Tuesday, October 25, 2011

"A Community of the Spirit," Rumi


There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.
Sit down in the circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.
You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.



Rumi – "A Community of the Spirit"

Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

Monday, October 24, 2011

Steven Connell, From: Our Love is Like...

Our love is a memoir and not a comic book and that type of real life is hard.
The whole world will love you on your best days. 
Brave are the precious few who will love you on your worst.

So on them bad days 
When the instinct to run is strong
I want you to get the opposite of gone
I want you all the way here
As if fear has you sweating super glue from your palm
So that the scarier the moment 
The tighter our bond.
My home is in your heart 
so when the bad days come 
we’ll make our fingers into windows and interlock them up tight
And our storm cellar has a bed in it
So turn my ribs to windchimes
And hang them from your lips 
daring the winds to blow.
As our worst days will always provide the chance
To dance

Remember that my brave flavored girl.

 ~Steven Connell, Our Love is Like...

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

John Ash, "The Middle Kingdom"


In those days we spent our time
sitting quietly in softly lighted rooms
designed for that purpose, trying not
to let any involuntary line of thought
arrive at its logical (and, of course,
regrettable) conclusion: namely
that our days were numbered.

We were all well-fed and warmly clothed, and
experienced no misgivings on this account.
The oceans were calm and shallow,
the rivers stocked with salmon. Each spring
brilliantly coloured birds passed over
on their way to northern lakes and hills.
Poems were often penned concerning
their brief and glorious transit. When
they returned in autumn we succumbed
to appropriate feelings of mild regret.

Friday, October 7, 2011

“since feeling is first,” e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

 ~ e. e. cummings, “since feeling is first”

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs, How to Live Before You Die (Commencement Address to Stanford, 2005)

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

 ~ Steve Jobs, How to Live Before You Die (Commencement Address to Stanford, 2005)

From: “He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do,” Philip Levine

Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words.

~ Philip Levine, “He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do”

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know.

  ...

When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.

~ Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes