May Something Comfort You

this isn't happiness™ (Ghosts, Matt Weber), Peteski


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“Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
by Adam Zagajewski (translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh):

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

(From Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators. Translation © 2002, and used by permission of, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 


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One always learns one's mystery at the price of once's innocence.
--Richard Rohr

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"And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it's an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely." 

- Adam Zagajewski


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As you live deeper in the heart

The mirror gets cleaner and cleaner.

~ Rumi

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INSOMNIA

All over the world people can't sleep.
In different times zones they're lying awake
Bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
They worry about bills, they worry whether the shoes they just bought are really too small.
One's husband's died, her son left for college
and she doesn't know how to program the VCR.
Another was beaten by her husband
One is planning a getaway
One holding stolen goods.
One's on the plaid couch in ICU.
His daughter, it turned out
Actually goes have a tumour
Even though the doctor said they'd do the MRI just to rule it out.
The woman on the other couch is snoring
which is strangely soothing
Evidence that people do sleep.
Some are lying on Charisma sheets
Some in hammocks
Some in jail
Some under bridges
One is at the north pole studying the impact of pollution
A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover he once had in Dar es Salaam and the jasmine blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver pin fastened in her hair at night.
Coincidentally, the lover, now in Rome, remembers looking out the window over the sink where she was washing dishes
And seeing him reading in the lawn chair
and she thought how perhaps for the first time she wasn't lonely.
They're all up.
some are too cold, some too hot.
some hungry, some in pain
Some are in hotels listening to people having sex in the next room
Some are crying
One the cat woke up and now she's worried about the rash she noticed in the evening and wonders if her daughter who's afraid to swim should be pushed
Some get up
Others stay in bed
They eat oreos, or drink wine
Or both
Many read
A few make Hallowe'en costumes
Some check their email
They try sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs
They listen to their clocks tick
Smartly, as a woman in high heels
Those who can, cling to their mates
An ear pressed to those neighboring lungs
Like a stethoscope
hoping to catch a ride on the steady sleep breath of the other
to be carried like a seed on the body of one who is able.
Right now in Japan dawn is coming, and everyone who's been up all night is relieved; they can stop trying
In Guatemala though the insomniacs are just getting started
and have the whole night ahead of them.
It's like a wave at the baseball stadium,
hands around the world.
So here's a prayer for the wakeful
The souls who can't rest
as you lie with your eyes open
or closed
May something comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze,
the smell of crushed mint
rain on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes
your child’s birth
a kiss, or even me—in my chilly kitchen with my coat on—thinking of you

~Ellen Bass

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The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

— William Shakespeare

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“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.” 

— Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence
[Maha Blog]

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"'I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera — except that it hurts.'

"Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions. I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way Santa Claus told me it ought to be. But affirming it the way it is — that's the hard thing, and that is what rituals are about."

[Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (from the episode, "The Inward Journey")]
Joseph Campbell


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Meditation is not supposed to be the fabrication or the reinforcement of some particular state, but simply the cultivation of the awareness of whatever is arising in the mind.

— Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche


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The body is a place of violence. Wolf teeth, amputated hands. Cover yourself with a cloak of leaves, a coat of a thousand furs, a paper dress. The dark forest has a code. The witch sometimes dispenses advice, sometimes eats you for dinner, sometimes turns your brother to stone…

— Introduction to The Body in Fairytales 

by Jeannine Hall Gailey


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