musings

the birds come to my birdbath

 

Philip Sutton, The Tree, 1958

 

emelle says:

I’m a fool with little need of company.

There’s no one deemed respectable here,
so how could I demand respect?

When recognition only brings busyness,
how could I not love invisibility?

Knowing that mind is the slayer of silence
why would I want “the last word?”

Saturated by streaming aliveness
how could I be lonely?

I cherish the extraordinariness
of ordinary suchness
but few know what that looks like,
so I’ll tell you:

The birds come to my birdbath.

The dogs wag their tails
when I open my door.

My luna-lover beams at me
without reproach or expectation.

My cup runneth over
and the ants make the most of it;
they even cart off my toenail clippings.

When the tide of breath runs out
they will claim every scrap of this body
and have a banquet with the worms.

And their scats will feed the earth;
new grass will grow in the summer,
sap will rise in the trees
and they will exhale my smile.

I will be breathed back
into the fecundity of space.

Just like that.
And that’s enough for me.

 

Image: Philip Sutton, The Tree, 1958
philipsuttonra.com

 

oh how I love being so deluded

 

Andrew Wyeth: Wind from the Sea, detail

 

I was asked to find my mind

and

I failed

I was asked to find my thoughts

and

I failed

I was asked to find my self

and

I failed

 

So then it seemed timely to try to find

the I

that was so successful at failing

 

ha!

it couldn’t be found

yet

it can’t be escaped

 

oh how I love being so deluded

that simply watching words leak out of a pen

can deliver shameless delight!

 

Image: Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea
Tempera on hardboard, 1947, detail
[What moves – the curtain or the wind?]
Source: Washington Post

All writing on this blog leaks from the pen of Miriam Louisa Simons.  Over at my other blog this unlit light, you’ll find more of a smorgasbord of writing, including some of my own.
I chose this WordPress theme for its uncluttered minimalism, and because it’s responsive (i.e., it displays readably on all devices).  All the links that normally appear in a sidebar or footer are hidden behind the menu icon at the top of the page.  If you feel inclined to explore the offerings posted here since 2010, please click that icon.  You’ll also find a way to follow this blog by email there.  I promise you won’t be overwhelmed – emptiness has erratic and unpredictable habits.  Posts turn up.  I marvel.
– mls
Copyright © Emptiness

pop goes the poseur

Three mid-winter haiku.

 

Rengetsu - Uji River Teapot Scroll ca1840

 

xxxv

winter in my hut

drafts shivering the rainbows

I sit with my tea

 

xxxvi

thoughts and thinker? wrong

thoughts-thinker-thinking: all one!

pop goes the poseur

 

xxxvii

zafu guru says

two thoughts cannot co-exist

I dive in the gap

 

Painting by Rengetsu – Uji River Teapot Scroll

Source – The Rengetsu Circle

this wild and precious life

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
– Mary Oliver

 

Kano Motonobu - Zen Patriarch Xiangyen Zhixian Sweeping with a Broom

 

after decades of wondering what I’d be
when I grew up,
what I’d do when I found my ‘real’ work,
what I’d contribute to life that might be of worth,
I tossed the questions to the stars
and gave up

is this typical I wonder?
a symptom of seniorhood?
or does it eventually occur to everyone
that while life is unbearably precious
and untameably wild
it isn’t yours or mine nor ever was

so with hair gone silver and eyes a-twinkle,
I whisper to the beloved poet:
this wild and precious life was never mine to map;
it always had its own agenda, dancing itself
across infinite webs of thought and feeling,
back to its own vibrant womb

and the role it gave itself as miriam
was that of sweeper of the space,
one who clears the mind-droppings, ensuring
no concealment of that fierce Grace
shining, shining through the world’s sorrow and joy
(and the sweeper’s too)

 

And what will Life do I wonder, with its one wild and precious You?

 

Image: Kano Motonobu –  Zen Patriarch Xiangyen Zhixian Sweeping with a Broom (detail)
Muromachi period 1336-1868.  Ink and color on paper.

 

the God game

How to play.

 
[Since participation isn’t optional, and there’s no Players’ Manual provided, what can one do but invent a good story?]
 

1

Go hide yourSelf [aka Primordial Awareness, Divine Light, Truth, Reality, Original Self, Godhead…] from view – somewhere so obvious and so simple, it’s guaranteed to be overlooked.

2

Call the shadow cast by your hidden self-shining Light “world”: an infinite array of mirrors reflecting every imaginable experience; a mind-field so intricate it can entertain for lifetimes…

 

Mirror Room (after Da Vinci)

 

3

Forget you had any part in this arrangement [crucial, repeat, crucial] and set out into the “world”, wearing an infinity of cunning disguises, to find yourSelf again.

4

Spend as much time as needed [i.e. aeons of now-ness] entertaining and satiating your seeker-self and eventually

5

stop.
shut up.
surrender and fall

back

 

down

 

in

 

and there,
which is now-here,
beyond time and space
behind the mirrors
out of your mind

 

meet yourSelf as your every perception
thought
and
feeling

 

love yourSelf as the font and the fabric
of this seething, sensuous
and wholly divine
dance

 

know yourSelf
– your own dear flawed and fantastic self –
as the Light
you hid so darned effectively
it took a lifetime of forgetting

before you could remember

again

 

Image: Mirror room built for the Da Vinci, the Genius traveling museum exhibition, based on one of his sketches. The mirror room was just an idea for Da Vinci, a way to see all around an object (or one’s self); the technology of his day couldn’t come close to creating mirrors of this size. I wonder if he fully realised what the experience of being in such a room would be like, the dizzying way reflections of your reflection would stretch off to infinity… did he perhaps reflect upon the all-inclusive Awareness in which this immense view appeared?

Source

 

silence has found me

This poem was originally posted on one of my other blogs in 2009. During some cyber housekeeping I found it again and it spoke to me with the same intensity expressed six years ago. It wants to be shared here on ‘the echoes’. With love.

 

Johann Heinrich Füssli - The Silence

 

silence has found me

its ruthless simplicity
has culled the clutter
from closets
I never knew existed
in the corridors of my brain

its unstoppable tide
has drowned the demon
that danced through my days,
demanding:
control, adjust, fix!

its throbbing roar
has muted the mutterings
of protest,
the pleas for reprieve,
from the screaming ‘me-me!’ myth

its yawning vastness
has swallowed whole
the impostor who once laid claim
to this luminous lifestream:
t i m e

its perfect love
has melted all that I took
to be me
in its crucible of fiery
Grace

and the receptors in these cells
heard the words
the whole world hungers
to hear:

you are loved!

how could it be otherwise
when separation from your essence
is impossible?

 

be silence

and Know

 

Image – Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Silence, oil on canvas, 1799-1801
Source – Wikimedia Commons

Reblogged from this unlit light