The Key to the Rock, the Answer to the Question

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[Image: “mixed messages,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Writing in the Dark

It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.

Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen—ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.

Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s—
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

(Thomas Merton [source])

…and:

A story about a Taoist hermit in the mountains conveys the truth of our oneness with divine humor. A formal delegation from the Confucian temple below decided to visit and seek his advice. When they arrived at his hut unannounced, they were scandalized to find him completely naked. “What are you doing meditating in your hut with no pants on?” they demanded. “The whole world is my hut,” he replied. “This small room is my pants. What I want to know is, what are you doing in my pants?”

(Jack Kornfield [source])

From elsewhere:

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can’t write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, “Pay no mind. It’s the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”

(Natalie Goldberg [source])

…and:

Elegy at Middle River

It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its speed screamed across the iron-black bones
of the track, our train now stopping in the woods,
no platform, and I pull Al Green
out of my ears to a car completely hushed. We wait,
wait longer, till the intercom stirs; says
nothing. Someone folds gum into his mouth and chews.
An older couple up ahead is peeling the skin
off dark plums. Across the aisle a little girl’s feet dangle
inches from a slippery floor scummy from people’s shoes,
holding a water-filled bag of goldfish to her face
like a hungry cat. Her mother looks over, smiles,
covers her daughter’s ears, explains, we hit something,
probably a deer, so low she only mouths it,
and we watch another train worker pass
beneath the windows, his hair gathered and curled
in the rain. A man comes back from the train café,
hands his wife her tea, tells her the conductor’s locked
himself in the restroom, won’t come out,
and for the next two hours no one
speaks a word. Sometimes an arm
pulled through a sleeve, skin surfacing for air.
Sometimes the gravel’s gray teeth
crunched under service men’s boots. Sometimes a moan
from the dumb weight of the engine—a beast stilled
by what is pinioned beneath it. The little girl
opens her bag of fish, and pushes half of her sandwich,
crusts cut off by her mother, into the water, and outside
a dog barks at nothing, a siren, and a worker’s found a phone,
holding it out like it’s burning his hand, and the little girl
tosses the sopped bread into the aisle, one of her fish
flopping out with it and I listen to its wetted slap,
watch it flail, rose-gold and nothing’s getting better,
and we know it.

(Courtney Kampa [source])

…and:

Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything. The key to the Rock, the answer to the Question.

(Ralph Ellison [source])

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Embrace the Day’s Sublime

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[Image: “Autumn, Sliced and Diced,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

Landscape Mode

Overlooking the Cumberland River,
Clarksville, Tennessee,
Early November 1996

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,

ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet

with shining gusto trees along the shore, Orpyland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s

Train on the River stretched out strong like a pet cat
and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest

should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.

Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quit becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.

(Al Young [source])

…and:

Every Day

Three men spoke to me today.

One, bereaved, told me his grief, saying
Had God abandoned him, or was there
no God to abandon him?

One, condemned, told me his epitaph,
‘Groomed to die.’ On Death Row he remembers
the underside of his gradeschool desk, air-raid drill.
He never expected to live
even this long.
He sticks his head back down between his knees,
‘not even sad.’

One, a young father, told me
how he had needed his child, even
before she was conceived.
How he had planted a garden too big to hoe.
He told me about the small leaves near his window,
how he had seen in them their desire to be,
to be the world.

With this one I sat laughing,
eating, drinking wine. ‘The same word,’
he said, ‘she has the same word for me and the dog!
She loves us!’
Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.

(Denise Levertov [source])

From elsewhere:

When you were young—unfathomably, microscopically young, an embryo of five, six, maybe eight days past conception—you were a blob of pluripotent stem cells: uniform cells bound for a multitude of bodily fates. You were an entity made of potential. To use the analogy of Mr. Potato Head, you were all potato. Or plastic maybe. You get what I’m after. To stick to our flawed analogy, you can think of your DNA as the kid with the vision for the Potato Head she’s about to build. Under its sway, your pluripotent stem cells began to differentiate. Some became blood cells, some bone, some neuron; humans have four hundred, even five hundred, cell types in all. The cells grew and multiplied and assembled themselves and soon there were recognizable pieces—eyes, teeth, mustache, hat: all the bits that together produced the delightful, one-of-a kind Potato Head you are today.

(Mary Roach [source])

…and:

Animal of the Earth

For the first time I understand
I’m an animal too.
Bones.
Warm breath.
Moving shaggy arms
To encircle another.
Looked at
By beasts
That fly
Walk with four feet down
Crawl
On tiny scales that shine with flecks of spring.
I’m
The only animal
That wants to write a book
That moves so uncertainly through the cold
That spends so much time
Gazing at the sky And listening for itself
Among the rustling sounds.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (on her childhood alertness to wonderful words):

By the time I’d learned sublime, I’d already seen its chased grays and lit hurricane greens in the Hudson River School painters’ skies (firmament!), those parlous heights brightening to revelatory, those gorges blackly, mossily seducing. I’d already read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and to that, too—though I apologize now for the taxonomy of purples I made of it in high school English class—I retroactively applied the word.

My Aunt Pasq made us Easter bread—dense, yeasty and saltless with a hard-boiled egg, shell and all, held fast in its braided center. My grandmother grew tomatoes in her backyard. I had, for “sublime,” the words bread and tomato. I had the phrase “go pick a nice tomato for dinner.” And once out there, alone with my task, I had all to myself the teetering six o’clock light, the peeling and tender, pink-skinned birch shadowing the grass and me, the fence hung with flower boxes we’d watered just that morning, the fence keeping back the weedy graveyard on one side of the house and grocery’s parking lot on the other. That is, sublime was all around—loose, though, and rampant, unaffiliated with the word for it. Even now I say it sotto voce, preferring egg, bread, tomato, birch, wet fence.

(Lia Purpura [source])

Aside to friends in the US:

If you’ll be attending a No Kings rally on Saturday, please be careful. Read up in advance about any precautions the event organizers have prepared for you. Say and sing everything that needs to be heard — say and sing it loudly and proudly. Know that as many millions of you as there are out there, many, many more millions of your sisters and brothers can’t be with you, for one reason or another. (Among them: the souls of millions of Americans who’ve died over the last 250 years, never in their worst nightmares imagining the America we’ve got today.) There is sublime, and there is sublime. Embrace it in whatever form you find it tomorrow — not the least, in one another.

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To Whom Does the Gift Belong?

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[Image: “Blink and Go Hungry (L&M Donuts, June 2025),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

There once lived a great warrior. Though quite old, he still was able to defeat any challenger. His reputation extended far and wide throughout the land and many students gathered to study under him.

One day an infamous young warrior arrived at the village, determined to be the first man to defeat the great master. Along with his strength, he had an uncanny ability to spot and exploit any weakness in an opponent. He would wait for his opponent to make the first move, thus revealing a weakness, and then would strike with merciless force and lightning speed.

Much against the advice of his concerned students, the old master gladly accepted the young warrior’s challenge. As the two squared off for battle, the young warrior began to hurl insults at the old master. He threw dirt and spit in his face. For hours he verbally assaulted him with every curse and insult known to man. But the old warrior merely stood there calmly. Finally, the young warrior exhausted himself. Knowing he was defeated, he left feeling ashamed.

Somewhat disappointed that he did not fight the insolent youth, the students gathered around the old master and questioned him. “How could you endure such indignity? How did you drive him away?”

“If someone comes to give you a gift and you do not receive it,” the master replied, “to whom does the gift belong?”

([source: various, including this])

…and:

everything

I went out on the porch. Nothing. Silence. Vast silence of the woods full of fireflies. The stars. Down in the south the huge sign of the Scorpion. The red eye of Regulus. Just stars. Not a light from any house or farm. Only fireflies and stars and silence. A car racing by the road, then more silence. Nothing. Nothing.

When a car goes by you can feel the alien frenzy of it. Someone madly going somewhere for no reason. I am a complete prisoner under these stars. With nothing. Or perhaps with everything.

I sit on the porch and deliberately refuse to rationalize anything, to explain anything or to comment on anything, only on what is there. I am there. Fireflies, stars, darkness, the massive shadows of the woods, the vague dark valley. And nothing, nothing, nothing.

Is she thinking of me? Loving me? Is her heart calling to mine in the dark? I don’t know. I can’t honestly say that I know. I can’t honestly say I know anything except that it is late, that I can’t sleep, that there are fireflies all over the place, and that there is not the remotest possibility of making any poetic statement on this. You don’t write poems about nothing.

And yet somehow this nothing seems to be everything. I look at the south sky, and for some ungodly reason, for which there is no reason, everything is complete. I think of going back to bed in peace without knowing why, a peace that cannot be justified by anything, by any reason, any proof, any argument, by any supposition. There are no suppositions left. Only fireflies.

…I want to tell you something, but I don’t know how to begin to say it. I am afraid that if I start talking and writing, I will confuse everything. Nothing needs to be said.

(Thomas Merton [source])

From elsewhere:

Toward the Verrazano

Up from South Jersey and the low persistent
pines, pollution curls into the sky
like dark cast-off ribbons
and the part of us that’s pure camera,
that loves funnel clouds and blood
on a white dress, is satisfied.
At mile 127, no trace of a tree now,
nothing but concrete and high tension
wires, we hood toward to Outerbridge
past Arthur Kill Road where garbage trucks
work the largest landfill in the world.
The windscreens are littered, gorgeous
with rotogravure sections, torn love
letters mauve once-used tissues. The gulls
dip down like addicts, rise like angels.
Soon we’re in traffic, row houses, a college
we’ve never heard of stark as an asylum.
In the distance there it is, the crown
of this back way in, immense, silvery,
and in no time we’re suspended
out over the Narrows by a logic linked
to faith, so accustomed to the miraculous
we hardly speak, and when we do
it’s with those words found on picture postcards
from polite friends with nothing to say.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

Regardless of the actual nature of time, we know that our conscious experience doesn’t represent the sequence of events in the world accurately. We have seen that through different processes the brain binds information that arrives at our sense receptors at different times and delivers it to us as a neat, present-moment package. But we can still wonder how conscious experience itself relates to time. Paying close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience through a concentration exercise like meditation—or simply contemplating the mystery of one’s felt experience in general—leads to many interesting questions pertaining to time: How much time does a moment of consciousness take? Is consciousness continuous or does it somehow flicker in and out (and how would we know the difference)? What is the present moment; is it some sort of illusion? Is time itself an illusion?

(Annaka Harris [source])

…and:

Insomnia

After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.

By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
yelling across the rising water
at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous
ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

Now a silhouette on the horizon,
the only boat on earth is disappearing.

As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,
I concentrate on the giraffe couple,
their necks craning over the roof,
to keep my life from flashing before me.

After all the animals wink out of sight
I float on my back, eyes closed.
I picture all the fish in creation
leaping a fence in a field of water,
one colorful species after another.

(Billy Collins [source])

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Your Words Shape the World You Need

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[Image: a portion of a page from a story (anthology? novella? novel?) I never finished — but often think about — called “Barking Tree.” At one level, it’s a story about kids; on another level, though, it’s a story about, well, about the title of this post.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

 …you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.

But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear which expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.

Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination and he said it was God. He, if anyone, ought to know, for he was one of the greatest poets and artists that ever lived.

Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.

How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it…

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of imagination, should come first—at least for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom…

Now, you see, I have established a reason for your working at writing, not in a trifling, weak way, but with affection and endurance. In other words, I want to make you feel that there is a great intrinsic reward to writing. Unless you feel that you will soon give it up. You won’t last very long at it. A few rejection slips will flatten you out. A few years of not making a cent out of it will make you give it up and feel bitterly that it was a waste of time.

I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that.

(Brenda Ueland [source])

From elsewhere:

Writing

But prayer was not enough, after all, for my father.
His last two brothers died five weeks apart.
He couldn’t get to sleep, had no appetite, sat
staring. Though he prayed,
he could find no peace until he tried
to write about his brothers, tell a story
for each one: Perry’s long travail
with the steamfitters’ union, which he worked for;
and Harvey—here the handwriting changes,
he bears down—Harvey loved his children.

I discovered those few sheets of paper
as I looked through my father’s old Bible
on the morning of his funeral. The others
in the family had seen them long ago;
they had all known the story,
and they told me I had not, most probably, because
I am a writer,
and my father was embarrassed by his effort. Yet
who has seen him as I can: risen

in the middle of the night, bending over
the paper, working close
to the heart of all greatness, he is so lost.

(Judson Mitcham [source])

…and:

The [Pittsburgh] Pirates were in the cellar again. They lived in the cellar, like trolls. They hadn’t won a pennant since 1927. Nobody could even remember when they won ball games, the bums. They had some hitters, but no pitchers.

On the yellow back wall of our Richland Lane garage, I drew a target in red crayon. The target was a batter’s strike zone. The old garage was dark inside; I turned on the bare bulb. Then I walked that famously lonely walk out to the mound, our graveled driveway, and pitched.

I squinted at the strike zone, ignoring the jeers of the batter—oddly, Ralph Kiner. I received no impressions save those inside the long aerial corridor that led to the target. I threw a red-and-blue rubber ball, one of those with a central yellow band. I wound up; I drew back. The target held my eyes. The target set me spinning as the sun from a distance winds the helpless spheres. Entranced and drawn, I swung through the moves and woke up with the ball gone. It felt as if I’d gathered my own body, pointed it carefully, and thrown it down a tunnel bored by my eyes.

I pitched in a blind fever of concentration. I pitched, as I did most things, in order to concentrate. Why do elephants drink? To forget. I loved living at my own edge, as an explorer on a ship presses to the ocean’s rim; mind and skin were one joined force curved out and alert, prow and telescope. I pitched, as I did most things, in a rapture.

Now here’s the pitch. I followed the ball as if it had been my own head, and watched it hit the painted plastered wall. High and outside; ball one. While I stood still stupefied by the effort of the pitch, while I stood agog, unbreathing, mystical, and unaware, here came the daggone rubber ball again, bouncing out of the garage. And I had to hustle up some snappy fielding, or lose the ball in a downhill thicket next door.

The red, blue, and yellow ball came spinning out to the driveway, and sprang awry on the gravel; if I nabbed it, it was apt to bounce out of my mitt. Sometimes I threw the fielded grounder to first—sidearm—back to the crayon target, which had become the first baseman. Fine, but the moronic first baseman spat it back out again at once, out of the dark garage and bouncing crazed on the gravel; I bolted after it, panting. The pace of this game was always out of control.

(Annie Dillard [source])

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Find the Words Leading to Your Answers… and Eventually to Your Song

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Note to regular visitors: this has been a week of very interesting travel adventures for me… so interesting, in fact, that I’m posting this Friday entry — this abbreviated Friday entry, at that — two days late. Heh.

[Image: “God’s Hopes for Mankind Have Not Changed,” by a photographer identifying themselves as “Oscar,” on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!)

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Questions

Why is this day different from
yesterday and why am I
I and not you or her or it?
Why does the pond ripple with
the wind and why does the dog
bark at nearly everything and why
is that annoying to me? Why is it
music moves me and why do I nearly
cry when someone’s selfless for a moment
even in a movie? Why was I
born, why do I live another day,
where did I come from and where
am I going? Why do flies
appear suddenly from nowhere
and what do flies think about,
or grasshoppers, or fish, say
trout, large ones, that hover
gracefully, facing upstream, and why is it
the water ouzel twitches like that
or for that matter what about the
several things in this world that don’t
speak or see or decide or taste anything
like bacteria, fidoplankton, amoeba, mites?
What’s the measure of this world?
Is small smaller than large or
is it larger and is there any small or large
outside mathematics and does it make any difference
and to whom? You? Me? What
does language do after all? Is it
another organ, like a nose? And did
everything that’s ever happened happen
by chance or is there a design?
What’s a design anyway?
Is there anything but design?
Can anyone anyway ask a single serious
meaningful question?
Can I?

(Norman Fischer [source: nothing precisely matching this quote, but obviously related to this])

From elsewhere:

Fado

A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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Stumbling Over the Life You’re Looking For

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[Image: “Ann and Morris Foster (c. 1951; photo by Jack).” These are my maternal grandparents; Morris would’ve turned 116 years old a few days ago, although he was only in his early 40s when this was taken. Ann was a year-and-a-half older.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

On Living
(excerpt)

Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast…
Let’s say we’re at the front—
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

(Nazim Hikmet [source])

…and:

To have a good day is more than I expect, sometimes.
But I did enjoy the one that started with my child asking,
while looking at the calendar, “Is today an odd or evil day?”

([source: no other found])

…and:

The old monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation, he sat.

Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai warrior. “Old man! Teach me about heaven and hell!”

At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk. But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and more agitated with each passing second.

“You wish to know the secrets of heaven and hell?” replied the monk at last. “You who are so unkempt. You whose hands and feet are covered with dirt. You whose hair is uncombed, whose breath is foul, whose sword is all rusty and neglected. You who are ugly and whose mother dresses you funny. You would ask me of heaven and hell?”

The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head. His face turned to crimson and the veins on his neck stood out in bold relief as he prepared to sever the monk’s head from its shoulders.

“That is hell,” said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent.

In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, compassion and love for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears.

“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”

(John W. Groff, Jr. [source: quoted in numerous sources, including here])

From elsewhere:

Napoleon and the Furrier

During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, his troops were battling in the middle of yet another small town in that endless wintry land, when he was accidentally separated from his men. A group of Russian Cossacks spotted him, and began chasing him through the twisting streets. Napoleon ran for his life, and ducked into a little furrier’s shop on a side alley. As Napoleon entered the shop, gasping for breath, he saw the furrier and cried piteously, “Save me, save me! Where can I hide?” The furrier said “Quick, under this big pile of furs in the corner,” and covered Napoleon up with many furs.

No sooner had he finished when the Russian Cossacks burst in the door, shouting “Where is he? We saw him come in.” Despite the furrier’s protests, they tore his shop apart trying to find Napoleon. They poked into the pile of furs with their swords, but didn’t find him. Soon they gave up and left.

After some time, Napoleon crept out from under the furs, unharmed, just as Napoleon’s personal guards came in the door. The furrier turned to Napoleon and said timidly, “Excuse me for asking this question of such a great man, but what was it like to be under those furs, knowing that the next moment would surely be your last?” Napoleon drew himself up to his full height, and said to the furrier indignantly, “How could you ask such a question of me, the emperor Napoleon!! Guards, take this impudent man out, blindfold him, and execute him. I, myself, will personally give the command to fire!”

The guards grabbed the poor furrier, dragged him outside, stood him up against a wall, and blindfolded him. The furrier could see nothing, but he could hear the movements of the guards as they slowly shuffled into a line and prepared their rifles. He could hear the soft ruffling sound of his clothing in the cold wind, and he felt it tugging gently at his clothes and chilling his cheeks, and the uncontrollable trembling in his legs. Then he heard Napoleon clear his throat and call out slowly, “Ready,…aim….” In that moment, knowing that even these few sensations were about to be taken from him forever, a feeling that he couldn’t describe welled up in him, and tears poured down his cheeks.

After a long period of silence, the furrier heard footsteps approaching him, and the blindfold was stripped from his eyes. Still partially blinded by the sudden sunlight, he saw Napoleon’s eyes looking deeply and intently into his own–eyes that seemed to see into every dusty corner of his being. Then Napoleon said softly, “Now you know.”

(Steve Andreas [source])

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It’s Already Happened: Welcome to the Other Side!

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[Video: “Turn Around,” a TV commercial from sometime in the 1960s promoting Kodak film and cameras. The singer, apparently: either Harry Belafonte — who’s also credited as a possible co-songwriter, with Malvina Reynolds and Alan Greene — or Ed Ames; I’m sure somebody knows the truth (see, e.g., this book)!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

One day a young Buddhist, on his journey home, came to the banks of a wide river. Staring hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him, he pondered for hours on just how to cross such a wide barrier. Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his journey he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river. The young Buddhist yells over to the teacher, “Oh wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?” The teacher ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river, and yells back, “My son, you are on the other side.”

([source: here, among many others])

…and:

The Options

When you die
here are the options:
everything or oblivion

A centre of light and around it
all you love, those dead
and those abiding still
and each holding
an object of endearment
you lost long ago
before you came to
know and be simultaneously
at last
at rest
beyond words

Or else your cells
stop their chemical
talk, the neurons say no
and their warmth leaves you
not even the absence of black—
nothing of earth’s up, round, biomass span
just the nonexistence
you tried to conjure once
by closing your eyes and
sleeping, except that dreams
fired their figments
across space at you
and your muscles straining

While we live
we pick one of these options
to live by, and neither is understood
the way the robin in the tree is
who speaks to us of March lust,
the way water and clouds are
which tell us to walk out
into the day, how to step
on grass and mud and feel the pull
upward and then sag an hour later
down, we with our little time
and our ideas and our blood.

(David Zieroth [source])

…and:

Picasso is riding on a train and someone sits down next to him.

Recognizing who he is, the person asks, “Why don’t you paint people the way they really are?”

Picasso asks, “What do you mean by the way they really are?”

The man eagerly pulls out his wallet and shows Picasso a picture of his wife and says, “This is my wife.”

Picasso responds, “She looks rather small and flat, don’t you think?”

(Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei [source: unknown for now, but the same story in different words is here])

From elsewhere:

“You play pool?” [congressman Boyette] asked.

[Galaxy, his paid escort, said,] “I could kick your ass any night, Spanky.”

“Well, listen to this. The woke police are trying to get all the eight balls changed from black to rainbow-colored!”

Galaxy rolled her eyes. “Who said that?”

“Fox.”

“Who on Fox?”

“Judge Jeanine,” said Boyette.

Galaxy let out a hoot. “I’m going to pretend you know that’s total bullshit.”

“No, it’s not. She says they’ve got Washington lobbyists putting pressure on all the billiard companies.”

Galaxy said, “You find more dumb ways to kill a vibe than any guy I’ve ever been with.”

(Carl Hiaasen [source])

…and:

Song for Autumn

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And at evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Once upon a time, all the professors disappeared, swallowed and digested by a new system. All the centers of learning closed because they were outmoded, and their sites were converted into living quarters swarming with wise, well-organized people who were incapable of creating anything new.

Knowledge was an item that could be bought and sold. A device called the IWM 1000 had been invented. It was the ultimate invention: it brought an entire era to an end. The IWM 1000 was a very small machine, the size of an old scholarly briefcase. It was very easy to use-lightweight and affordable to any person interested in knowing anything. The IWM 1000 contained all human knowledge and all the facts of all the libraries of the ancient and modern world…

With the IWM 1000, you could write any type of literature, compose music, and even paint pictures. Creative works were disappearing because anybody, with time and sufficient patience, could make any work similar to and even superior to one made by artists of the past without having to exert the brain or feel anything strange or abnormal.

Lovers would make the machines conjugate all the tenses of the verb to love, and they would listen to romantic songs. In offices and administrative buildings tape-recorded orders were given, and the IWM 1000 would complete the details of the work. Many people got in the habit of talking only to their own machines; therefore, nobody contradicted them because they knew how the machine was going to respond, or because they believed that rivalry could not exist between a machine and a human being. A machine could not accuse anyone of ignorance: they could ask anything.

(Alicia Yáñez Cossío [source: “The IWM 1000,” from 1975!])

…and:

My Autumn Leaves

I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.
I watch the woods for deer who never come.
I know the hes and shes in autumn
rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen
apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work
so I may let the crows in corn believe
it’s me their caws are meant to warn,
and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves

they know me too. They know the boy
who lives inside me still won’t go away.
The deer are ghosts who slip between the light
through trees, so you may only hear the snap
of branches in the thicket beyond hope.
I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.

(Bruce Weigl [source])

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What You See May Not Be What You Get

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[Image: “Parked Car, Small Town Main Street” (1932), by Walker Evans. Found this here, at the Web site of the Portland Museum of Art.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Seeker’s List of Things to Do

1. Fall and rise a thousand times if need be.

2. Become a habitual seeker.

3. Give up, then try again.

4. Realize that you want to help others.

5. Be thankful.

6. Become a decent human animal.

7. Look for the source of thoughts.

8. Look in whatever way keeps your attention.

9. Will to do one thing — one iron in the fire.

10. Find a teacher(s).

11. Always desire more, never be content.

12. Surround yourself with fellow seekers.

13. Spend time alone.

14. Know that the Hound of Heaven is real. [see note below]

(Shawn Nevins [source])

…and:

This is an example of the diverse responses that an object may elicit. The object is a book. To an animal, it appears as an oddly shaped black and white object. A primitive human being would see a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, say, a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics.

This example illustrates that all the observers are partly correct in what they see, but all except the trained physicist are unaware of how much more meaningful and significant the object is than they can recognize. To the non physicist adult it is a book that seems incomprehensible — even ridiculous. What this example demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. The more subtle, profound depths tend to be overlooked — and what is crucial to understand is that we will not even recognize that we are overlooking these more profound depths of meaning.

This occurs because the higher levels of significance are lost… As [Buddhist economist E.F.] Schumacher pointed out:

Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradiction. All levels of significance — up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious — an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

This raises an arresting question: what higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?

(Roger Walsh, edited by Helen Palmer [source (in somewhat different form)])

…and (last paragraph):

In America people do not look at each other publicly much…

I remember my first experience as a café sitter in Europe. There is staring that startles the American. I tried to analyze it and came out with the realization that the European interested is really interested in just ordinary people and makes a study of a man with his eyes in public. What a pleasure and an art it was to study back, and a relief to me as a young more or less educated American, with still echoing in the mind his mother’s “Don’t stare!” (I still cannot point at anything in public.) But I stare and stare at people, shamelessly…

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

(Walker Evans [source])

From elsewhere:

Everything in this world which seems to lack harmony is in reality the limitation of man’s own vision. The wider the horizon of his observation becomes, the more harmony of life he enjoys. In the very depth of man’s being the harmony of the working of the whole universe is summed up in a perfect music.

(Hazrat Inayat Khan [source])

…and (excerpt):

Trance Essay for Remembering Images

Someone I was hoping to kiss informed me
that it’s easy to remember

images (all you have to do, they said, is take
a lesson from a children’s book, one in which a girl could

remember anything she wanted by saying “click,”
and imagining she held a camera).

(Diana Hamilton [source])

…and:

Old Jewish joke:

The celebrated rabbi is on his deathbed. His students are lined up in order of seniority to pay their respects, awaiting his final words with bated breath. Eventually, and with effort, the rabbi opens his eyes, then addresses his most senior student. ‘Life,’ he declares, ‘is a river.’ The student turns to the next most senior, and the message gets carried down the line: ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ Only the most junior student, the last to receive the words, is naive enough to venture a question. ‘But what does the rabbi mean, “life is a river”?’ The query comes back up the line, until the senior student, trembling at the audacity of questioning the master, manages to blurt it out. ‘My rabbi, I’m sorry, but what do you mean, “life is a river”?’

The old man is moments from expiring. But for one last time, he opens his eyes, and regards the student in unblinking silence. Then he shrugs, and turns up his palms.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘So it’s not a river!’

(Oliver Burkeman [source])

…and:

The United States Welcomes You

Why and by whose power were you sent?

What do you see that you may wish to steal?

Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies

Drink up all the light? What are you demanding

That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then

What is that leaping in your chest? What is

The nature of your mission? Do you seek

To offer a confession? Have you anything to do

With others brought by us to harm? Then

Why are you afraid? And why do you invade

Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute

As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?

Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we

Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?

(Tracy K. Smith [source])

____________

Note about “the Hound of Heaven”: I’m embarrassed to confess how deep and complex was the rabbit hole down which this phrase led me. When I tracked down the source of the whiskey river quotation, I found this note about the “hound” in question:

Refers to the poem by Francis Thompson. There is something calling you – God, Rose’s Invisible Current, or the Voice of the Silence. Become aware of your intuition (heart), your hunger and yearning for certainty. You hide with endless diversions from your hunger and yearning. You fill the emptiness in you with material goods, or even love. Yet, you are truly, always alone. There is simply you and a haunting question that sooner or later you must confront.

So then of course I wanted to learn something about the poem in question — and then to figure out what “Rose’s Invisible Current” referred to, and the Voice of the Silence, ditto, and— well, as I said, it kept branching and branching and branching… Maybe this was the lesson of the whole post today!

[back]

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See the Mountain… Ask the Questions… Watch for Answers

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[Video: “Mars in 4K: The Ultimate Edition,” compiled from the NASA originals by an independent filmmaker who runs a Patreon project dubbed “ElderFox Documentaries.” The video’s description as posted at YouTube says: “A few years ago I threw together some Mars images and rendered them in 4k. Back then, I had little editing knowledge. The video went on to get over 60 million views. It was something that hadn’t been done before, and was a case of the right place at the right time. I’m not expecting this video to come close to the view count of the original, but I just wanted to do it justice and give you all something nice to watch.”]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (italicized portion):

My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”

“About fifteen years,” I said.

“Oh! Lord,” he said despondently. “Do I have to?”

“I ’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this — if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”

“Did you find one?”

“I found three,” I said.

It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

(John Steinbeck [source])

…and:

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.

(Alan Watts [source: nothing canonical; quoted in various forms here and there, e.g. here])

…and:

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.

Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

# 999, or Thereabouts (Epilogue)

Keep walking. Just keep walking: as fast as you can, no faster. (Perhaps it’s not walking, as such… No: it’s definitely not walking, as such…) Maybe you go just a few steps, and then you have to rest; maybe you can go a mile before stopping to catch your breath. Should a passerby offer a lift, and you feel like talking, ride with them for a distance — take a load off. And then when your paths diverge, walk some more. Walk. Walk…

There will come a time when you walk for just two steps, before needing to rest. And then you will walk just one more step, and need to rest again. And perhaps if you’re lucky, there will be a bench (no luck involved, there’s always a bench), and you can rest on the bench, and say honestly and without regret: I’ve walked enough.

Look back the way you came then. How far you’ve walked! How much higher you are now than when you started! You didn’t even realize you were ascending — it was just putting one foot ahead of the other, over and over…

Close your eyes. Remember the first hundred steps. Remember that odd building you passed, the one with the funny turrets, and the first passerby who stopped for you and that strange story they shared — what was it, something about a pet chinchilla? — and that stand of willows in the middle of the field, by the little creek, and the way the startlingly purple sun rose on the first day after the first night you slept in the open. Remember the one-thousandth one hundred steps, the bus station you passed, with all the waiting taxis… the older driver who stopped to talk but did not offer you a ride… That first night it rained…

Rest.

Rest.

Rest.

Rest… and always, always remember.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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Glancing at All the Worldly Immortalities, and Then Moving On

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[Image: “I Came to Pass, But Not to Stay,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don’t notice it.

(Charles T. Tart [source])

…and:

1.) We judge matters so superficially that ordinary acts and words, done and spoken with some flair and some knowledge of worldly matters, often succeed better than the greatest cleverness.

2.) To be too dissatisfied with ourselves is a weakness. To be too satisfied with ourselves is a stupidity.

3.) Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.

4.) Wealth does not teach us to transcend the desire for wealth. The possession of many goods does not bring the repose of not desiring them.

5.) We so love all new and unusual things that we even derive a secret pleasure from the saddest and most tragic events, both because of their novelty and because of the natural malignity that exists within us.

6.) There is no one who cannot derive great help and great benefit from learning; but there are also only a few people who do not receive a great harm from the light and knowledge they have received by learning, unless they use their knowledge in a manner both fit and natural for them.

7.) Self-love is even deceived by self-love, because by looking out for our own interests and disregarding those of other people, we lose the advantage that comes with the exchange of favors.

8.) Often the desire to appear competent impedes our ability to become competent, because we are more anxious to display our knowledge than to learn what we do not know.

(From the Maxims of Madame de Sablè, translated from the French by Arthur Chandler [source: nothing canonical, but pieces of it floating around here and there])

From elsewhere:

He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.

(Lev Grossman [source])

…and:

The big house stood as firmly rooted in the soil of Denmark as the peasants’ huts, and was as faithfully allied to her four winds and her changing seasons, to her animal life, trees and flowers. Only its interests lay in a higher plane. Within the domain of the lime trees it was no longer cows, goats, and pigs on which the minds and the talk ran, but horses and dogs. The wild fauna, the game of the land, that the peasant shook his fist at when he saw it on his young green rye or in his ripening wheat field, to the residents of the country houses were the main pursuit and the joy of existence.

The writing in the sky solemnly proclaimed continuance, a worldly immortality. The great country houses had held their ground through many generations. The families who lived in them revered the past as they honoured themselves, for the history of Denmark was their own history.

(Isak Dinesen [source])

…and:

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes

None of this had to happen.
Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water.
Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
The asteroid might have missed.
The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves.
The radio might have found a different music.
The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside
each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.
The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.
I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.
You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would,
long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in
at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.
If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief
of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water
from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.
From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.
This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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