Please
let me remind you,
who study the inconceivable:
Your time is running fast.
Don’t ignore
it.
Posts Tagged → death
the myriad things are peaceful
Haven’t you
read the ancient worthy’s saying?
“The white clouds are clear and still, and the rivers
flow into the blue sea. The myriad things are
originally peaceful, but people
make trouble for
themselves.”
After all,
this statement is completely
accurate and true. If you know what it means
as soon as you hear it mentioned, you can use it to pass
through birth and death to freedom and no longer be obstructed
by the psycho-physical nexus. You will be like a bird getting
out of a cage — independent and free. With a single
stroke you put a stop to all other actions and
talk, and you no longer fall into
secondary views.
on this date a lion rose to heaven
Rory James Andrew Young
21 May 1972 Lusaka, Zambia
26 April 2021 Fada N’gourma, Burkina Faso
🐆
As good a man
as I have ever known or am likely to
was killed on this day two years ago. Please
read about his monumental life,
and please send him
your love.
Prayers for the dead
are on the same footing as gifts for the living.
The angel goes in to the dead with a tray of light, bearing a cloth of light,
and says, ‘This is a gift for you from your brother so-and-so,
from your relative so-and-so.” And he delights in
it just as a living man rejoices
in a gift.
Ibn al -Ghazali
🕊
after we resume our original nature
When the water returns
to its original oneness with the river,
it no longer has any individual feeling to
it; it resumes its own nature, and finds
composure. How very glad the
water must be to come
back to the original
river!
If this is so,
what feeling will we have
when we die? I think we are like the water
in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect
composure. It may be too perfect for us, just now, because
we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our
individual existence. For us, just now, we have
some fear of death, but after we resume
our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
don’t die
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
24th Poet Laureate of the United States