How to Enter
Yellow
by Mary Oliver
There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches
bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Why Do YOU Meditate?
At yesterday’s Sunday Sangha, David read a couple of poems including this one by Wes Nisker, which definitely bears repeating:
Why I Meditate
(After Allen Ginsberg)
by Wes Nisker
I meditate because I suffer. I suffer, therefore, I am. I am, therefore, I meditate.
I meditate because there are so many other things to do.
I meditate because, when I was young, it was all the rage.
I meditate because of Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Marco Polo, the British Raj, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred E. Newman, et al.
I meditate because evolution gave me a big brain, but it didn’t come with an instruction manual.
I meditate because I have all the information I need.
I meditate because I want to touch deep time, where the history of humanity can be seen as just an evolutionary adjustment period.
I meditate because life is too short, and sitting slows it down.
I meditate because life is too long, and I need an occasional break.
I meditate because I want to experience the world as Rumi does, or Walt Whitman or Mary Oliver.
I meditate because now I know that enlightenment doesn’t exist, so I can relax.
I meditate because of the Dalai Lama’s laugh.
I meditate because there are too many advertisements in my head and I’m erasing all but the very best of them.
I meditate because I have discovered that my mind is a great toy and I like to play with it.
I meditate because I want to remember that I’m perfectly human.
Sometimes I meditate because my heart is breaking.
Sometimes I meditate so that my heart will break.
I meditate because a Vedantic master once told me that in Hindi my name “nisker” means non-doer.
I meditate because I’m growing old and want to become comfortable with emptiness.
I meditate because Robert Thurman calls it an evolutionary sport and I want to be on the home team.
I meditate because I’m composed of a hundred trillion cells, and from time to time, I need to reassure them that we’re all in this together.
I meditate because it’s such a relief to spend time ignoring myself.
I meditate because my country spends more money on weapons than all the other nations in the world combined. If I had more courage, I’d probably immolate myself.
I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma Vihara, the divine abode of Awe and then I’ll go down in history as a great spiritual abbot.
I meditate because I’m building myself a bigger and better perspective and occasionally I need to add a new window.
Halleluiah
Halleluiah
by Mary Oliver
Everyone should be born into this
world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Hallelujah, anyway I’m not where I
started!
And have you too been trudging like
that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the
world is
and how miraculously kind some
people can be?
And have you too decided that
probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a
little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
A Distant Chime Goes Off
I had a visit yesterday from, well, you could say an old boyfriend, but our relationship was more significant (and more complicated) than that…at least the effect of the relationship on me was more significant — and more complicated — than that. I’m not sure I could say the effect was the same for him, although clearly whatever effect it had was long lasting.
It’s been about 7 or 8 years since I saw him last — since I spent a significant (and complicated) weekend with him in Germany, where he lives — and before that, it had been more like 15 years since I’d seen him, and before that….well, the whole thing started more than 30 years ago and while it did not exactly continued, it did not exactly finish either. (The photo is of us, in Italy, about 20 years ago.)
So why am I posting this on Dharma Town, you might ask. Where’s the Dharma in it? I’m not exactly sure. It has something to do with my ability now to be able to recognize deeply ingrained habit patterns that have been playing out in my life over and over (which is karma). And something to do with wanting to acknowledge what’s changed for me over those past 7 or 8 years — my ability now to be aware and present for what’s actually happening and what I’m actually feeling about it (which is mindfulness).
And now, for some reason, this too feels like Dharma:
What Narcissism Means to Me
by Tony Hoagland
There’s Socialism and Communism and Capitalism,
said Neal,
and there’s Feminism and Hedonism,
and there’s Catholicism and Bipedalism, and Consumerism,
but I think Narcissism is the system
that means the most to me;
and Sylvia said that in Neal’s case
narcissism represented a heroic achievement in positive thinking.
And Ann,
who calls everybody Sweetie pie
whether she cares for them or not,
Ann lit a cigarette and said, Only miserable people will tell you
that love has to be deserved,
and when I heard that, a distant chime went off for me,
remembering a time when I believed
that I could simply live without it.
Neal had grilled the corn and sliced the onions
into thick white disks,
and piled the wet green pickles
up in stacks like coins
and his chef’s cap was leaning sideways like a mushroom cloud.
Then Ethan said that in his opinion,
if you’re going to mess around with self-love
you shouldn’t just rush into a relationship,
and Sylvia was weeping softly now, looking down
into her wine cooler and potato chips,
and then the hamburgers were done, just as
the sunset in the background started
cutting through the charcoal clouds
exposing their insides–black,
streaked dark red,
like a slab of scorched, rare steak,
delicious but unhealthy,
or, depending on your perspective,
unhealthy but delicious,
–the way that, deep inside the misery
of daily life,
love lies bleeding.
Things As They Are
Perspective Without Any Point
in Which It Might Vanish
by Jane Hirshfield
It Might Vanish
The way the green or blue or yellow in a painting
is simply green and yellow and blue,
and tree is, boat is, sky is
in them also —
There are worlds
in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.
This among them.
Even today–this falling day–
it might be so.
Footstep, footstep, footstep intimate on it.
A Blessing
…with a nod to Mary Oliver:
A Blessing
by James 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.
In Some Lovely Wild Place
A Lesson from James Wright
by Mary Oliver
If James Wright
could put in his book of poems
a blank page
dedicated to “the Horse David
Who Ate One of My Poems,” I am ready
to follow him along
the sweet path he cut
through the dryness
and suggest that you sit now
very quietly
in some lovely wild place, and listen
to the silence
And I say that this, too,
is a poem.
It’s Time
I think I need a little Tony Hoagland today.
The Time Wars
by Tony Hoagland
It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm.
We lived on 17th and G Streets; Kath called it the G spot.
At night in the bathtub I read The Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf,
trying to keep the pages of 20th-century prose from getting wet,
reading the guest lists for her dinner parties
as she knocked out book after book between her shattering depressions.
Sometimes I would meet Richard at the Chinese place for dinner,
and one two three hours would vanish like our food.
We would stand outside The Great Wall, adjusting our scarves
in a pastoral moment of urban separation,
watching the cabs whiz by in the dusk.
The Vietnam War monument was just five blocks away;
on Saturday you would always see a vet or two,
in their windbreakers and baseball caps–
heads down, crying in the shrubs–
the little POW buttons and various insignia attached to their clothing
like they were advertising something.
We ourselves were fighting the Time Wars:
we could feel it speeding up, rapidly escaping,
like the hiss from a leaky ballon.
We were trying to plug it, to slow it down, to decelerate,
but none of us was having much success–
One day in February Kath brought in some roses and said,
“Here, the sun came 93 million miles
to make these flowers that I killed for you,”
and I said, “Kathleen, my talents are not capacious enough
to properly exaggerate your virtues,”
and we both burst out laughing
and time stopped right over our heads like a little red car.
On June 14th, 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal,
“Windy day. I am the hare, far ahead of my critics, the hounds.”
Something endearing about the mixture of weather report and vanity.
Something lonely about this image of success.
We ourselves aren’t thinking about the future anymore.
What we want is to calm time down, to get time in a good mood,
to make time feel wanted.
We just want to give time many homemade gifts,
covered with fingerprints and kisses.
The River Keeps Coming
At the River Clarion (final stanza)
by Mary Oliver
7.
And still, pressed deep into my mind,
the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing
by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible
voice
singing.
***
I’m leaving this afternoon for Anushka’s weekend retreat in KC. I’ll post highlights on Monday. Stay tuned.
While I Sit Here
At the River Clarion (continued)
by Mary Oliver
6.
Along its shores were, may I say, very
intense
cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to
uphold them,
for heaven’s sakes–
the lucky ones: they have such deep
natures,
they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with
books,
idea, doubts, hesitations.