16
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
~Hafiz, from ‘All the Hemispheres’, version by Daniel Ladinsky
(Thanks to Panhala.net Photo by lukedmillward)
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
~Arthur O’Shaughnessy
(Photo by Victor Periakin)
(Photo by Alexander Safonov)
Mind is like the sky that confronts everything. Difficult to define, mind is everything, though not the ultimate thing.
~Avadhoota Gita, I:9
(Photo by Andris Eglitis)
This too
Something is dying
Something is being born
The shedding
of the old
skin
is but the birth
of a new one…
The void
is
the falling
and flying
simultaneously
but we can only
grasp
one
side of the coin
at a time.
The silence
in between
breaths
whispers
the ephemeral nature
of all:
Peace is in the eye of the storm.
(An old poem of mine, Photo by Viktor Chistov)
The shadows of evening fall thick and deep, and the darkness of
love envelops the body and the mind.
Open the window to the west, and be lost in the sky of love;
Drink the sweet honey that steeps the petals of the lotus of the
heart.
Receive the waves in your body: what splendour is in the region
of the sea!
Hark! the sounds of conches and bells are rising.
Kabîr says: “O brother, behold! the Lord is in this vessel of my
body.”
~ Kabir, Songs of Kabir, (trans. by Rabindranath Tagore)
(Photo by Ben Canales)
Completely freed from yes and no;
great emptiness charged within;
no questions, no answers;
like a fish, like a fool.
~Robert Aitken, Roshi
(Photo by Oleg Klochkov)
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
~T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton
(Photo by lucian olteanu)
“By observing mental states you also become aware of the seven factors of enlightenment. These are: awareness of awareness, investigation of the Way, vigour, joy, serenity, concentration and equanimity.”
~Buddha, Maha Satipatthana Sutta 14-16
(Photo by Sally Gall)
“This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary. It is peoples’ fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary. That we were born and that we face eternal extinction after death is an extraordinary fantasy.”
~Brian Perkins
(Photo by ruslan)
“If you could get rid of yourself just once,
The secret of secrets Would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
Hidden beyond the universe
Would appear on the
Mirror of your perception.”
~Rumi
(Photo: “Journey of the clouds” by Ulrik Hasemann)
“To the mind, the heart and mind are two things, but to the heart, they are one.”
~Stephen Levine
(Photo: by KimbeS)
