Day Four: Ten Days of Persian Influence

Source

THE SKY GAVE ME ITS HEART

The sky gave me its heart

because it knew mine was not large enough to care

for the earth the way

it did.

Why is it we think of God so much?

Why is there so much talk

about love?

When an animal is wounded

no-one has to tell it, "You need to heal"; so naturally it will nurse

itself the best it can.

My eye kept telling me, "Something is missing from

all I see." So it went in search of the cure.

The cure for me was ... beauty, the remedy--

for me was to 

love.

Rabia of Basra (c. 717-801)

 tr.Daniel Ladinsky

-
Rabia of Basra (717–801) was a Sufi mystic who lived in the eighth century. She was regarded as the first female saint of Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam.

You can read more about Rabia here

Day three: Ten Days of Persian Influence

Source

 SOLITUDE

Spiritual joys come only from solitude,
So the wise choose the bottom of the well,
For the darkness down there beats
The darkness up here.
He who follows at the heels of the world
Never saves his head.

Rumi
Tr. Phillip Dunn

This poem reminded me of Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and the way the main character, Toru Okada needed time spent in the bottom of a dry well to restore to him what was lost.

In the begining of the story his cat goes missing, then his wife fails to return home from work and he begins to get phone calls from  a mysterious woman.  He is kind of going no-where, has no goals and little motivation for anything until, like Alice, he falls down a hole.  It is here, buried in the dry well beneath the earth that he begins to find places within himself that transcends the everyday world.  It is in this place of death that he begins to come alive: to feel, to grieve, to know what he cares about and to 'get outside of himself'.  Acknowledging that passivity is not an appropriate response to the shattered world, Okada is forced into a series of very definitive actions that bring his wife (and his cat) back.

Day Two: Ten days of Persian Influence

 SEARCH THE DARKNESS

Sit with your friends; dont go back to

sleep.

Dont sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.

Surge like an ocean,

dont scatter yourself like a storm.

Life's waters flow from darkness.

Search the darkness, dont run from it.

Night travelers are full of light,

and you are, too; dont leave this

companionship.

Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,

dont slip into the dirt like quicksilver.

The moon appears for night travelers,

be watchful when the moon is full.

-Rumi

translated by Kabir Helminski

I've chosen another Rumi passage to reflect on today.  I was struck by the lines "surge like an ocean, dont scatter yourself like a storm".  It has got me thinking about what it means to live deep.  I spend so much time on the internet, looking up anything I want to know but I also usually speed read what I find there and half the time dont even read all the text.  I like pictures.  I like blogs with pictures.  I feel like my attention is diffuse. I think it is getting harder to zoom in and focus; such is my habit of flitting from this to that.  This is not what I think it means to live deep. I want to live deeply. Just like Thoreau, who wrote in Walden

I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

~Henry David Thoreau

The culture I live in encourages breadth.  Lots of experience, lots of difference and diversity, lots of stimulation, lots of everything.  Masses of information.  Masses of material objects. Masses of choice. There isnt much any more that points us towards the depths.  Perhaps understandably because life usually manages to send us there - via pain of one sort of another.  That is where many of us grow and become wiser, deeper.  But how else, I wonder?

So after thinking for a little while these are some of the ways that might lead to "surging like an ocean":
*doing things over and over.  Not always seeking the new or novel
* to know and accept both light and shade within myself and others
* to know my limits. to set limits by making deliberate choices.  To keep boundaries
*to have high hopes and to set realistic goals to move towards these
* to work towards mastery of a few skills rather than trying everything
*to love questions and to live with them
*to be able to sit with pain, mine and others
*to be able to critically reflect.
*To know what I value and let what matters most to me to shape my choices
*to be curious about everything (and respectful and restrained, where appropriate)
*to listen well
*to wonder
*to enjoy solitude

Well, that is just for starters.  I'm sure I will think more about this as the day goes on.  What about you?  What do you think about living deeply and how do you cultivate this within your own soul?

Day One: Ten Days of Persian Influence

SOME KISS WE WANT

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into

me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon

wont use the door, only the window.

Rumi 

translated by Coleman Barks

Lately, she has been longing for that kiss, that fleeting touch. That one that is gone so quickly the mind doubts it ever was. The body though, knows it did.  She felt the flicker of flame, melting that frozen sense that there is more to the world than meets the eye and now she is hungry for more of this. Mystery.  She cant command it. Or control it. Or know when and where it might come or even if it will. And so she breathes.  Deeply. and watches. and waits. and begins to see... to feel. Connected to the sea. To the lilies. to the moon. Most of all to the moon. Connected by an invisible thread of breath ... to life. and this is enough

Ah, that's the life!

My alter ego lives in a tent.  In a forest. By a river.  With a waterfall for showering and a lovely warm pool of spring water for relaxing in. Not far from the sea.  Which is every wonderful shade of aqua and azure you can imagine. She spends her days reading books she borrows from the library, just a short train ride away.  That is, after she has foraged for delicious fruits and fresh herbs. On weekends she embroiders works of arts which sell for just enough to keep her in the style to which she is accustomed and to have a reserve for any, as yet unwarranted medical expenses and the occasional holiday to somewhere new and different.  She doesnt quite know what to make of the real me who lives surrounded by books and fabric and art supplies. Who watches way too much TV - albeit recorded or on DVD so that she doesnt have to watch the adds.  Who lives in the city trying very hard to grow delicious veggies and herbs in her back garden. Wishing she had a swimming pool.   Occasionally the real me is reminded of my alter ego.  Like when she reads about women who live in tents. Like the character in Cloudstreet.  Or like Kathryn Carroll in "Spirit of Progress".  That is when she remembers who she would like to be... just sometimes.
My alter ego would not get cold and die from pneumonia like Miss Carroll does.  Nor would she make the newspaper, or be the subject of a painting. Even one that wasn't famous.  She would also have lots of friends.  Four legged and two legged.  And she would not turn away from the kind Mr Skinner who brings her fresh milk, cream and butter.  She would be feisty though, just like Miss Carroll, and self sufficient, and free.  She too would have a light in her tent at night, casting a soft yellow glow of hope for those few who might chance to see it, and who might find comfort in it.  Just like Miss Carroll, she has a lovely nephew named Michael but unlike Miss Carroll, she also has a lovely nephew named Jack.  And she likes visiting art galleries.



The Spirit of Progress, a work of fiction by Steven Carroll, is inspired by Carroll's great aunt Kathryn who was the subject of Sidney Nolan's  1946 painting Woman and Tent, housed in the Nolan Gallery, Canberra, a copy of which is shown above.

How many?

If the Inuit people have 97 different words for snow, I wonder how many words surfers have for waves?  I dont know the first thing about surfing but even I can see that the surf is different today than it was yesterday.  Today its frothy and fizzy.  The aqua waves are marbled with white veins.

 Yesterday the waves were clear enough to see through and the white fluff on top looked firm, like uncooked meringue.

They were like this the day before, as well. Crisp and clear.

Everyday they are beautiful to me. I love hearing them thunder and roar.  Especially at night but all day long as well.  There is no letting up. I think about breathing in all that extra oxygen, imagining the good it is doing me.  A week here at Tuross Heads (NSW) is every kind of relaxing unwinding bliss.  No wonder the locals want to keep this place a secret.

Slow reading

Photo from Flickr: click image to go to photographer's photostream

I've never forgotten the school holidays when I had to spend days lying on my bed in a darkened room.  Not being able to read anything. It was terrible. Boring. Painful. I'd strained my eyes reading, and how they hurt!  I dont imagine the torture of that experience did much to curb my book worm ways, though it probably did for a while.  All my life I've been someone who never goes anywhere without a book, reading at any opportune moment.  Well, that was until I began working in a job that required me to spend hours each day in front of a computer screen.  I did that job for five years and in that time I reckon I could count the books I actually finished reading on my fingers, perhaps I'd need a few toes.  It wasnt that I lost interest in books. I'd want to read. I'd start but I just couldnt get very far into them before losing interest. Unless I was on holidays.  It was most unlike me.  My pattern of reading a book a week with several on the go at any one time came to a halt. I'd look at pictures in magazines and in the newspapers but seldom read all of the accompanying text.  I discovered I liked reading poetry - as long as they were not too long.  Just postcard sized poems that i could mull over. It has now been a year since I began different work where I dont spend most of the day in front of a screen. I'm so relieved to discover that I can still lose myself in a book. Returning to reading has taken time though.  I still dont read anything like the volume I used to.  But I feel I am finding my way towards the pleasure I used to know and I hope that in time, I will get back to the level of reading I once enjoyed.  Heaven knows, the list of books I want to read just keeps growing.
During my non-reading phase I did sometimes wonder what had happened to me.  In one of the week end papers i found an article that offered a very acceptable rationale to me. One that would suggest I wasnt alone in finding it difficult to settle into reading lengthy texts.  Tech expert Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brain, argues that our "our hyperactive online habits are damaging to the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information".  The technologies we use to find store and share information can reroute our neural pathways.  Carr describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by "tools of the mind" - from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock and the computer.  Discoveries in neuroscience have shown how the human brain makes patterns for expediency, and how it changes in response to our experiences.  The internet has made us very adept at scanning and skimming but in the process, Carr argues, we are losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation and reflection.  The internet invites rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.  Research has shown that office workers glance at their email inbox 30 or more times in an hour.  My own experience causes me not to doubt this.  Sometimes I would turn off the email notification if I was needing to get something done by a deadline but most of the time, I have to admit, I enjoyed the distraction of checking emails. Tracy Seeley, an English Professor at the University of San Fransisco has noticed that many of her students have difficulty concentrating on a text for more than a minute at a time.
Our technology has trained us away from slow concentrated reading.   Some who have recognised this advocate for slow reading. Tracy Seeley has a blog about it.   Nicholas Carr does too.  Ramona Koval mentioned it during one of the Bookshow episodes last week.  Apparently,  there is a whole movement towards slow: slow food, slow travel and now slow reading.  When applied to reading it's about the practice of the intentional reduction in the speed of reading for the purpose of greater comprehension, learning or just plain old pleasure.  It's about reading things that take a bit more time: reading things fully rather than just skimming. And for me its about taking a book with me to read while I wait for a friend, an appointment, a tram.  It's about reading in bed before I turn out the light and sometimes turning off the TV and curling up on the magic carpet of my couch, ready to be other than who i am, just for a brief while.