To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:

silence of paintings. You language where all language

ends. You time

standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation

of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.

You stranger: music. You heart-space

grown out of us. The deepest space in us,

which, rising above us, forces its way out,--

holy departure:

when the innermost point in us stands

outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other

side of the air:

pure,

boundless,

no longer habitable.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rainer Maria Rilke

My story isn't sweet and harmonious like invented stories. it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dreams, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves -

Herman Hesse

The seed’s journey to flowering
The ivy’s journey from house to house
The moon’s journey into the pond
The eruption of the flower of regret from earth
The downpour of young vine from the wall
The rain of dewdrops over the sleep’s bridge
The leap of joy from the swamp of death
The passage of accident from behind word...

The battle of a hole with the pleasing light
The battle of a stair against the long leg of sun
The battle of solitude with a song...

I saw people
I saw towns
I saw fields and alleys
I saw water, I saw earth
I saw light and darkness
And plants in the light and plants in the darkness
Animals in light, animals in the darkness
And man in the light and man in the darkness

My hometown has been lost
Overcome with fever and with impatience
I have built another house on the other side of house

In this house I feel closer to the moist obscurity of grass
I can hear the garden breathing
And the sound of darkness when dropping from a leaf
And the sound of a light coughing from behind a tree
I can hear the sniffing of water at through the crack of each rock
I can hear swallows dripping down from the spring’s ceiling
And the clear sound of opening and closing windows of solitude...

I am close to the beginning of earth
I pick up the pulse of flowers
I am familiar with the wet fate of water and the green habit of the tree

My soul flows towards the new direction of objects my soul is young
My soul sometimes coughs from joy
My soul is idle
It counts raindrops, the holes in bricks,
My soul is sometimes true as a rock on the road

I haven’t seen two poplars to be enemies
I haven’t seen a willow selling its shade to the ground
The elm tree freely bestows its branch to the crow wherever there is a leaf my passion blossoms a poppy bush has bathed me in the flow of existence

I know the weight of the dawn like the wing of an insect
I listen to the music of growth like a flowerpot like a basketful of fruit I have high fever to ripen
I stand on the border of languor in the tavern
Like a building at the edge of the sea I am anxious about the long eternal waves...

Excerpt from The Waters footsteps ,Sohrab Sepehri

With words, with names still to be found...

There are some who must speak, speak on to the shadow in the corners

About scarring wounds which are hard to heal

On the clearest of nights

And of ponds yawning One might say, in the face of a wall

That would hold them down.

There are some who must hug that very wall, and try to open it

With words, with names still to be found

For that which has no form and has no name.

From Elegies, by Guillevic

I saw many things on earth
I saw a child who sniffed the moon
I saw a gateless cage in which light was fluttering a flight of stairs that love was mounted to the roof of heaven
I saw a woman pounding light in a mortar...

Excerpt The Water's Footsteps by,Sohrab Sepehri

Lets not soil the water. This stream is perhaps running to a white aspen To soothe a lonely heart...

Let's not soil the water:
Perhaps a pigeon is drinking down there
Or a thrush dipping its wing by a far thicket
Or a pitcher being filled in a village.

Let's not soil the water.
This stream is perhaps running to a white aspen
To sooth a lonely heart.
A dervish may have dipped his dry bread there.

... lady has come to the stream.
Let's not soil the water.

Beauty is doubled.

Sweet water!
Clear stream!
People are so affable there!
May their streams bubble!
And their cows produce abundant milk!
Never have I visited their village.
Their hedges must bear God's footprints.
There, moonshine illuminates the expanse of speech.
No doubt, the fences are low in yonder village.
And its inhabitants know what peonies are.
No doubt, blue is blue there.

A bud blossoms! People know it.
What a glorious village it must be!
May its alleyways overflow with music!
The people living by the stream understand water.
They did not soil it
Nor should we.

(Translated by Ismail Salami)

Sohrab Sepehri

 my muse

In the full light of day there are caves

In the full light of day there are caves.

In full sunlight caverns.

Its not always a bad thing to enter them,

to think oneself over in there, and emerge then

charged with something else,

to hallow the day.

excerpt from Repose, by Guillevic Selected Poems

Excerpt Tagore's Invitation, image H.C.Love

Every moment and every event of every mans life on earth plants something in his soul.

"Seeds of Contemplation EVERY moment and every event of every mans life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Still Life, H.C. Love

A voice from the dark called out, "The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster, peace, not only the absence of war."

But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can't be imagined before it is made, can't be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses...

A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light - facets of the forming crystal.

Denise Levertov, Making Peace

"Has the light done you any injury?"

Has the light done you any injury?

Does the light ever take you away?

Is it always the same light?

 - Guillevic/ Levertov, excerpt Enquetes

"The outer being is a means of expression only, not one's self. One must not identify with it, for what it expresses is a personality formed by the old ignorant nature. If not identified one can change it so as to express the true inner personality of the light." - Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga

Light Breaks through...  a dawning of awareness of this inner self - not what you expect... so easy to go back to the old ways... so hard to stay with what moves you into the unknown the unexplored aspects of true light of self. The roles you have played no longer apply here, as you grapple with this you become more of who you were meant to be and yes this can be painful to the ego

that cherishes the false self, and has a fear of whats unfamiliar.

Does the light ever take you away?

"Lost in the light supernal am I and on that light I turn my back ... "  December's seed thought

The sadhana of this yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation... but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by self-opening to an influence, to the Divine power above us and its workings, to the Divine presence in the heart...It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self -opening can come. - Sri Aurobindo

Is it always the same light? 

"A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can."

Denise Levertov

When one enters the true (yogic) consciousness then you see that everything can be done, even if at present only a slight beginning has been made; but a beginning is enough, since the force, the power are there. It is not really on the capacity of the outer nature that success depends, (for the outer nature all self-exceeding seems impossibly difficult,) but on the inner being and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the outer view and consciousness from the inner; that is the work of the sadhana and is sure to come with sincerity, aspiration and patience.  - Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga