Selling Fishhooks
Last night, one of my dharma buddies and I listened to a fascinating talk by Guy Armstrong, titled: Consciousness, Awareness and Nibbana. In the talk, he quoted this lovely poem by Rumi:
Tending Two Shops
Don’t run around this world
looking for a hole to hide in.
There are wild beast in EVERY cave!
If you live with mice,
the cat claws will find you.
The only real rest comes
when you’re alone with the Mystery.
Live in the nowhere that you came from,
even though you have an address here.
That’s why you see things in two ways.
Sometimes you look at a person
and see a cynical snake.
Someone else sees a joyful lover,
and you’re both right!
Everyone is half and half,
like the black and white ox.
Joseph looked ugly to his brothers,
and most handsome to his father.
You have eyes that see from that nowhere,
and eyes that judge distance,
how high and how low.
Yow own two shops,
and you run back and forth.
Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap,
getting always smaller. Checkmate,
this way. Checkmate that.
Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore.
You ARE the free-swimming fish.
Welcome Home
For today:
My Life Was the Size of My Life
by Jane Hirshfield
My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It road elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off
our closes on
our tongues from
This Life. This Flood.
For today: This poem.
My Sandwich
by Jane Hirshfield
So many things
you’d not have thought of
until they were given.
Even the simple —
a cottage cheese sandwich,
a heron’s contractable neck.
You eat. You look.
Then you look back and its over.
This life. This flood —
unbargained for as lasting love was —
of lasting oddness.
What Else Is There To Do?
While I was visiting with Mirabai after the CDL retreat, she told me about an event she organized, in which Jack Kornfield read this letter from his friend, the poet Alison Luterman:
“Don’t tell anyone, but even as a good Jewish girl I love Jesus. I love his dark Semitic eyes and how his friends are all the poor and the prostitutes. He’s just that Buddhist Bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara, except his name is easier to pronounce. It’s hard to yell for Avalokitesvara when you’re in big trouble, but ‘Oh Jesus!’ comes naturally. I just don’t want to die saying ‘Oh shit.’ I want to die like a lama, lie on my right side, and turn my head in the direction of my next birth. I know I have to meditate a lot to do this and well, let’s face it, I haven’t started early enough in my life to ever get there, I’m afraid, and following Jesus seems so much easier. All you have to do is love everyone.
“Well, ‘seems’ is the critical word here. Sometimes it seems impossible, especially with the particular people around you, but then if you really look, you realize what else is there to do? What else is there to do?”
“Spooky Action at a Distance”
For today, a little poetry-and-quantum-physics entanglement:
Entanglement
by Jane Hirshfield
A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague
sign their moon-faced illicit emails,
“ton entagle’e”.
No one can explain it.
The strange charm between border collie and sheep,
leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.
There is, too, the matter of a horse race.
Each person shouts for his own horse louder,
confident in the rising din
past whip, past mud,
the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.
Desire is different:
desire is the moment before the race is run.
Has an electron never refused
the invitation to change direction,
sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?
A story told often: after the lecture, the widow
insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.
And what, the physicist
asks, does the turtle rest on?
Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,
but it’s turtles all the way down.
And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,
who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket
from a night-market street stall.
On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,
a turtle.
Inside that green-painted shell, still smaller.
This continues for many turtles,
until finally, too small to see
or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head,
a single un-green electron
waits the width of a world for some weightless message
sent into the din of existence for it alone.
Murmur of all that is clasp able, clabberable, clamberable,
against all that is not:
You are there. I am here. I remember.
What To Add
Today my friend celebrated the life…and honored the death…of her sister. For my part: I bore witness. And offer a poem.
Zero Plus Anything Is a World, by Jane Hirshfield
Four less one is three.
Three less two is one.
One less three
is what, is who,
remains.
The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.
Recipe:
add salt to hunger.
Recipe:
add time to trees.
Zero plus anything
is a world.
This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each breath changed.
Recipe:
add death to life.
Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.
Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.
Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,
then another.
I Hear the Sigh of Happiness
This is the poem Christine read at Sunday Sangha last weekend (a very sweet little group that would love to have you visit, by the way).
Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak
by Jane Hirshfield
Only when I am quiet for a long time
and do not speak
do the objects of my life draw near.
Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug.
Hesitant even the towels,
for all their intimate knowledge and scent of fresh bleach.
How steady their regard as they ponder,
dreaming and waking,
the entrancement of my daily wanderings and tasks.
Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose,
they seem to be thinking,
a quiet judgement that glistens between glass doorknobs.
Yet theirs is not the false reserve
of a scarcely concealed ill-will,
nor that other, active shying: of pelted rocks.
No, not that. For I hear the sigh of happiness
each object gives off
if I glimpse for even an instant the actually instant–
As if they believed it possible
I might join
their circle of simple, passionate thusness,
their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,
the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.
Remembering
My dear friend’s sister died yesterday. Today, I turn to Mary Oliver:
West Wind, 8
The young, tall English poet–soon to die, soon to sail on his small boat into the blue haze and then the storm and then under the gray waves’ spinning threshold–went over to Pisa to meet a friend; met him; spent with him a sunny afternoon. I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart. So my love is a gift to myself. And I think of him, on that July afternoon in Pisa, while his friend Hunt told him stories pithy and humorous, of their friends in England, so that he began to laugh, so that his tall, lean body shook, and his long legs couldn’t hold him, and he had to lean up against the building, seized with laughter, abundant and unstoppable; and so he leaned in the wild sun, against the stones of the building, with the tears flying from his eyes–full of foolishness, howling, hanging on to the stones, crawling with laughter, clasping his own body as it began to fly apart in the nonsense, the sweetness, the intelligence, the bright happiness falling, like tiny gold flowers, like the sunlight itself, the lilt of Hunt’s voice, on this simple afternoon, with a friend, in Pisa.
Restraining Yourself and Loving Others
What speaks to me today are these lines from Verses from the Center by Nagarjuna, translated by Stephen Batchelor:
Buddha taught that acts
Are motives of the mind
And words and gestures
You are moved to express.
Restraining yourself
And loving others
Are seeds that bear fruit
In this life and beyond.
Or?
This is the poem that speaks to me today:
A Cottony Fate, by Jane Hirschfield
Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.
Now I too am sixty.
There was no other life.