whiskey river Fridays

Ingredients of Revelation

December 10, 2010 by John 9 Comments

Shinto

When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art and fear. Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them. What veteran artists share in common is that they have learned how to get on with their work. Simply put, artists learn how to proceed, or they don’t. The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone — it’s non-transferable and of little use to others.

(David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear [source])

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“What If You Get a Question Wrong?”

December 3, 2010 by John 15 Comments

[Image: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch
(click image for a much larger view of the whole triptych)]

From whiskey river:

You Learn

You learn.
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

…and:

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

(Terry Tempest Williams [source])

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What You Find in the Cracks

November 26, 2010 by John 10 Comments

[For information about the above image(s), see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

from Late Gazing, Looking for an Omen as the Sun Goes
I.
The window’s dark. Roll back the curtain’s waves.
What’s to be done about sunsets?
Climb up and stand in some high place,
lusting for a little more twilight.

(Yuan Mei [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield)

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Hanging in the Sky

November 19, 2010 by John 1 Comment

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

This is the Dream

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)

…and (italicized portion):

You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

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What You Think, What You Know, What You Can and Can’t Have

November 12, 2010 by John 12 Comments

[Longer trailer for The NeverEnding Story (1981); you can see the whole film on YouTube, if you’d like, broken up into nine or ten parts]

From whiskey river:

I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that’s why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That’s why we dream what we dream and “think up” the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don’t yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, “Hey. She’s serious. Let’s give her more.”

But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we’ve developed. Think of it as a relationship to “the muse,” if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, “Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.”

(Peter Levitt, ZinkZine, Fall 2003 [source])

…and:

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. [*] A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

(Carl Jung [source])

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All in Good Time

November 5, 2010 by John 5 Comments

[A favorite minute from Citizen Kane. See the note at the end of this post.]

From whiskey river:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin, from Present Company [source])

…and:

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

(Jeanette Winterson. from Lighthousekeeping [source])

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Et Çe N’est Pas Bon, Ma

October 29, 2010 by John 13 Comments

[Image taken from a full photographic composition by Brandon Voges of the Bruton Stroube studio; see the note at the bottom of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Picnic, Lightning

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident
(picnic, lightning) when I was three.
— Lolita

It is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
Safes drop from rooftops
and flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of the comics,
but still, we know it is possible,
as well as the flash of summer lightning,
the thermos toppling over,
spilling out on the grass.

And we know the message
can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body’s rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens —
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next.

(Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room [source])

…and:

Expectations of goals and rewards (such as Enlightenment) are recognized for what they are: last-ditch attempts by the ghostly self to subvert the process to its own ends. The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait.

(Stephen Batchelor, from Buddhism Without Beliefs [source])

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Un Momento, Por Favor

October 22, 2010 by John 8 Comments

[Image found at What My World’s Like]

From whiskey river:

Visiting the Graveyard

When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiar

but not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,

which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language —
I can catch the tone

but understand not a single word —
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.

(Mary Oliver, from Red bird [source])

…and:

…Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion.

We have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word now, we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline calibrations on the watch.

As a result, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because we believe that the present is always instantly vanishing. This is the problem of Goethe’s Faust. He attains his great moment and says to it, “Oh still delay, thou art so fair.” But the moment never stays. It is always disappearing into the past.

Therefore we have the sensation that our lives are constantly flowing away from us. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to waste; time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of clocks, we feel that we have a past, and that we know who we were in the past — nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were — and we believe we also have a future. And that belief is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply us with everything we’re looking for.

You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.

(Alan Watts [source, in slightly different form])

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Just Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?

October 15, 2010 by John 12 Comments

[For information about the video, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There is never anything more truthful
Than what you yourself make of it
Except the possibility that is always there
Behind you, at the back of the mirror,
Behind the brain, in back of the universe —
And that also as you will make it.

(Peyton Houston, from The Changes [source])

…and:

When you find yourself asking, irritably and rhetorically, “Why the hell does he keep doing that?!” — I strongly recommend you answer the rhetorical question. The causal story revealed in the answer, which always has roots outside the person, might reduce counter-productive blaming and contempt, and it will give you vital information about how the behavior might be changed.

(Thomas Clark, from Encountering Naturalism)

…and (italicized portion):

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

(Alan Watts, from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

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It Went Right By You

October 8, 2010 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Lodz, PL, 1994.” A photo by Mark Pimlott from his 2008 exhibit, All Things Pass,
at Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (click for original)]

From whiskey river:

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

(Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin [source])

…and:

Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.

(John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara [source])

…and:

Sleepless

Can’t get clear of this dream,
can’t get sober.

Spring breeze chilly
on the flesh: me all alone.

My orphan sail
finds the bank
where reed flowers fall.

All night
the river sounds
the rain falling:
listen.

(Yuan Mei, from I Don’t Bow to Buddhas [source])

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