Poems that help me to Pause- Collection

[Mike]

SOMETIMES

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~ David Whyte ~

(Everything is Waiting for You)

[Connie Weber]

Hi Mike,
Wonderful to read your recent additions to the collection. My sister sent me a DVD of "David Whyte, Live in San Francisco" and I've been watching that over the last couple of days.
Here's a poem from River Flows that appeals to me today, forgive me if it's already here on the blog. I'm at s-low speed and switching pages for searches takes a long while.

Working Together

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

the visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinkin of the way
the intangible air

traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

[Mike]

CARGO
by Greg Kimura

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.

But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”

But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.

The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.

[Mike]

The poet David Whyte recently shared his perspective about this process:

“In our personal pilgrimages there are constant edges that we are asked to go to. And if you shy away from these pioneering edges because you feel that they lead through doorways that are too difficult, you stay in a kind of bland middle. In the artistic tradition, any movement at all is understood to be disturbing and destabilizing, and the process of living is a constant visitation and absence from this edge. There is no human being who can stay at the edge all the time, and you shouldn’t try and force yourself to the edge. We’re creatures of visitation and absence, and we learn through visitation and absence. But, if you don’t spend any time at all in places where you are being broken open, where you are being enlarged, where you are being humiliated, where you’re being re-tooled for a larger world, then you stay in your old life and can become haunted by it.”

[Mike]

“This is an absolute necessity for anybody today: you must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually wonderful will happen.”
~ Joseph Campbell

[Mike]

THROUGH DARK EMOTIONS
by Miriam Greenspan

Pain invites us to change our lives and ourselves,
to transform the way we look at the world.
Though we may want to push out
of our discomfort zone immediately,
despair asks us to slow down, take our time, be still.
Sometimes it compels us to stop everything
in order to painstakingly remap our world.
It is through surrender to the unwanted
that we embrace our vulnerability.
Our helplessness teaches us humility.
When we are humbled by pain, we see
our smallness in the vastness of the cosmos.
The ego gives up its hold on reality,
its paltry attempts to control and to dictate
its terms. It lets go of its agenda.
Its grandiosity thus diminished,
there is an opening, and a larger vision can emerge.

Amazingly, this letting go,
which is a kind of death,
is also one of the great joys of life —
an effort that is the end of all effort.
When we unfurl the gnarled fist of control,
letting the hand open up to receive and to give,
our smallness — once the source of our agony —
becomes a source of comfort.
Whether we listen to them or not,
the dark emotions will emerge.
Once way or another,
they exert their call through the body —
as an act of grace or an act violence,
a cancerous growth or a surge of creative energy.

Dark emotions don’t go away.
They simply come to us in
whatever form we can bear.
When we master the art of staying
fully awake in their presence,
they move us through suffering.
We discover that the darkness
has its own light.

[Mike]

THE GREAT AFFAIR
by Diane Ackerman

The great affair, the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.
Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,
and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

[Mike]

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot ~



(excerpt, East Coker V, Four Quartets)

[Connie Weber]

Beautiful additions to your poetry collection, Mike. Thanks so much for sharing the collection with us!

[Mike]

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.


~ Tao Te Ching ~

(Translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English)

[Mike]

The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.


~ Wendell Berry ~

(Collected Poems)