Posts Tagged → love

while you are eating a piece of bread


 

While you are eating

a piece of bread, try to recall

the events that collaborated to let

this take place. The ovens heat that baked

the bread, the plowed earth before that, sunlight,

rain, harvest, the winnowing, the being carried to and

from the mill, the complex idea and the build­ing of the mill

itself. The many motions of weather in the turning of four seasons.

And don’t forget the knife that cuts the bread, the metallurgy and the skill of

forg­ing that blade, and your teeth, those original grinding devices. Then there’s

your stomach digesting the crust and there’s the rest of your body being

nourished, each part in unique ways. Two hundred and forty-eight

bones, five hundred and thirty muscles, three hundred

arteries, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, your organs

and limbs, your brain. As the bread dissolves,

many intelligences within you are deciding

and peacefully agreeing on how to

divide the benefits. If there were

discord, you would feel pain

and cry out, but

you don’t.

 

Now notice the unified

human awareness thoughtfully

living inside your body with a soul

in communion with other spirit-intelligences.

Observe how it sits at the junction of two worlds as

a human being looking with kindness on other human

beings. Some say this is the cul­mination of the body’s long

development and the beginning of the next transformation,

that you that live with gratitude for food and thank­fulness

also for any difficulty, pain, or sudden disappointment,

seeing those too as grace, that you live inside and

outside time as an angelic breadeating witness

taking in this myriad convergence of

providential motions and that you

are in yourself an individual

soul being made from

divine wisdom.

 

Bahauddin, father of Rumi

the drowned book

 

I was like an old tree until we met

stilted koans are all monks have

Ikkyü also had a hermitage in Kyoto which he called Katsuroan (Blind Donkey Hermitage), and often stayed at Daitokuji. But increasingly, to the point of anguish, he became disgusted with worldly carryings on at the main temple, shuddering at the…frantic hustling for donations:

 

Yoso hangs up ladles baskets useless donations in the temple

my style’s a straw raincoat strolls by rivers and lakes

*

ten fussy days running this temple all red tape

look me up if you want to in the bar whorehouse fish market

 

In 1471, when seventy-seven, Ikkyü revealed his passion for a blind girl, an attendant at the Shuon’an Temple at Takigi. He wrote poems about their affair, some farcical, some very moving. He was self-conscious at the oddness of an old zen monk falling for a young woman, but they spent years together, Ikkyü’s feeling for her growing in intensity:

 

I love taking my new girl blind Mori on a spring picnic

I love seeing her exquisite free face its moist sexual heat shine

*

your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh

green distances of your blindness

*

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom

now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you

 

Ikkyu

poems translated by stephen berg in crow with no mouth

prose introduction by lucien stryk

wikkyu

🪷

 

this is what you shall do

fluid awareness

 

This

is what you

shall do: Love the earth

and sun and the animals, despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks, stand up for

the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor

to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have

patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat

to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,

go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young

and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open

air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you

have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss

whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall

be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only

in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and

face and between the lashes of your eyes

and in every motion and

joint of your

body.

 


Walt Whitman

 

the reality is that we are safe

wholly absorbed in the breath

 

When we’re holding

the mental formations of despair

and suffering, we can look and see that 

this has been born from that; suffering is born

because we are in touch with an image from

the past. The reality is that we are safe,

and we have the capacity to enjoy

the wonders of life in the

present moment.

 

When we recognize

that our suffering is based on images

instead of current reality, then living happily

in the present moment becomes

possible right away.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh