quotes

life’s passages … 68

winterwalk

Nikon D750… f/1.8 1/800s 35mm 200 ISO

“FRIDAY MORNING, 9 O’CLOCK. People complain about how dark it is in the mornings. But this is often the best time of my day, when the dawn peers grey and silent into my pale windows. Then my bright little table lamp becomes a blazing spotlight and floods over the big black shadow of my desk. … This morning I am wonderfully peaceful. Just like a storm that spent itself. I have noticed that this always happens following days of intense inner striving after clarity, birth pangs with sentences and thoughts that refuse to be born and make tremendous demands on you. Then suddenly it drops away, all of it, and a benevolent tiredness enters the brain, then everything feels calm again …”

cited: Trans: Arno Pomerans, An Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, pg 69.

life’s passages … 65

brendakofford_dandelionproject9118b-webThe ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see the land. The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. When one tree in the garden is sick, you have to care for it. But don’t overlook all the healthy trees. Even while you have pain in your heart, you can enjoy the many wonders of life — the beautiful sunset, the smile of a child, the many flowers and trees. To suffer is not enough. Please don’t be imprisoned by your suffering. … When you have suffered, you know how to appreciate the elements of paradise that are present. If you dwell only in your suffering, you will miss paradise. Don’t ignore your suffering, but don’t forget to enjoy the wonders of life. For your sake and the benefit of many beings.

When I was young, I wrote this poem. I penetrated the heart of the Buddha with a heart that was deeply wounded.

My youth
an unripe plum.
Your teeth have left their marks on it.
The tooth marks still vibrate.
I remember always,
remember always

Since I learned how to love you,
the door of my soul has been left wide open
in the winds of the four directions.
Reality calls for change.
The fruit of awareness is already ripe,
and the door can never be closed again.

Fire consumes this century,
and mountains and forest bear its mark.
The wind howls across my ears,
while the whole sky shakes violently in the snowstorm.

Winter’s wounds lie still,
Missing the frozen blade,
Restless, tossing and turning
in agony all night.

I grew up in a time of war…Once the door of awareness has been opened, you cannot close it. The wounds of war in me are still not all healed. … Embrace your suffering, and let it reveal to you the way to peace.

~Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, pp. 3-5)

life’s passages … 43

if I go to heaven I will forget you,

and

if I go to hell you will forget me.*

In China a person who will not forget the past is described as ‘one who did not drink Old Lady Meng’s soup.’ Borrowed from Buddhist folklore, Old Lady Meng dispenses the Broth of Oblivion to souls leaving the last realm of the underworld on their way to reincarnation. After drinking her soup, the soul is directed to the Bridge of pain that spans a river of crimson water. There, two demons lie in wait: Life-Is-Not-Long and Death-is-Near. They hurl the soul into waters that will lead to new births.

Old Lady Meng is more than a quaint antidote for the Greeks’ Mnemosyne. She embodies a psychological understanding about the forces that promote, indeed demand, forgetting for the sake of ongoing life.  It is not enough to note that water is linked with amnesia in Chinese folklore as much the same way that the river Lethe is associated with forgetting in Greek mythology. The challenge here is to make sense of the distinctively Chinese attachment to remembrance in spite of the benefits of Old Lady Meng’s soul.

In Jewish tradition, too, the benefits of amnesia were acknowledged along with the sacred commitment to recollection. There is a midrash, or Torah-based story, that teaches us a lesson similar to that of Lady Meng: ‘God granted Adam and Eve an all-important blessing as they were about to leave the Garden of Eden: I give you, He said, ‘the gift of forgetfulness.” What is so precious about amnesia? Why would God, who demands fidelity to memory, offer the relief from recollection? Perhaps it is because without some ability to forgive and forget we might become bound by grudges and hatred. To remember everything may be immobilizing. To flee from memory, however, leads to an ever more debilitating frenzy.(40-41)**

source:

*Arang and the Magistrate

Munhwa broadcasting corporation 

**Bridge Across Broken Time

Vera Schwarcz

life’s passages … 37

I was a child,
Nostalgia seemed a small stamp:
I was here…
My mother was there.

When I grew up
Nostalgia became a ticket:
I was here…
My bride was there.

Years later,
Nostalgia was a little tomb:
I was outside…
My mother was inside.

And now,
My nostalgia is a shallow strait:
I am at here…
The mainland is there.

~ Yu Guang Zhong

Orchid… Sony RX100-3 f/2.8 1/640 25.7 800 ISO

“The Chinese expression for “nostalgia” is xiangchou, literally “village sadness.” …xiangchou describes the grief that accompanies the traveler who cannot find a way back to the home village…[it] is not a geographical predicament but a spiritual state of being. First he finds himself outside the mother as a tiny emblem of apartness, then he is the man who contemplates her tomb. The shallow waters of the Taiwan straits are, similarly, not only a spatial divide between the island and the mainland but a reminder of the longing for, and the impossibility of going back to, ancestral roots.” *

*cited: V Schwarcz (Bridge Across Broken Time)

life’s passages … 23 

Looking backward ... I cannot see the ancients of days.
Looking forward ... I cannot see ages yet to come.
Only heaven and earth have remained,
And will remain forever ...
I am alone, I grieve, I drop tears into the dust ~Chen Tzu-ang

(cited: Trans: Anonymous, The Jade Flute Chinese Poems in Prose. The Project Gutenberg

Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/400s 300mm 






					

	
	



			
				



			
	
	
	
	

		

			life’s passages … 22
		

	


			

			

sunday morning with Susan Fromberg Schaeffer 





“… She was staring into the lake, watching the snow as it reached the black water and then vanished. As if the snow never existed. How nature teaches the same thing again and again, she thought. Yet it was so beautiful, the silence, the drift of the snow down from the heavens, the disappearance of each flake as it touched the surface of the lake. Surely they live on, she thought.” ~The Snow Fox, pg. 94






					

	
	



			
				



			
	
	
	
	

		

			life’s passages … 6
		

	


			

			

wednesday morning with Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

















“… And there the mist refuses to part again over that time in their lives, and for a long time, I know nothing about them. Life is like that, a book left in the rain, ink erase by water, entire chapters disappearing. And then the story continues, and you must imagine the missing chapters that went before. Rest assured, it has continued, their story, although no one was there to let me read it. But since I began to write, I have come to know the rest of it, and so I will write it down. …”*





*cited: Susan Fromberg Schaeffe, Snow Fox, pg. 172

					

	
	



			
				



			
	
	
			

			
							
		

	
	

		

			a bit of orange
		

	


			

			

“Different flowers usually have separate meanings, but, as of often happens, flower-symbolism is broadly characterized by two essentially different considerations: the flower in its essence, and the flower in its shape. By it very nature it is symbolic of transitoriness, of Spring and of beauty…










“…Orange or yellow-colored flowers represent a reinforcement of the basic sun-symbolism …”*





*cited:Trans: Jack Sage:  J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols





Image submitted in response to Cee’s Flower of the Day challenge

					

	
	



			
				



			
	
	
	
	

		

			words of wisdom
		

	


			

			

“… the wind bids me to leave you.





“Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.





“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.





“Even while the earth sleeps we travel.





” We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”~Kahlil Gibran*










Paula’s Lost in Translation: Words of Wisdom 





*cited: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. (Alfred A Knopf  1973)

					

	
	



			
				


			
				



			
	
	
			

			
							
		

	
	

		

			saturday morning with Rilke
		

	


			

			

“And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this.  Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.” ~Rilke* 












…





and a saturday morning’s walk through a community garden.  Cee’s FOTD





*(Trans: M. D. Herter Norton, Letters to a Young Poet)