You Keep Falling

Photo: Jake Rajs, "Cherry Blossom," Washington DC

Love Recognized
by Robert Penn Warren

There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.

How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
Was I yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law abiding citizen.

But you, like snow, like love, keep falling,
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.

Silence.

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Robert Penn Warren reads his poem "Love Recognized"

How One Surrenders to the Emptiness

Buoyancy
by Rumi, version by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best of luck
we could have. It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

Row for Your Life

West Wind #2
by Mary Oliver, from West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable
pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life
toward it.

If We Didn't Try to Hold the Flux

Surviving DC, July 22, 2002

"It's a tension, I think, because what both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things that we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter, that there's this constant impermanence, this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years that we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment. 

I have to say, my feeling about it is, part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's going to disappear. We know it's impermanent. We know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now. For me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. We know they're going to go. We know that in twenty years from now, if they treat us with affectionate contempt we'll be doing really well. But that doesn't change the fact that right now, it's this child and not any other child in the universe. Just this one.

I think there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that the fact that we can do both of those things--we recognize the impermanence, but that we feel the attachments--that seems to me to give our life its very special texture."  

~ Alison Gopnik, from "Object Lesson," Radiolab, Season 12: Episode 8

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See also: 

• Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (library)
• Instincts

Same Old Same Old

Can you fall in love with the things you only know, 
the things you may never touch?
If I truly believe that things can change, 
will I wake up to something different?

From "Breakfast with My Shadow" by Cloud Cult

Breakfast With My Shadow - Cloud Cult from Motion 117 Productions on Vimeo.