As It Was in the Beginning (Only Different)

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[Cartoon by David Borchart, from The New Yorker (January 11, 2016)]

Note to long-time (frequent or occasional) visitors to Running After My Hat: this will be the last (regularly scheduled) “whiskey river Friday” post here. I may still drop something else from time to time, but this will begin the process of winding RAMH down to something like stasis. More details to come, especially this coming Monday, April 20: anniversary #18!.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (#1, May, 2005):

This then is life.
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

How Curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

(Walt Whitman [source])

…and:

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

From whiskey river itself (December, 2024) (italicized lines):

Advice to Myself #2: Resistance

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.

(Louise Erdrich [source])

…and (October, 2024):

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From elsewhere:

I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.

It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.

Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.

(Tom Bodett [source: not available online, originally spotted in this issue of Funny Times])

…and:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

..and finally, maybe inevitably:

# 000: If you believe in ghosts — ghosts in the sense of diaphanous (once-living, now-dead) beings who pass through walls, moan lugubriously through the night, make your pipes rattle and your lawn die — well, I hate to break the news but… you are probably nuts.

And yet…

Everyone alive who does not suffer from certain neurological disorders has a past, carries it in their heads, never lets it go but sometimes takes little pleats and darts in its surface: neatening it up, fitting it around other thoughts and sometimes — often — fitting the other thoughts around it. The nature of the past is forever to be known but also unknown, really; we “understand” it, if at all, only in the way that a ten-year-old might “understand” quantum electrodynamics. It has a shape, it has a texture, it has sound and color, it — yes — smells… but it’s not quite there, either.

Hold onto your past. It’s yours, like no one else’s. You carry it with you — inescapably — as you move from room to room, from moment to moment, and it never changes no matter what you think you’re doing to change it. The past is that place where you never quite live, but are always moving to, always carrying around in a satchel, sometimes unpacking it for your or someone else’s inspection. It is a gift, unsought, to every human who has ever lived.

And there, there is where the ghosts live.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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Love Yourself. Then Forget It. Then, Love the World.

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[Image: “About the Size of It,” 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 (italicized stanzas):

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

                                             1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

                                             2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                             3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
   still another.

                                             4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

                                             5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
   change.
Congratulations, if
   you have changed.

                                             6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
   fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
   your life—
what would do for you?

                                             7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From elsewhere:

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.

Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows. Tree and lichen belong to one another. Neither is causing the other any harm.

Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.

Stop and notice how closely the human teenagers resemble the whistling, clicking, preening starlings.

Stop and contemplate the hollow-boned ducks floating on the water like leaves. Like deadwood. Turtles, too, drift in the sunny water. See the way the bones in the turtle’s webbed foot resemble the bones in the duck’s webbed foot. Hold open your hand. Trace the outline of your fingers.

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.

The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.

We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.

(Margaret Renkle [source])

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A Dance to the Lilt of the Moment

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[Image: “Play that Tune,” 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:

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Landscape And Soul

Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.

And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky – a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.

But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours–arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson [source])

From elsewhere:

Naturalists call [stickywilly] by its botanical name, Galium aparine. It grows nearly everywhere and offers itself for many human uses: as a hot drink, in a cake, as a salve for eczema, or as protection from scurvy. But it goes by so many common names that stickywilly recipes passed down in rural families are hard to share because it would not be clear to others what wildflower, when dried and brewed, actually serves as a half-decent substitute for coffee. Is it catchweed? Bobby button or bedstraw or cleaverwort? Possibly it’s cleavers, or clivers, or any of the nearly endless riffs on the plant’s tendency to cling: stickyweed, stickybob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, sticky grass, stickyjack, stickeljack, gripgrass, whippysticks. Shall I keep going? I could keep going for days…

I embrace the old-timey plants that evolved to feed wildlife, the plants with names that change from place to place and people to people. And I will always insist on the homely names of my Wiregrass ancestors. It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.

(Margaret Renkl [source])

…acnd:

Prayer for Joy

What was it we wanted
to say anyhow, like today
when there were all the letters
in my alphabet soup and suddenly
the ‘j’ rises to the surface.
The ‘j’, a letter that might be
great for Scrabble, but not really
used for much else, unless
we need to jump for joy,
and then all of a sudden
it’s there and ready to
help us soar and to open up
our hearts at the same time,
this simple line with a curved bottom,
an upside down cane that helps
us walk in a new way into this
forest of language, where all the letters
are beginning to speak,
finding each other in just
the right combination
to be understood.

(Stuart Kestenbaum [source])

…and:

We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step, we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [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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When “Never Enough” and “Ever Plenty” Go Walking Hand-in-Hand

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[Image: “Sufficient Unto the Day…,” 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 (first three stanzas):

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was

a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun

so they were, in part at least, golden. I

held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us

as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,

but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.

The geese
flew on,
I have never
seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Actually, love is something entirely different. Just like intelligence is a quality of the mind, so love is a quality of the heart. We don’t just have intelligence when we have to solve a difficult mathematical equation; we don’t just have intelligence when we have to make logical connections; the mind remains intelligent whether we do that or not. It’s the same with love. The loving quality of the heart remains with us whether there’s anybody in front of us that we can actually extend that love to or not.

(Ayya Khema [source])

…and:

Sin

The worst part is failing to kiss the ground each morning.
Or the cold pot of resentment stirred and simmered
well into the evening. Everything else comes from this, grows.

It wouldn’t be so bad if such immense portions
of good fortune weren’t squandered each hour,
minutes the long dead would ransom eternity to regain.

Even now, ripe apples lie rotting casually about the floor,
single bites taken from each – there is
no worm, no snake . . .

only this failure to praise.

(Dane Cervine [source])

…and:

Lightenings

i

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into—
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

From elsewhere:

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

(Brad Aaron Modlin [source])

…and:

[The TV series Ted Lasso]’s out-of-the-gate conceit is that a protagonist inhabiting the stereotype of the blissful fool is wiser than the rest of us and has more to teach than to learn.

Ted Lasso began streaming in 2020, when, my Times colleague Margaret Renkl astutely observed, we were all “mired in an America we no longer recognized, a nation so dangerously polarized that many people would think nothing of cutting off their closest family members if they didn’t vote the ‘right’ way.” And the show struck a nerve, Renkl added, because there was “something about Ted Lasso’s sunny optimism and faith in silliness as a social lubricant, something about his openness and his unshakable kindness, that lifted Americans’ pandemic-worn hearts.” Renkl recalled a particular scene in which Ted tells a player who is stewing over a defeat which animal is the happiest in the world: “A goldfish. It’s got a ten-second memory.”

(Frank Bruni [source])

…and:

Lightenings

viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

(Seamus Haney [source])

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Recognizing the Universe’s Hand When It’s Offered

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

(Jon Kabat Zinn [source])

…and:

Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees.
    like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light
    of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

(K. C. Cole [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

If you knew what I knew about generosity, you wouldn’t let one meal go by without sharing it.

(Buddha [source (in slightly different words)])

From elsewhere:

To foster your spiritual life, you need an effective method especially suited to you. Buddhists call it upaya, “skillful means.” When I first heard about upaya many years ago, I felt excited because it helped me make sense of the many odd things we do in the name of religion. It’s important to have good ideas, but you also need to be skillful in your method. The practice of religion requires precise and thoughtful action…

Some schools of Buddhism teach that upaya goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands? In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Mysticism for Beginners

The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

Beach

The end, I think, will be a little like looking down as far as I can see to where the wind has kicked up the tide and turned it all the same—sea, spume, the air. There might even be someone walking toward me, the way in the edge-of-the-ocean blue light they’ll be obscure until the last moment. I think it’ll be late afternoon, the sky that luminous oyster white into which things disappear. I’ll stop to look at the sky, and the moment I do I realize I’m alone, I misunderstood the figure coming toward me, which, considering the time of day, is as it should be, especially now that the wind has kicked up a little and the white sun has almost dropped under the soft gray almost stillness of the water, it seems just the right hour to be, again, alive.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

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The World’s Happy to Answer the Questions You Don’t Ask

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[Image: “Petaluma Ramble No. 2 (No Questions),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

(Li Bai, translated by Arthur Waley [source])

…and:

A Settlement
(excerpt)

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my
mind.

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Anthropologist Jaime] De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.”

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

It’s meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

Once there was a man of Chu’u selling shields and halberds. In praising his shields he said, ‘My shields are so solid that nothing can penetrate them.’ Again, in praising his halberds, he said, ‘My halberds are so sharp that they can penetrate anything.’ In response to his words somebody asked, ‘How about using your halberds to pierce through your shields?’ To this the man could not give any reply.

(Tim Bayne, quoting from Han Fei Tzu [source])

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The Sound of One Hand on the Brink of Clapping

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[Image: “Warning: Bees Ahead (Joshua Tree National Park),” 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:

What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the act of separating, and judging. It takes only one because the one becomes two. The self separates from the self. It points a finger and declares, “You are good” or “You are bad.” Either one, it doesn’t matter. The first statement usually flips over to become the second. And vice versa. Either way, the separated self is not doing the writing. Envious, the self is thinking about the writing, thinking about the self, rocking in its dark corner.

(Bonnie (Bonita) Friedman [source, but subscription required — also try here])

…and:

First
we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don’t need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn’t thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to that which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what’s outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.

Second
we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity. Which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake.

(Norman Fischer [source: unknown, or at least undiscovered by me])

…and:

And if we found you, standing transfixed, would that be the beginning of the poem? Would you begin to write right then?

(Mary Oliver [source: from an interview with Steven Ratiner; see here, and search the page for the interview title, “Poet Mary Oliver: A Solitary Walk”])

…and (italicized portion):

When I first encountered the phrase [“write what you know”] (as a student: young, horny, etc), it struck me as rather useless. How could “write what you know” account for the writers who mattered most to me when I was growing up? I wasn’t reading John Updike or Saul Bellow; I was reading JRR Tolkien and Mary Renault, writers who hardly seemed limited to personal experiences and the people they had slept with.

Tolkien had never seen a dragon and Renault had never met Alexander the Great, yet they transcribed these fascinations as convincingly as Updike wrote about adultery and office intrigues. (To be sure, Renault began by writing realistic, sexually charged novels set in post-war Britain, but for better or worse, Tolkien never deigned to give us an exposé of the secret lives of Oxford dons.)

Still, “write what you know” commanded such influence that I couldn’t ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.

But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

(Steven Saylor [source])

Not from whiskey river, or its commonplace book:

One final fable. Heaven knows I’m no script writer, but let’s imagine it as a film.

Ten thousand years from now, after the Earth and humans have been through immense upheaval, warfare, and economic collapse, human societies have resurrected themselves and are working toward the rediscovery of science and technology. They are aided by the recent unearthing of a partially preserved ancient library whose texts they are endeavoring to reconstruct and translate.

The reigning culture differs from ours; its highest scientific priority is the study of Earth’s life. While researching marine mammals, whose population is far greater than it is today, scientists notice that whales’ songs change substantially when they swim above the Mariana Trench, the oceans’ deepest canyon. Specialized submarines are sent to the area to investigate. Several disappear without a trace, but just before they vanish, strange sounds, almost musical, are heard over their communication lines. Finally, one badly damaged sub is recovered. The photographs from its camera reveal no sign of any calamity or of any animal attacking the craft; there’s just blurring of the water.

The scientists are baffled. Then one of them, investigating those strange noises, has an epiphany. There are indeed creatures living within the Mariana Trench—the whales are communicating with them—but they’re invisible. Rather than flesh and blood, they’re built solely from sound waves in the water. The submarines weren’t recording the sounds the creatures make; those were the sounds the creatures are.

(Matt Strassler [source])

…and:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

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The Gods Were Gone, Then You Opened Your Eyes

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(Image: “The ballad of Marie Curie (Army of Lovers,” by Pablo (Gulin) Kopec; found it on Flickr (and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!). The image’s title refers to this song, the lyrics to which you can find here.)

From whiskey river:

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor—
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

(Jane Kenyon [source])

…and:

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.

(Jane Mead [source])

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Digging Deep for Compassion When Cynicism Comes to Call

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[Image: On my first visit to downtown Durham, NC, in the fall of 2022, I was struck — moved — both by the obvious demographic diversity and by the displays of public art, especially murals. This mural (I haven’t been able to learn the artist’s name) commemorates (among other things) a particularly fraught moment in the history of that diversity: the establishment in the early 1970s of a “charrette” to help resolve ongoing racial tensions, especially surrounding school integration. The two people seated at the table at top left were appointed by a Federal judge to lead the charrette; from left to right, they are C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater. At the start of the project, Ellis was the angry “Exalted Cyclops” of Durham’s Ku Klux Klan; Atwater, an angry community activist and organizer. You can read more about the charrette — and the “best of enemies” relationship between Ellis and Atwater — here, here, here, and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Prayer for the Abuser
(excerpt)

To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

(Kuan Yin [source: widely quoted, including here, but nothing canonical I can find])

Not from whiskey river:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Some schools of Buddhism teach that [skillful means (upaya)] goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands?

In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity. I’ve borrowed them all, but now, in this new configuration, they become mine…

It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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