On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

         ~ Kahlil Gibran

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light, 

of giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its 

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything 

I have ever learned

in my liftetime

leads back to this:  the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation, 

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver

On Awakening

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth.
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep!

Rumi

Photographer:  Norman Koonoo, Nunavut

On Love

On Duality

Because suffering is impermanent, 

that is why we can transform it.
Because happiness is impermanent, 

that is why we have to nourish it. 

                                                            
                                                                  Thay, 10th June 2014

On Duality

How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Do not try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire.
Do not wash a wound with blood.

No matter how fast you run, 
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it's in front.

Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.

Rumi

On Healing

 

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed - blessed illusion -

That I had a beehive 

Here inside my Heart

And the Golden Bees

Were making

White combs and sweet honey

From my old failures.

Antonio Machado

On Courage

The bravery is believing in yourself.
 
And that nobody can teach you.

On Diversity

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things,

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stiple on trout that swim;

Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches wings;

Landscape plotted and pierced - fold, fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear, tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who know how?)

With swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

On Connection

Ah, not to be cut off

Ah, not to be cut off, 

not throught the slightest partition,

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner, what is it?

If not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke

On Living the Questions

I would like to beg you

to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Art: Justyna Kopania

Togetherness

Come sit down beside me,

I said to myself.

And although it didn't make sense,

I held my own hand

As a small sign of trust

And together I sat on the fence.

On Answers...

On Awareness

Self Awareness 

is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Robert Heinlein

On Moving Past Limitations

On Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not an emotion,

It's a decision.

Tear up the IOU

Grandfather Great Spirit

  Grandfather Great Spirit

All over the world the faces
of living ones are alike.

With tenderness they have
come up out of the ground.

Look upon your children
that they may face the winds
And walk the good road to the Day of Quiet.

Grandfather Great Spirit
Fill us with the Light.
Give us the strength to understand,
And the eyes to see.

Teach us to walk the soft Earth
as relatives to all that live.

On Understanding

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, 

and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever 

explaining things to them.”  

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Artwork by Mattijn-Franssen

Laundry Day

On Time