooked, all-encompasing dimension of reality and being:
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins
And it is a challenge to us, a beckoning call…
that calls us out over our
own fathoms.
I was a teenager in the 1980s, when the first personal computers started to become available. And, yes, I was one of those nerdy computer kids, spending hours in front of the computer screen, when I wasn’t down at the neighborhood arcade feeding quarters into Pac Man and Space Invaders. It was a new medium, a new world built of light, different ways to display light, manipulate light, and finding meaning in that light. The mathematics, art, and movement of light were mesmerizing.
But once the giddiness and sense of power wears off, you realize how restless that world is. The human mind, never much at ease in any historical period, now has endless promptings to remain entranced and agitated.
I went through a period when I rejected computers along with as many other elements of modern technology as I could. I desperately wanted to find out what it meant to live in the essential state of being human. What did it mean to be human 500 years ago? 5,000 years ago? What is the essential human experience of life and self-awareness?
I began to seek remote places in nature, where I could meditate and fast.
I wanted to discover that “silence in the mind” that brings us–
…within
listening distance of the silence
we call God.
Don’t get me wrong– I’m a modern person, a product of the modern era. I would greatly resent being thrust back into some previous era. I don’t take the freedoms and possibilities of my modern life for granted.
But we so miss having a place in society for silence. We are given very little encouragement to cultivate stillness. More than ever we must fight to create the space for silence in our lives. I feel great love and respect for all you misfits and spiritual revolutionaries out there quietly holding ajar the doorways to silence. You are the hope of the world.
What to do
but draw a little nearer…?
…All this, typed on a computer, sent out over the Internet. (Ivan, still trying to find ways to make light move, yet in ways that inspire peace.)
Recommended Books: R. S. Thomas
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R. S. Thomas |
Mar 12 2021
Lalla – Coursing in emptiness
Coursing in emptiness
by Lalla
English version by Coleman Barks
Coursing in emptiness,
I, Lalla,
dropped off body and mind,
and stepped into the Secret Self.
Look: Lalla the sedgeflower
blossomed a lotus.
— from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Edited by Jane Hirshfield
/ Image by Crystalline Radical /
Yesterday was Maha Shivaratri, a celebration in honor of the Hindu god Shiva. So I thought we should have a poem dedicated to Lord Shiva…
I love the opening phrase in this poem’s translation: “Coursing in emptiness…” Reality is recognized as being vast and empty — but a living emptiness! — like a great formless sea. And the point of awareness, though supremely at rest, covers the entire spaciousness like one reclined on a coursing clipper ship carried along by a gentle, steady wind.
And in this pure state of awareness, the agitated ego-mind that constantly chants “I, me, mine!” — that part of the mind that we normally think of as ourselves — it grows thin and ghost-like until it disappears. Even the physical body becomes unreal to us and the awareness of it can completely fade away.
…Yet we remain. The collection of mental processes and agitations that we thought was our identity has ceased. The body has become at most an idea, a form of expression. It is a tool for interacting with an idea world. The body has dropped off, yet we remain. Completely stilled and settled, we are returned to the natural experience of bliss and wholeness. In the deepest way possible, we are at home, at one. We finally know who and what we really are. This is the return to the Secret Self. This is the way to step into the Secret Self.
Lalla’s final pair of lines — “Look: Lalla the sedgeflower / blossomed a lotus” — expresses the utter surprise and delight of this first recognition. A sedgeflower grows low among the grasses, close to the ground, hardly noticed. How can something so humble, something so lost among the weeds and dust of earthly existence come to such vibrant life? How could this little thing I call “me” have stepped into the radiant enlightenment that blossoms like a lotus in the crown? The sedgeflower — the little self — discovers within it the scintillating lotus of the True Self!
=
A personal note about Shiva–
I have always felt a special appreciation for the imagery of Shiva. When I was younger and more of an ascetic myself, I loved the iconography of Shiva as the bone-thin yogi with long matted hair meditating in bliss in the Himalayas. Austere, pure, the embodiment of what is essential and meaningful in existence.
These days I am fascinated by the image of Shiva Nataraj, the Lord of the Dance. Shiva, ecstatically dancing, creating and dissolving the universe with each step, his long hair flying about his shoulders as he spins in his perfect balance. To me this is an image of the way the Eternal expresses both stillness and movement, how the Divine moves masterfully through existence, how all life is an expression of the underlying joyful impulse to move and express.
Shiva Nataraj teaches us how to dance through life!
Have a beautiful day!
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Lalla
Kashmir (India/Pakistan) (14th Century) Timeline |
Mar 05 2021
Fakhruddin Iraqi – Everywhere veiled
Everywhere veiled
by Fakhruddin Iraqi
English version by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson
Everywhere veiled
by Your own Face
You are hidden from the world
in Your very manifestation.
Look where I will
I see Your Face alone;
in all these idols
I see only You.
Jealous lest You be recognized
at every instant
You dress Your Beauty
in a different cloak.
— from Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (Classics of Western Spirituality) , Translated by William Chittick / Translated by Nasr Seyyed Hossein
/ Image by nasrul ekram /
Even amidst terrible suffering and devastation, we have the opportunity to glimpse the face of God. Sometimes it is in a helping hand or a healing voice. A kind gaze that doesn’t turn away is often the most powerful thing of all. A heart that breaks, yet remains engaged, that is what the world is always yearning for. To see, to feel, to care– these require courage and the willingness to face pain rather than run from it. But, when we do that, and breathe through it, we discover our deep humanity… and perhaps something of our shared divinity.
A broken heart, a willing hand, and a clear seeing eye, these are the pathways to God.
==
Iraqi suggests to us that all of life, all of reality is a game of divine hide-and-seek.
Reading this poem raises a question– As we walk daily through the world, do we merely look, or do we see? And when we truly see, how can we not occasionally pause in mute wonder and melt?
Look where I will
I see Your Face alone
Recommended Books: Fakhruddin Iraqi
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Fakhruddin Iraqi
Iran/Persia/India/Turkey (? – 1289) Timeline |
Mar 05 2021
A book and a building
A book and a building are not enough.
The human spirit needs cathedrals of trees,
towering mountains, and fields
of spring wildflowers as places of prayer.
Feb 26 2021
Mary Oliver – Spring
Spring
by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her —
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
— from New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver
/ Image by Marie Hale /
We have snow on the ground here in Colorado, but spring is coming. You can see it in the brilliant morning sunlight, in the first tentative buds on branches. We are, all of us, beginning to shake off the long hibernation of winter to encounter the world once again, like Mary Oliver’s bear.
The poem evokes for us the image of this black bear, this huge being, “like a black and leafy ledge,” waking from its slumbers and rather roughly encountering the world once again. But that renewed interaction between bear and gravel, grass, and tree is a form a sacrament. It is the embodiment of a questions: how to love this world.
The poem circles back to the poet, her human life filled with creativity and cities…
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities…
But we sense that the list is incomplete. Something fundamental has been left out of the first part of that list. That connection with nature. No… deeper even than that. Something archetypal. The great primal being within as it awakens and encounters the world.
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
Despite its massive presence, it is silent. Without words. Beyond words.
(The phrase “dazzling darkness” is of particular significance within Western esoteric traditions, tracing back to a poem by the important early Christian mystic Dionysius the Areopagite. I suspect Ms. Oliver used it intentionally to suggest the same mysterious, vast, silent presence.)
all day I think of her -–
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
I have always felt a special connection with the animal world. As a child, for a time I planned to become a veterinarian. I remember often meditating as a boy on the wordlessness of animals. What sort of world do they inhabit without words, without names for things or places or people… or even for themselves? I tried to imagine that world, to enter it with my own wordlessness. Like Mary Oliver’s bear. In our wordlessness, when we stop naming things, we find that we encounter everything more immediately, more fully. When we name a thing or person or experience, we have labeled it, categorized it and, as a result, moved it outside of the realm of direct experience and shunted it safely into a mental idea of the moment, rather than the living moment itself. When we name things through incessant thought, we then encounter our thoughts about the experience and not the actual experience. We end up seeing only reflections of the mind and forget how to see the world as it is.
Mary Oliver’s bear reminds us to let that great black bear rise from its sleep and encounter the world in its wordlessness. This is how we can begin to answer the “only one question: how to love this world.” We embody perfect love when we are truly present in our dazzling silence and not elsewhere in our words and thoughts. Love is connection, contact, encountering a person or place as it is, as we are. Love is being right here.
Have a beautiful day, one of wordless spring awakening!
Recommended Books: Mary Oliver
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| New and Selected Poems | Why I Wake Early | Dream Work | House of Light | Thirst: Poems |
| More Books >> | ||||
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Mary Oliver
US (1935 – 2019) Timeline |
Feb 26 2021
battered heart
somehow the battered heart
blossoms with such beauty,
no hint of past hurts