Thought for the Day

"Transience is the most general phenomenon of the cosmos. Change is the only changeless reality. Seasons, livelihoods, personal relationships - all of these will change. Our experiences in life are transient and relative. Only death is certain, completing the cycle of life that begins with birth. By meditating upon this truth, we recognize that we, too, are manifestations of transience. When we understand this teaching deeply, we become humble and sincere. We treasure each moment and endeavor to do our best. We feel less stress and become more accepting of the diverse phenomena of life. If something good happens we can feel the joy and be thankful. But we know that the conditions for the situation will not last forever, and we do not become attached to the feeling. We will simply consider every moment and every experience as a blessing." - Ilchi Lee

As With Angels

If everything is punctured,
harmony, cool joy, sun through trees, money and trigonometry,
miracle scratchings, crackings in the brain, me,
if everything is punctured, tender niceties and tears:


we become brilliant without knowing it
we too are filled.

Thought for the Day

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

William Butler Yeats b. 1865

When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Born--New

I walk in time. Whirling about. No matter. Peace to you. True high. I found endless play when love became a birth wound. Now I'm not just in this body but open to the life that falls from the sky.The wound is my whole world, Lord. Imagine winter blue. Ringing bell of being. And those gifts, tiny and lovely, hidden behind walls of ice. I'm only talking to myself, to myself. I'm finding my way through to an infinite grace. Self breaking. Broken. I fell into a joy, a wonderful coincidence. The moment became my sacrificial act. You can't rush a healing. I fought the slow dream of love. I burned my wings, sweetheart mama. Poet vertigo. Saint Miles of Promised Wonder gone to stone. My labyrinth. My walking. Wanting to stretch out of time. Ready to escape. Talk heavenly shining, mama. I’m stoned on blue, running to the moon. I’m hallucinating afterlight forever.

Thought for the Day

THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

—Yehuda Amichai

Plea Prayer

He carries the longing
Your shadow grows inside him
A faint stream of red blood
The sweet medicine of twilight
All the way to the mythical nest of sky
Grace he couldn’t find a thousand times before
A fire surges up from his head
Resurrection that is stunning
He’s got nothing but this
To remember
How he cares more than the words
And when he cries it is a beautiful crying
And the tears he cries are very pure
Meaning it is mystery
Meaning he touches wonder
And the love arcs between the stars.

Thought for the Day

World Inside the World

Through
gracing mistakes

inside a raw spiritual hunger
the eternal crosshairs
remain
on constant communion.

“Yes, I thought I was haunted,
a symptom of unrest,
but it drew me in closer
to you.”

Thought for the Day

Jack Kerouac: San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation)

“Now it’s jazz. The place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there: one mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys; one strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody. Up and down the stairs they come. The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard—he’s wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming at the cash register and everything is going to the beat.

It’s the Beat Generation. It’s beát. It’s the beat to keep. It’s the beat of the heart. It’s being beat, and down in the world and like old-time lowdown, and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat, and servants spinning pottery to a beat..."

Nature of the Journey

he spreads out the map of the four corners of his soul
he absorbs the geometries of his failures
time flows leaving no instructions
he types out the endless is never, the never is endless
what is consciousness for an accidental being
he explores his own mountains and mystery tunnels and islands
everything whirlpooling, hypnotic and wounded
a love falling into death and descent
a heartbeat

rocking open-door rhythms
the pull of the sunlight and a mixing of angels
he pushes himself in and out of a false sense of security
he rises in language to the edge of his life
clouds as feelings and feelings as clouds
he charts the deep but the destination keeps moving
the place which is not-here and no-there and not-then

Thought for the Day

“And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech,and it is beyond concept.

Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

—Thomas Merton from his Asian Journals.

On the Edge of Angels

We travel the sky
with no certain route.
It’s a lifetime.
Are these horizons
sacred sanctuaries of the self
or code for a whole way of life?
We lose ourselves in the wind
where there is no salvation.

Thought for the Day