"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
-- Jalaluddin Rumi

"Who never spoke before his spirit moved"

Crises come unannounced. Do they give us a glimpse of the deep aquamarine layers within our selves or create a fleeting illusion of there being more to us than the shimmer and go of our daily existence? If it be the former, why doesn't the experience stay? The spirit moves so seldom and so subtly that it is gone before you capture it. And then it wanes and wanes into a figment of the imagination that seems all too unreal after a few days.

If the artist spoke only when his spirit moved (and in the fortunate event that paper-n-pen or mouse-n-keyboard were at hand), how plentiful would his output be? Philip Larkin's average of nine poems a year seems daunting enough, even for a poet who confessed to writing of banalities and the 'decisions of the flesh' rather than anything as intangible as the spirit. Quantity doesn't matter, one might say. But I suspect meagreness of output also reflects the poverty of these intense moments in our small lives. Else there are sparse pinpricks of diamonds among heaps of coal!

Perhaps the roots are yet too far out of my reach, perhaps this is one of those times when I manage to keep doubts at bay to believe in virtual reality. Am I being guided or teased?

 "My heart leaps up when I behold/ A rainbow in the sky."
-- William Wordsworth

Doubtless, the universe is immeasurably beautiful. But are we capable of apprehending this beauty? A disillusioned heart is not proof of the absence of birdsong.

The moon, they say, causes tidal waves, both in the oceans and in the unknown depths of our oceanic selves.

But today the full moon, an awesome floodlight in the sky, brought peace to me at last. When I stop asking, you give of all your tender care, all the more mysterious for your fearful immensity.

Osho again

"Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together. Or, listening to beautiful music, you fall together. Whenever, in whatsoever situation, you become one, a peace, a happiness, a bliss, surrounds you, arises in you. You feel fulfilled. There is no need to wait for these moments--these moments can become your natural life. These extraordinary moments can become ordinary moments - that is the whole effort of Zen. You can live an extraordinary life in a very ordinary life: cutting wood, chopping wood, carrying water from the well, you can be tremendously at ease with yourself. Cleaning the floor, cooking food, washing the clothes, you can be perfectly at ease--because the whole question is of you doing your action totally, enjoying, delighting in it."

On Goodness

From Khalil Gibran's The Prophet:

You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom...

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.
In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.
But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.
And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.
But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, "Wherefore are you slow and halting?" 
For the truly good ask not the naked, "Where is your garment?" nor the houseless, "What has befallen your house?"

The Ball Poem

 (John Berryman, on "the epistemology of loss")

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do?  I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went.  I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless.  Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions.  People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back.  Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour... I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.