Happy Post-Valentine's Day

Someone recently said "There is nothing as whole as a broken heart." I believe this is a quote from a Rabbi whose name I immediately forgot. Thinking about it this morning, and worrying about a friend in the throws of a torrid and complicated love affair, I wondered about the source of the purity of that statement. It seems to speak of what it means to be "poor in spirit," if I may be permitted to blend broadly divergent Abrahamic traditions.

I was remembering how it felt to be in the enchantment of love, the feeling of becoming a better self, a self wealthy in essences far more than my own, bathed in the light of and the allure of the powers of another beautiful soul. I was one, then I was two. That is the glow of a certain kind of romance, a kind of enchantment that feels heavenly until the light of that other soul seeks to wander away on its own accord, leaving us to roast in the hell of our attachments and resentments.

It's a trap we find our way out of when we turn to renounce that finery of the light of another's beam, when, for the sake of bearing only what is truly ours, we find ourselves wealthy in our poverty, the poverty of being just ourselves, with treasure lost, and ambition anulled. Solid ground, common ground, motherland, underfoot. The Truth never wanders away.

thinning a forest, sinking a highway

full sun

Sun reverie. I shot all these one morning last week while filling the car with gasoline at the Hesse station of 4th Avenue, thinking about how the petroleum, if fossilzed algae, is also in a sense fossilized sunlight. How generous is the sun? How many hearts does it have?

here and there

The Juice Box windows tell a lovely story, especially if you are thirsty for a box of snowflakes.

worm speed

Every tree seems to try to teach something by way of the sweep of its gesture and other unpronouncable qualities. It's been a long time since I've walked slowly enough to hear what any of them have to say. I guess that's one benefit of this tenacious cold virus that's going around. It's good, belonging to slow.

Off Season Dog Beach

Rents are low!

18th Street curb literature

I came across 2 dozen various volumes of this publication from 1936. Don't really want them, but they're fascinating.

amnesia

"You became what you became by remembering it, because it was very literally in your body before birth." Martin Prechtel. A mayan belief that beautifully mirrors the Talmudic teaching of the philtrum, the angel and amnesia. It states that in utero, the baby knew all Torah, all truth. But at the time of birth an angel comes and removes the memory by stroking the child above the top lip, leaving the cleft between the nose and mouth. " 'Hush' it whispers to the stirring child, 'Now you must forget.'"* These teachings bear the hope that heaven and all its laws and motions are in our physical body, and the work of life is to remember and recognize it. They evoke the Tibetan sage Milarepa's statement that the body is a tutelary deity, containing secrets and powers and protective efficacy that happens in secret, in the secret world of the kidney, the spleen, the heart, the liver, the lungs, the silent council of the city of the body, as if each one were a passage of forgotten Torah.

*Terryl Givens, When souls had wings: pre-mortal existence in Western Thought.

bay leaf boat on white bean lake

Amazing how fast these cook up when you've let them soak for 24 hours. Since I don't have a pressure cooker (they scare me!) I cook dried legumes the old fashioned way, and they taste so much better than the ones from the can can.

spirea and zion's house of plants

To date, my favorite plate from children's literature: the centerfold of Gene Zion's The Plant Sitter. The house became so full of the organically originating abundance that the walls fell off. I've posted it here before because I can't get enough of it. It's such a beautiful metaphor for some kind of Taoist practice of identifying with your essence and being fed and fulfilled by that gossamer elixer that drapes, sustains and saturates life to the point where all armor and peronality-identificaion concepts and devices fall to the wayside. What color is your parachute? Who cares. When you get to the heart of it, everyone has the same parachute, or no parachute at all, just a long, sustained plunge that inverted becomes an ascent.


Spirea, with buds forming. From spire, shoot, flame, sprout, a stalk of grass.

trees in the house

All these trees did change people's lives, braided souls back together with parts too deep to describe, made our houses magical places, renewed and blessed us in a multitude of ways too subtle for words, as it seems only conifers can. What an honor it is to open one's door, symbolically, to the essence of a tree, the heart and grace of the wilderness, by taking a tree into the house, being blessed by its ancient grace. Thanks to the trees for being as generous as they are and always has been.

I daydreamed about having a tree this year...we never do. We always put presents around the plastic one my mother puts up every year. I passed by trees for sale on the street wondering what it would be like to make one of them a part of my life, a friend that close. I know what kind of magic it would have brought us. I didn't take one, though. Not this year. I guess I don't feel worthy. Or maybe there are other ways to get close to all the blessings and grace, sweetness and generosity the conifers and their relations bring to our lives. An homage is not enough by far to offer in thanks to what the trees have given. What does one do?

klipah

It seems to me lately that you can't really embrace the physical without being spiritually nourished, or the spiritual without becoming intoxicated with the physical, they seem to loop around to continually embrace each other and give rise to one another. The essences of things always speak their names in the domain of the soul.

What I'm scared of, and what makes me so lonely, is wandering in the lost land where the empty shells of intellect are taken for actual things. As if there were an out there out there, unrelated to my soul.

tidings of comfort and joy

Waking thoughts

What asceticism might be about - not abusing the body because of its weakness and corruptibility, but aligning the higher and lower self when they are at odds on account of the thousands of kinds of addictions we suffer. It's a much broader issue than people's dependency on drugs and alcohol, it eventually will goad the subtle and pervasive dependencies like the need to feel perfect or better than others, to buy or wear what few can afford, to always win or succeed or exude specialness in some way. I guess this is what the lady was talking about when she said it was our strengths that we need to recover from, not our weaknesses. I've been waiting for more information on that point.

by the sea

Jamaica Bay, Four Sparrow Marsh, Mill Creek

sky music

I was walking down 18th St. and it seemed to me that the clouds were making something like a staff in the sky. I wondered what notes would roll by, or what kind of music cloud music is, in the traditional sense of the word cloud. I would expect it to warble inaudible tones.

My daughter asked me why water vapor floats, I did my best to answer, but I too wonder why the clouds float on a certain line, there's an invisible barrier there, almost as if someone had put painter's tape over the blue and sponged on some white. Or the reverse, depending on the day's predilection.

yellow leaves

Found it impossible to do justice to this copse of gingko in Prospect Park, the camera sadly compressed everthing, shrunk the spaciousness in the depth created by the light and shadows and sadly diminished the elegant gradiant of green to yellow on the grass below the trees. You had to be there. You have to go there. It's in the Southwest.

Have you been there? Have you been in one of those night scenes that occur lately on streets lined with locust or linden, when, on account of the bright yellow leaves glowing against the night sky, you enter an infrared world? It turns you upside down, rolls you over, breathes it's yellow light into the world, makes every leaf your story of renewel.

november marigolds

more here

he cumbers himself never

safety in numbers

Yesterday I walked through Occupy Wall Street and crossed paths with a man who was audibly evaluating everyone who passed by him on the basis of whether or not they were impressively counter cultural. Somehow he's was not aware that conformity, even upended, is still the problem. I know this man doesn't speak for OWS, that no single person does, but I have to say I've been waiting for the movement to become so cool to itself that it gains a cache of exclusivity. As hard as they try to avoid institutionalization, can they? Institutions, as purveyors of conformity, always lose their souls.

I found an antedote in Emerson, again. A dangerous revolutionary so dangerously revolutionary he becomes immediately forgettable. "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of all the bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his." (Self-Reliance)

Yes, to do otherwise would be a lonely, lonely pursuit. Emerson doesn't talk about that part. Occupy loneliness?

mulcher

Last night my talent for sleeping failed for several hours so I was feeling a little skewey this morning when I passed this scene at the playground. For some reason the sight of this steaming pile of mulch, hot with decay, brought some odd feeling of relief. It's amazing to realize how much is happening in what appears to be nothing, and how much everyone changes every day without trying, modulating and striving for balance quiety and organically, as if the wisdom we can't help but accrue and the goodwill that we can't help but share has a chemical nature. Slowly, silently, so much is happening.

on my lips

Discouraged and bound to petty worries, I see myself praying, praying to pray. As Nachman suggests, praying to find the words for the prayer that life provokes from my heart. Even as I articulate the words, I feel the swell of all that robs humanity of hope crowding around the new baby, this newborn prayer, absorbing its light and cloaking it in doubt and darkness. It's like a race, to keep the prayer always new, always at dawn, to fortify the words against a thousand corrupting influences. Maybe that's why an old sage might stay up all night to pray, to make sure the dawn is pure and nothing blocks its rays.

So, on your mark, get set, go, here's the prayer.

Let the soul of humanity be deeply nourished by the beauty of human souls and the mystery of their radiant origin. As a friend of mine might say, let us become drunk on the event of ourselves and others and warmed by the unseeable light that carries us continually into being.

Amen

the purification of nations

In Zuccotti Park

The double usage of the root "ecos" in this vignette at Occupy Wall Street reminds me that the root is Greek for home. That's all the Greek I know, maybe all I need to know...I was there with my daughter last night, she jumped in and insisted on painting a sign which read "Take Care of Earth," and tromped around carrying it high over her head. I love the fact that she didn't write "the" before "earth." It's more like when you say "give this to mom," you don't say "give this to the mom."

What kind of food, what kind of drink?

Came across this by Hafiz yesterday..few manage to change my perspective on life in so few words.

A Cushion For Your Head

Just sit there right now
Don't do a thing
Just rest.

For you separation from God,
From love,

Is the hardest work
In this
World.

Let me bring you trays of food
And something
That you like to
Drink.

You can use my soft words
As a cushion
For your
Head.

After I read this I asked myself, what kind of food am I given to weather this beautiful disaster? What kind of drink? They are such small, tiny things, a beautiful dream or an instance of precognition, a song that speaks to me in Motherese, words that heal wounds, but more than anything else, the chance to help someone retrieve the soul's inscrutable radiance, the flavor of life, because under these conditions, the home sick soul often finds a camp somewhere between this world and another, and our poverty doubles.

songs

indian summer

well maybe we put the pool away too soon. anyway it has a hole in it. now that it has drainage, it would make a good planter.

fishing line nest

My daugher brought this home the other day, perhaps it was blown down by the latest storm. I imagine that it might be an oriole's nest because it looks like it could hang like a little sack from a tree, and also because it is essentially made from repurposed fishing line. The Baltimore Orioles I see in Prospect Park almost always appear near the lake, darting in and out of the phragmites or perched on tree branches overhanging the lake, and those places are unfortunately rife with abandoned fishing line.

The little one plans to leave it in a tree hoping that it will be reused. It's certainly tough enough for another go.

late season blooms

I came across a healthy zucchini vine growing on the chain link fence on the corner of Propsect and Terrace. I wonder if I will ever catch that gardener in action, I've been admiring the plot for years. Anway, it's good to see a squash plant so healthy, this time of year many of them wither with some sort of fungus the family seems very susceptible too. I have a gourd plant in my front yard, a vine carrying many mature water jug gourds that is now practically leafless having been ravaged by some kind of disease, and the trellis itself is far worse for wear after the hurricane hit. I find it scenic and evocative, but I'm afraid my neighbors may beg to differ.

survivor

The day after Irene hit Brooklyn I was weeding and came across this monarch caterpillar in the yard. So tender, so sturdy. The afternoon before I had come out of the house to find a family clustered around something on the ground under a Linden Tree, a Swallowtail Butterfly perched on a grounded twig, drying its wings. The mother turned to me and without caring who the heck I was breathlessly attested to its beauty.

I know.