Friday, April 14, 2017
Jay Leeming, Lao-Tzu in Exile
Lao-Tzu in Exile
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat,
Here where jackal’s cries grind down the moon.
The way of heaven is an empty road.
Our names are paper ships: they do not float
For long. Success is a great misfortune.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat.
The Emperor’s court was an ill-fitting coat;
It was men shouting in a crowded room.
The way of heaven is an empty road
Vanishing in darkness. The leaves of oaks
Can never fall too late or too soon.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat
For it returns to the sea, as a bell’s note
Fades into the echoing air of noon.
The way of heaven is this empty road
Which I walk. A single strand of smoke;
Stars shimmering above endless dunes.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat.
The way of heaven is an empty road.
Jay Leeming
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat,
Here where jackal’s cries grind down the moon.
The way of heaven is an empty road.
Our names are paper ships: they do not float
For long. Success is a great misfortune.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat.
The Emperor’s court was an ill-fitting coat;
It was men shouting in a crowded room.
The way of heaven is an empty road
Vanishing in darkness. The leaves of oaks
Can never fall too late or too soon.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat
For it returns to the sea, as a bell’s note
Fades into the echoing air of noon.
The way of heaven is this empty road
Which I walk. A single strand of smoke;
Stars shimmering above endless dunes.
At last I’ve chosen water as my boat.
The way of heaven is an empty road.
Jay Leeming
on a dying friend:
death of a girl
(18.04.2017, 00.16 am)
(18.04.2017, 00.16 am)
so
young, so full
with
energy,
all
one cry for help
she
couldn’t ask.
all
bent on destruction
to
flee a world
in
which she saw
no
home for her soul.
all
one protest
against
the slow
death
in prison,
the
way of adults.
all
one warm heart
and
nearness without
and
with words,
open
and wounded.
all
one ecstasy of
suffering and joy,
never
complaining,
growing
towards death
by
a needle, by a needle.
worse
than needles in her
deep sweet child soul,
wounds
and raw rage,
she
run towards
escape,
now dying,
bleeding,
soon
reaching
the other side
and
what Goethe said,
filled
with the East,
digging
in his nose
filled
with Goethe,
what
kind of God to
only
push from outside
to
whirl the universe
circling
around one finger,
she
and i, we didn’t believe.
but
her nightmares won
over
the vision of children
who
are born with future.
each
one lost so young
is
another loss of hope,
a
black finger
swearing
at our sky
and
burning a hole
in
our mind,
in
our faith,
in
our life.
i wish her peace, to reach peace and a long kind sleep
Rumi:
"You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. You're the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You're some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won't have to become coins."
Rumi:
"You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. You're the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You're some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won't have to become coins."
On kindness, Phillips, Taylor,open-heartedness, quotes
kindness translates as "open-heartedness"...
"Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. Bearing other people’s vulnerability — which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it — entails being able to bear one’s own. Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other."
...
"The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened). Vulnerability — particularly the vulnerability we call desire — is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread."
....
It is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can… Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.
On kindness
"Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. Bearing other people’s vulnerability — which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it — entails being able to bear one’s own. Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other."
...
"The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened). Vulnerability — particularly the vulnerability we call desire — is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread."
....
It is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can… Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.
On kindness
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