Warp and Woof

Warp and Woof

Daily experience for most

is a delightful fearful mixture..

We are content to allow the mixture

to serve as reality undoubted..

Acceptance of the

warp and woof

is the life we know..

Yet pain and distortion

confusion and doubt

lead some to question..

And in questioning to 

discover  Reality anew..

Finding:

warp and woof

are most blinding

hiding our inherited light

imposing seeming separation

and captivity remains...

Dogs and Cats

Dogs and Cats

These denizens of creation

fall short in our bifurcated minds..

We render ourselves

as the conscious ones

find disfavor on those below..

Yet now with a quantum question

we ask who is conscious

and consulting our experience

which is always at ready

an answer returns:

not dogs, not cats, not plants or rocks

and amazingly not our divided selves..

The quantum question receives its answer:

only consciousness is conscious..

This fearful response

settles into freedom

for all those dogs and cats and all...

(from a friend, CP..)

Here's a so well written view regarding our comments on dogs and cats:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees therefore a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves, and therein we err...... we greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by the man.  In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and more complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston

Poems of Simplicity

WENDELL BERRY 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



DAVID WHYTE

In the Beginning

Sometimes simplicity rises

like a blossom of fire

from the white silk of your own skin.

You were there in the beginning

you heard the story, you heard the merciless

and tender words telling you where you had to go.

Exile is never easy and the journey

itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,

when you heard that voice, you had to go.

You couldn’t sit by the fire, you couldn’t live

so close to the live flame of that compassion

you had to go out in the world and make it your own

so you could come back with

that flame in your voice, saying listen…

this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love…

It is all here, it is all here.

---David Whyte

Everything is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
---David Whyte

Heady Minds

HEADY MINDS

Our minds project and name:

this realization is rumbling

underneath our shadows and struggle..

Is it not amazing

that externals are mind's projections

awaiting..but not long.. for their names

eagerly provided by heady minds..

This realization reverses

our notions..those heady beliefs

of separation as wisely undeniable..

Although the rumbling often seems 

fleeting and faint

not reportable in shadowy newsdays

real Happiness is found seeping in...

The Purple Pumpkin

The Purple Pumpkin

Waiting for the white paper

which underlies this writing

to loose a flow of words

finding Peace

in the facing-off:

a pumpkin and a purple cushion..

Henry David Thoreau chose

to sit on a solitary pumpkin

not a crowded purple cushion..

Many we know might charge him

with most slothful neglect..

Our venerable teachers 

have exhorted us to

lift up the purple

with their assumption:

what is real is purple..

Yet we..startled by experience

find that very often

purple is pain..

We long to sit on that pumpkin

long since overgrown

with dead purple vines..

At last in our longing

the pumpkin may speak

of what lies in hiding

.. 'til just now..

with Peace emerging

the Pumpkin is Purple...

Zozobra

https://burnzozobra.com/all-about-zozobra/

Better...

Better...

With our thoughts and perceptions

we give credence to separation:

a self which experiences the world

the world we have always known..

Better however..an apparent self

seeming to experience an

unfolding world..

Even Better..an unperturbed Self

colored and shaped

but knowing only My Self..

But perhaps Best..simply I am...