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Julio 31, 2007
This white unswaying place
I'm sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly
through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply
quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply
gleaming.
How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so
strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.
Laurie Sheck
Posted by sarita at 1:53 PM
Man and Camel
Man and Camel
On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."
Mark Strand
Posted by sarita at 1:50 PM
Gnosticism V
". . . what the little word after means . . ."
—I. Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, 2.399.4-6
Stuffed September night, the hot leaves bump
on swollen breezes and a fat
black moonlessness.
I got up (3 am)
to clean the house, there was
so much pressure on it forcing the butt end down.
I scrubbed counters and mopped floors.
I didn’t turn the lights on.
Cleaning
in the dark makes a surprise for later. By then
I will have
slept, woke, come striding back
from infuriated interiors—ah
now
recall
I dreamed Of Wordsworth—his little vials,
Wordsworth collected little vials,
had hundreds of them, his sister stored them on shelves
in the pantry—
and yes
to inspire me is why
I put in a bit of Wordsworth but then the page is over,
he weighs it to the
ground,
the autumn of him soaking my mop purple in the dyes of
what's falling
breathless under its own
senses.
Anne Carson
Posted by sarita at 1:47 PM
Julio 18, 2007
A Buddhist Master’s Advice to Young Leaders
If we treat people around us with an angry heart, people will inevitably respond with anger. We then have an environment of violence vs. violence. However, if we treat people with kindness and compassion, they will not find it so easy to remain angry with us. So we need to start from within ourselves and learn to cultivate an attitude of non-harming and non-violence. Then we will have a standpoint from which to build peace. If we have peace in our minds, then the world we experience will be at peace, even when from an objective point of view, the world is in conflict. When we are at peace in our mind and we are not generating conflict and violence, then we can truly begin to help others attain peace and eliminate conflict.
Master Sheng Yeng
Posted by sarita at 1:02 PM