https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5376966732319747&set=a.151204954895977

Out beyond ideas
of heresy
and dogma
there is a field
I'll meet you there

- Rumi (translation)

The Arizal’s Mikvah

 

To walk, just before the Sabbath descends,
a borrowed towel over your shoulder,
down the green hill
that leads to the cemetery of Cabalists,
to pass through the narrow lanes between the gravestones
and hesitate by the Arizal’s grave,
to sense the souls of his students
hovering over his gravestone,
to know for certain that he too hovers there,
only a little higher,
rocking back and forth, like a flame.
To walk a few yards east
and enter the mouth of the Arizal’s cave,
to slowly remove your clothes in the heavy air
and descend into the cold spring,
to leave this world for a moment,
to know one day
all those you have forsaken
will forgive you.

From the book G‑d's Optimism by Yehoshua November

brain/heart

my brain and
heart divorced

a decade ago

over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become

eventually,
they couldn't be
in the same room
with each other

now my head and heart
share custody of me

I stay with my brain
during the week

and my heart
gets me on weekends

they never speak to one another

    - instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week

and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:

"This is all your fault"

on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past

and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future

they blame each
other for the
state of my life

there's been a lot
of yelling - and crying

so,

    lately, I've been
spending a lot of
time with my gut

who serves as my
unofficial therapist

most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage

and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut's plush leather chair
that's always open for me

~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up

last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head

I nodded

I said I didn't know
if I could live with
either of them anymore

"my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,"
I lamented

my gut squeezed my hand

"I just can't live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,"
I sighed

my gut smiled and said:

"in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,"

I was confused
  - the look on my face gave it away

"if you are exhausted about
your heart's obsession with
the fixed past and your mind's focus
on the uncertain future

your lungs are the perfect place for you

there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either

there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment

there is only breath

and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out."

this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves

and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs

I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs

before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said

"what took you so long?"

   ~ john roedel 

(johnroedel.com)

From Heart of Wisdom (pg. 263)

Within my earthly temple, there's a crowd;

There's one of us that's humble, one that's proud,

There's one that's broken hearted for his sins,

There's one that's unrepentant sits and grins:

There's one that loves hIs neighbor as himself.

And one that cares for naught but fame and pelf.

From much corroding care I should be free

If I could once determine which is me.

- Edward Sanford Martin

After Seeing The Ummervise Van Gough Experience at Pier 36 In NYC I Found This

 The Starry Night

BY ANNE SEXTON

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.

Even the moon bulges in its orange irons   

to push children, like a god, from its eye.

The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.   

Oh starry starry night! This is how   

I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,   

sucked up by that great dragon, to split   

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry.

Instructions for the Journey
Pat Schneider

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

Instructions for the Journey

Pat Schneider

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

At the Maritime Museum

by Yehuda Amichai

I saw clay jars covered with barnacles
that were saved from the ocean bottom,
and thought about the sailors of ancient times
who gave half their lives to sail to those jars,
and the other half to bring them back here.
They did what they had to do, and drowned near the shore.

A woman beside me said, “Aren’t they
beautiful?” and was startled by her words and by me.
Then she walked away into her life,
which is also half a setting out
and half a returning.

A BLESSING

 BY JAMES ARLINGTON WRIGHT

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

 Three Tame Ducks

By Kenneth Kaufman

There are three tame ducks in our backyard
Dabbling in mud and trying hard
To get their share and maybe more
Of the overflowing barnyard store,
Satisfied with the task they're at
Of eating and sleeping and getting fat
But whenever the free wild ducks go by
in a long line streaming down the sky,
They cock a quizzical puzzled eye
And flap their wings and try to fly.

I think my soul is a tame old duck
Dabbling around in barnyard muck,
Fat and lazy with useless wings.
But sometimes when the north wind sings
And the wild ones hurtle overhead,
It remembers something lost and dead,
And cocks a wary, bewildered eye
And makes a feeble attempt to fly.
It's fairly content with the state it's in,
But it isn't the duck it might have been.

posted on my old blog with explanation - 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2005

 Untitled

By Zelda

In the morning, I thought
“Life’s magic will never return,
it won’t return.”
Suddenly in my house, the sun
is a living thing,
and the table with its bread—
gold.
And the flower and the cups—
gold.
And the sadness?
Even there—
radiance.

4 beauties shared by billy collins on FB LIve on April 13, 2021

 

Postscript

Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Monet refuses the Operation

Lissel Meuller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

verities :: kim addonizio

Into every life a little ax must fall.

Every dog has its choke chain.

Every cloud has a shadow.

Better dead than fed.

He who laughs, will not last.

Sticks and stones will break you,

and then the names of things will be changed.

A stitch in time saves no one.

The darkest hour comes.