“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.” - Rumi
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LOVE
Tell me, what was love like?
Was it round or square,
Short or long or of a shape
One would be proud to wear?
I do not know. I only know
so far as its fold extends
That none who knows its shape can say
Where love begins or ends.
Anonymous (from Korea, 16th Century)
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Loved this poem, thought it was something I could print out and give to participants with their certificates.
Manolita
Ahhh, so satisfying…
Manolita
This the last poem Raymond Carver wrote, it is inscribed on his tombstone.
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
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LOOK INTO THE EYES…
The raw gritty depths of grief.
Forget all the spiritual books
you have ever read,
the greatest book
is written in flesh and blood,
you can feel it deep down
in the raw wounded places of your life,
Forget this poem
it can never be said.
Forget the piety and sweet safety
of a so-called spiritual life,
just look into the eyes
of everyone you meet,
and feel
the raw gritty depths
of their grief.
-Norah Tunney
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This is one of my favorite poems to sit with, by Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists –
The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
http://patschneider.com/pat/the-patience-of-ordinary-things/
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Dear Theresa,
Thank you for this. I am taking it into the morning practice here at the 9-day Practicum in Snowmass, CO. Thinking of you with gratitude.
Warmth, Lynn
Lovely, Lynn. Thinking of you with warmth and smiles, Theresa.
My Class Eight is next week and as appropriate for beginning the series, this seems fitting for the last class as well!
Thank you so much for this, Lisa
I have this poem taped up above my kitchen sink, so that I can wake to it (early) every morning!
Who Are You When You Are Not?
1
Who are you when you are not playing the character you have created? Who are you when you are not imitating, impersonating, or pretending to be someone that you are not? Who are you when you are not trying to please or impress someone else? Who are you when you are not obsessing with what to say, or with the right words to use? Who are you when you are not striving to be perfect, wanting to be someone that you are not?
2
Who are you when you are not thinking about what you like and what you dislike, what you want and what you don’t want? Who are you when you are not wanting life to match your expectations, wishing the world and people in it to be as you would like them to be? Who are you when you are not daydreaming pleasant fantasies, or daymaring scary dramas? Who are you when you are not plotting how to satisfy your cravings?
3
Who are you when you are not who you think you are? Who are you, really?
~ Piero Falci
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I have heard a poem about “allowing” at the recent MBSR in mind-body medicine and the 9 day Fundamentals Training but did not get it in any of the poetry packages. Anyone able to help with either posting it or pointing me towards the poet? Kindly Andrew
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Here is the one I am familiar with:
Allow
By Danna Faulds
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes
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Thank you, much appreciated
Simple gratitude !
Be Thankful
Be thankful that you don’t already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?
Be thankful when you don’t know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.
Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.
Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.
Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.
Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.
Be thankful when you’re tired and weary
Because it means you’ve made a difference.
It is easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are
also thankful for the setbacks.
GRATITUDE can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they can become your blessings.
Author Unknown
I love this poem…Thank you !!!
A poem I wrote for our MBSR course…
Dawn All Day
May
Our neighbors get a rooster,
an orange-faced thug at the new farm nextdoor.
The rooster crows each day at 6 a.m.
5 a.m.
3 a.m.
11 pm.
And any other random hour and minute I might seek quiet.
We lose sleep and patience, each of us.
My children want to start a coyote farm,
or to change the direction in which they practice archery.
We cannot put the rooster on ‘vibrate,’
an alarm no one set in this Right to Farm town.
June
I learn to breathe.
Mindfully, I notice the sensations
in my pinky toe and earlobe.
I watch my thoughts drifting
from my resume to the laundry to the itch in my earlobe,
which was imperceptible
two minutes ago when I tried to notice it.
Lying down, I scan each nerve,
sometimes without falling asleep.
I stand up and the cat is missing,
escaped to prowl the yard.
We search under every bush, finding him
under a bed, startled by a door slammed by the wind.
I was not practicing cat mindfulness, I tell my husband.
“It’s ok,” he says. “You were just being mindful of something else.”
My earlobe.
I haven’t noticed the rooster in weeks,
his crowing just another wavelength.
July
I learn to sit in stillness.
With awareness, I listen to sounds
of the dog’s jingling collar,
the cat’s claws on our carpet,
the hawk that lives atop the dead tree out front.
I listen to the jingling thoughts that send my mind down tangents,
clawing at the fragile threads of my best microsecond of mindfulness
and I try to watch these thoughts like that hawk
But watching thoughts is like trying to towel off
while you’re swimming
In this quandary, the rooster crows.
bringing me back
To this moment,
my breath,
my body.
Without judgment, he crows.
Without judgment, I am present,
listening closely, seeking his next call for my awareness.
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So descriptive, I connected visually with this, thank you for sharing !
A great Thanksgiving poem…
A QUIET LIFE by Brian Wormser
What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.
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