A Monday meander: When compassion creeps in

The dahlias didn’t want to quit this year.

SOS 1995

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

~ Leonard Cohen

As another thousand years have passed

A mourning sky from the past.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

A thousand years or so ago

Going up the mountain and into the clouds/fog.

We are not here on Earth to be alone, but to be a part of a living community, a web of life in which all is sacred. Like the cells of our body, all of life is in constant communication, as science is just beginning to understand. No bird sings in isolation, no bud breaks open alone. And the most central note that is present in life is its sacred nature…Hearing its presence speak to us, we feel this great bond of life that supports and nourishes us all. Today’s world may still at times make us feel lonely, but we can then remember what every animal, every insect, every plant knows – and only we have forgotten: the living sacred whole.

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

All good things

In my junk journal (repurposed book).

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
― Adrienne Rich

However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse – the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny – may find human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

Springtime musings

Beauty and grace.

So many beings in the universe love us unconditionally.  A bird song can express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. The trees, the water, and the air don’t ask anything of us; they just love us. Even though we need this kind of love, we continue to destroy these things. We should try our best to do the least harm to all living creatures.

We humans think we’re intelligent, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce symmetrical flowers; a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us to recognize and cultivate the noblest nature in ourselves.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have

A Monday meander: The greening

So pretty in pink.

I am thinking about time in both directions now — not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.  I think about the American chestnuts, today so rare that their locations are often closely kept secrets among researchers trying to understand why this scant handful survived.  All the vanishing plants and creatures I love so dearly are, I know, only the barest remnant of the abundance this landscape once sustained.  There were twice as many songbirds the year I was born as there are now, and even that teeming number is paltry by comparison to those who lived when chestnuts reigned over the eastern forests.

… The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty.  Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again.  Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly.  A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong.  The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness.  The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails.  Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

~ Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Because

Me and my solar eclipse shadows.

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
― Coco Chanel