E. E. Cummings - "I am a little church"

art Lois Bryan

 I am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor
of hurrying cities—I do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
I am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are the prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

I am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
—I do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
I am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, I lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

 

Walt Whitman - Song of the Open Road

art Dirk Wuestenhagen

 Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it
to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and
the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that
provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all
under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and
flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you,
you are vacant of them.

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

source text 

 

Rupert Spira - God Is Self-Aware Existence

Oriah "Mountain Dreamer" - To be in Love

I have my own ambivalence about Valentine's Day, but not about love.

 Here's something I wrote a couple of years ago that's still true for me:

There are thousands of ways to fall in love.
At night I open my eyes in the welcoming darkness
And listen to the snow softening all sound.
And I fall in love with being here.
In the morning I smile, grateful for hot showers,

Sweet tea, and cinnamon baked apples.

There are thousands of ways to be in love,
To listen to the song of another’s heart
To hold them with tender attention,
To forgive ourselves for all the moments we’ve missed
In our hurry to get somewhere
Not realizing there is nowhere to go,
That love is already here.

On good mornings,
mornings when I am not distracted or forgetful,
I get up and ask:
How will I make love to my life today?

~Oriah "Mountain Dreamer" House

oriah mountain dreamer. 

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Demand

”Demand is born out of duality: ’I am unhappy and I must be happy’. In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness. When one makes an effort to be good, in that very goodness is evil. Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives. When you demand an experience of truth or reality, that very demand is born out of your discontent with what is, and therefore the demand creates the opposite. And in the opposite there is what has been. So one must be free of this incessant demand, otherwise there will be no end to the corridor of duality. This means knowing yourself so completely that the mind is no longer seeking.”
 J. Krishnamurti

Rupert Spira - So intimate

art Ashley Christudason

 “Enlightenment could be defined as the absence of resistance to what is,
the total intimacy with whatever is taking place
without any desire to reject or replace it;

so intimate that there is no room for a self to separate itself out from the whole,
to stand apart and look at the situation from the outside,
to judge it as worthy or not worthy, good or bad,
right or wrong, desirable or undesirable;

so intimate that there is no room, nor any time,
in which a separate self could take refuge inside the body
and so finds itself without boundaries or borders
pervading the whole field of experience;

so intimate that there is no ‘me’ on the inside
and no object or other on the outside,
but only seamless intimate experiencing;

so intimate that there is no room for a ‘self’ and an ‘other’,
a ‘me’ and a ‘you’, a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, a ‘now’ and a ‘then’.

So utterly now and here that there is no time for time
and no place for distance or space.”

Rupert Spira 

 

A.R. Ammons - Nothing lowly

art Reza Badrossama

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

 

 

Ramana Maharshi - Turn inwards and know your Self first

"All metaphysical discussion is fruitless unless it causes us 

to seek within the Self for the true Reality.
One can, and often does, go through numerous books, a whole library perhaps, and yet comes out without the faintest realization of what one is.
Learning often renders a disservice, especially 

when it causes a person's ego and pride to develop;
these prove to be serious obstacles to progress.
Science is exploring the external universe, when it has not yet explored the Self.
Inventions are being made constantly, they will never cease as we can go on inventing one new thing after another.
What is the use? All this is Maya. Turn inwards and know your Self first.
All these notes you are making of my sayings and so on, are useful for beginners, for friends and to answer the questions of others.
But for yourself, you know that they are only pieces of paper.
Dive into the Self and find all you want to know there!
All controversies about creation, the nature of the universe, 

evolution, the purpose of God etc, are useless.
They do not lead to true happiness.
People try to find out about things which are outside themselves 

before they try to find out

 'Who am I?'
Only by this means can they gain happiness
- not by understanding the whole universe, for the Self is happiness."