Listen
Last night at the Hi-Pointe Sitting Group, I read one of the poems Mirabai read to us at the retreat. (Partly as a way of bringing her energy back home with me, but mostly because I was awe-struck by the beauty of it.)
Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds, by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Listen–
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now.
In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums,
And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump
Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved’s Name.
There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
Out of the mouths of a thousand birds.
There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life
Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands
And my even quieter simple being and heart.
My dear,
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram
Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out
About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?
Hafiz, too,
For many years beat his head in youth
And thought himself at a great distance,
Far from an armistice
With God.
But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you.
O listen–
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.
In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer
Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.
Good Choice
The Noah Levine passage wasn’t exactly right for Wednesday night’s sitting…although, who knows, maybe I should have given it a go. Instead, I closed the sit by reading Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver. (Always a good choice)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(image from A Whole World, by Couprie and Louchard)
Listen to This (without the all-CAPS)
I subscribe to Dharma Seed podcasts, so I listen to a lot of dharma talks. Most of them are very good…a few, I must admit are tedious…but some are so beautiful and inspiring that it’s all I can do not to fire off e-blasts to everyone I know, saying LISTEN TO THIS!!!! (We all know how welcome those emails are.)
So instead, I’ll just post the link here!
Pascal Auclair has a terrific talk, titled: On Unconditional Friendliness, Concentration and Other Things. It was recorded during a Metta retreat at True North Insight in Montreal. In the talk, Pascal reads a wonderful poem by Galway Kinnell, which I offer here (as an incentive to listen to the whole talk here.)
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to teach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
(image from A Whole World by Couprie and Louchard)