Collected Wisdom

The yoga pose is not the goal.

Becoming flexible is not the goal. Standing on your hands is not the goal.

The goal is to create space where you were once stuck. To unveil the layers of protection you have built around your heart. To appreciate your body and become aware of the mind and the noise it creates. To make peace with who you are.

The goal is to love, well…You.

Come to your yoga mat to feel not to accomplish.

Shift your focus, and your heart will grow.

                                  --shared by Trish, January 14, 2016


For all the setting suns

Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises--a mother speaking downstairs, a grandfather rumbling in response, cars swishing past on Philadelphia Avenue and their headlights wheeling around the room. We need the little clicks and signs of sustaining otherness. We need the Gods.

--John Updike


Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what gives them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
--Galway Kinnell

Calling All Angels

Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Anna, Santa Susannah
Santa Cecilia, Santa Copelia, Santa Domenica, Mary Angelica
Frater Achad, Frater Pietro, Julianus, Petronilla
Santa, Santos, Miroslaw, Vladimir and all the rest

Oh, a man is placed upon the steps, a baby cries
High above, you can hear the church bells start to ring
And as the heaviness, oh the heaviness, the body settles in
Somewhere you could hear, a mother sing

Then it's one foot then the other as you step out on the road
Step out on the road, how much weight, how much weight?
Then it's how long and how far and how many times
Oh, before it's too late?

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don't leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, but we're not sure how

Oh, and every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity
Why, it's ah, it's almost as if you could only crack the code
You'd finally understand what this all means

Oh, but if you could, do you think you would
Trade it all, all the pain and suffering?
Oh, but then you would've missed the beauty of
The light upon this earth and the sweetness of the leaving

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, don't leave me alone
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, but we're not sure why

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
Walk me through this one, walk me through this one
Don't leave me alone

Calling all Angels, calling all Angels
We're trying, we're hoping, we're hurting, we're loving
We're crying, we're calling
'Cause we're not sure how this goes

--Jane Siberry
 

St. Catherine of Sienna, author of "This Place of Abundance"

This Place of Abundance

We know nothing until we know everything.

I have no object to defend
for all is of equal value
to me.

I cannot lose anything in this
place of abundance
I found.

If something my heart cherishes
is taken away.

I just say, "Lord, what happened?"

And a hundred more appear.

Where the hummingbird comes in happiness. Photo by Margaret Floyd-Evans

  
Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine

Who doesn't love
roses, and who
doesn't love the lilies
of the black ponds.

floating like flocks
of tiny swans,
and of course the flaming
trumpet vine

where the hummingbird comes
like a small green angel, to soak
his dark tongue
in happiness--

and who doesn't want
to live with the brisk
motor of his heart

like a Schubert,
and his eyes
working and working like those days of rapture,
by van Gogh, in Arles?

Look! for most of the world
is waiting
or remembering--
most of the world is time

when we're not here,
not born yet, or died--
a slow fire
under the earth with all

our dumb wild blind cousins
who also
can't even remember anymore
their own happiness--

Look! and then we will be
like the pale cool
stones, that last almost
forever.

--Mary Oliver


from one of Frank O'Hara's "Poem" poems

...of light we can never have enough
but how would we find it
unless the darkness urged us on and into it
and I am dark
except when now and then it all comes clear
and I can see myself
as others luckily sometimes see me
in a good light      (1959)

 

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

~ Mary Oliver ~

from "Annunciation" by Denise Levertov

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.


A Physics

When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling--Rocky, Smoky, Blue--
and a heart that can melt stones.

The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this--and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled

by such attractions--spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, and our trains
on time. But all the while we want

to love each other endlessly--not only for
a hundred years, not only six feet up and down.
We want the suns and moons of silver
in ourselves, not only counted coins in a cup. The whole

idea of love was not to fall. And neither was
the whole idea of God. We put him well
above ourselves because we meant,
in time, to measure up.

--Heather McHugh


Basho's Music

The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.


from Sun Magazine interview with Rupert Sheldrake

 If you want to change the world, then throw a better party.

--Rick Ingrasci

Frayed loveliness for Kenko

Kenko's Idleness

It's true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,

That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,

the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,

And their frayed loveliness.

--by Charles Wright


Development

Once I said to God, "How do you teach us?"
And He replied,

"If
you were
playing chess with someone who
had infinite power and infinite knowledge
and wanted to make you a
master of the game,

where would all the chess pieces be at every moment?

Indeed, not only where he wanted them,
but where all were best for your
development;

and that is every situation
of one's
life."

St. John of the Cross, author of "Development"

Human Nature

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels
turning in the cages of
our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut
with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up
like burnt paper.

--D.H. Lawrence