Tag Archives: creative unfolding

keeping quiet : keeping still

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Mark Rothko - s/T, 1969

 

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

 

For once on the face of the earth,

let’s not speak in any language;

let’s stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

 

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

 

Fisherman in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would look at his hurt hands.

 

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

 

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.

 

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

 

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

– Pablo Neruda

 

From Extravagaria, translated by Alastair Reid (pp. 27-29, 1974)

A steadying, thoughtful poem for today and everyday. I’m pairing it with Pico Iyer’s wonderful TED talk, The Art of Stillness. I feel that stillness, silence and solitude – attributes of whatever we take to be sanctity – are seriously endangered experiences. Will they become extinct in our lifetime?

I’m a committed activist in this area of concern. My experience has shown me that these ‘non-activities’ are the bedrock necessary for the unfolding of what matters to me – authenticity, right relationship, unfolding wisdom, and creative expression.

 

 

Painting by Mark Rothko – s/T, 1969

sometimes compassion is a big stick

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There’s been a surprising amount of interest in a recent post on my blog at echoesfromemptiness.com

(Visitors to that site will be aware that the postings are notes that were penned several years ago as she-who-writes was feeling her way into an uninvited and unexpected view of life.)

The post is called hope is the enemy of peace.  It seems to want to be aired here as well – who knows why.  There’s nothing I’d change with the benefit of hindsight, however a few sentences have been added.

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Morning Report:

pain, sinus, head-cold, cough, temperature,
toothache, knee-collapse
body demands attention and is receiving it

there is no desire for any of this to be other-than-it-is:
just now, like this, right here.

and this is the peace that was hungered for, sought
in every hopeful thought.

It’s a big say, but it can’t be denied:

hope is the enemy of true peace

for hope-full thoughts abandon actuality
projecting an idea-l scenario and
sabotaging the movement of an
incomprehensible Intelligence
which knows without knowing
and acts beyond right or wrong.

~

Peace is present the moment thought stops churning out its versions of a better me, a better you, a better world … sometime soon, hope-fully … and this unknowable Peace is the source of unscripted – therefore wholly creative – action.

To contribute to radical – not revolutionary – change, give up hope and rest in Peace.

Peace will show the way.

And be prepared: it might very well be a way that seems un-peaceful to the hope-generating thought machine.

Sometimes
compassion is a
big stick.
~ said His Holiness the Dalai Lama
speaking at Krishnamurti’s memorial service in Chennai, India.

~ miriam louisa

from longing to belonging

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Of late I’ve been marveling at the profound depth and breadth of this uncensored, unresisted, unfiltered experience of livingness. I’ve written about the immense sorrow and the exalted joyfulness and everything in between. It’s been both wondrous and humbling to realize how I managed, for decades, to make sure the door to unlimited livingness was kept safely chain-locked. Only manageable peeks allowed! Equilibrium must be maintained – no messy wetness around the eyelashes eh?

Well that’s all herstory now, as the scribblings here and elsewhere have made explicit. So it was only fitting that I would find myself – this past week – on retreat with a teacher whose immense and compassionate wisdom encompasses the limitless interbeing of life. And whose passion is the sharing of that wisdom.

Falling into this gracious and immeasurable Awareness and knowing it as ‘I’ is a big enough shock. Realizing that this inescapable un-locatable … whateveritis … melts one into seamless intimacy with the movement of Life in its inconceivable creative unfolding is the aftershock that keeps coming and coming and coming like an unstoppable orgasm.

Tarchin Hearn is wise to this. I think he’s a shaman disguised as a very non-sectarian Buddhist. He would chuckle and grin widely. I could write much about my week with him; how he helped me ‘adjust’ to this intimacy, how he opened up fresh vistas of wonderment and refreshed that soft fragile childlike curiosity that had been sidelined over the last difficult decade. But today I just want to offer you a taste of his gentle eco-poetry.
– ml

Going for refuge is ‘longing.’

Being refuge is ‘belonging.’

Everything mirroring, echoing, and creatively responding.
This mysterious temple of knowing.
This paramecium, this bacteria, this person,
this family, this forest, this butterfly,
each a temple of uniqueness,
mutually longing for
and belonging in
every other temple of longing and belonging.
Ocean currents of temple-ing
floating in sensual warmth of never ending
consummation and freshness.

– Tarchin Hearn

http://www.greendharmatreasury.org/