A Poem by Hafiz of Shiraz

Between Our Poles


Who can
I tell the secrets of Love?

Who has not confined their life
to a padded cell?

Look at
the nature of a river.
Its size, strength, and ability to give
are often gauged by its width
and current.

God
too moves between our poles,
our depth.
He flows and gathers power between
our heart's range of
forgiveness
and compassion.

Who can I tell,
Who can Hafiz
tell tonight
all the secrets of
Love?

-translation, Daniel Ladinsky

Thoughts from Summer Movement Monastery, 2009

Patches of stillness,
pockets of gleaming
silence
whirling from within chaos

still moments
absent moments
teacherous moments
steamy moments
hot moments
cool moments
frustrated moments
terrified moments
blissful moments
pure state moments

All receding into Presence

Receding
receding
floating away

in miasmas of
energy

until lost in the great
Sea of Being

Non-attachment is
free
flowing
Accepting of what
is.

On Tango

In tango, bodies merge and surrender to each other.
They glide like herons together, walking here, walking there, floating,
stalking into and through each other with slices of legs and sharp turns,
and the thrust of chests whirling around the centers of each other’s gravity.

Bodies listen to each other with an acutely piquant agonizing sort of ecstasy.

The melancholia of the churning music,
with its scattered notes and jolts of bandeon and sudden shifts,
is mood evoking of sweat-streaked cafes deep in the heart of an older Buenos Aires.
These phlangent shifting vapors of music hold and bind a pair together
in heart-stroking tender yearning, while the movement drives this longing ever deeper into the souls of the dancing dyad.

Tango drips into and through a person. A step. Slide and slide.

The nectar of life flows with tango. Each rythym is a placement into space, a projection into time, and an abandonment to it all.
It is an entering into time and a complete obliteration of it.

It is precision and wildness.

It is contraction concentration constraint
encased in

volatile eruptions of intensity.

Today Inside Mystery

I had an ordinary day today. Woke up, ate breakfast, rested, wrote a poem, ate some more, called a couple friends, and read email. But underneath was writhing in me so much more than simply going through with these daily ordinary events. I find it difficult to put into words what was happening inside of me on some deep level. I find it easier to write in poetic terms, thus I will attempt with the following words:


Flowing
honeyed music
plays inside my chest--
the wrought iron world outside, captive
to itself,
within itself,
churns restlessly from inside
out.

I play with thoughts, touch them
lightly with beams
of focused clarity;
touch pools of pain with
my fingertips,
they are
transformed into vaporous sheets of light.

Wisdom comes to my inner Room
and knocks

I open

tell Her to sit inside me,
even deeper

sit on that lone tree stump in
the center of this forest glade,

deep in the center
of brain and will
and watery emotion.

She comes in, trailing
long fabrics made of
light

and settles into the tree stump
of my center,
sends Roots
down through and into the stump,

and slowly, etched throughout the trajectory of my life,

I see her become the Tree growing out
of the root of my being,
replacing the old stump
which lay fallow,

resurrecting my being
so that
music can once again resonate

in honey tones

deep
inside my chest.

Weaving through Delicacy

The body is ever-so-fragile, if you think about it. Ponder the delicacy of our digestive tract, for example, with its many yards-long smooth tubular plumbing, fine cilia-lined, tender, paper-thin walls, and its many crepe-like folds melting one over the other.

I got a chance to meditate on the incredible vulnerability of the brain, recently, while on a Dancemeditation retreat upstate with 40 others. We spent one exercise focusing on our bones, moving with the bones in mind, moving 'from' the bones. I found that my attention ended up on the skull, the cage for our brain. How little I think about my brain as an organ just like any other organ of the body. I wrote this following the exercise:

"I did some juicy neck movements and then found myself working in the brain. The brain floated through space in its solitary encasement of bone, completely separate from other organs. I began to hear the brain convey its "story" to me. As an organ, it is one of the largest and only one so isolated from the rest. The torso cavity contains a big soup of organs that nestle into each other, communing and connecting. The brain, on the other hand (or should I say, on the other end?), lonely, the most vulnerable of all organs, resides in its own captivity of sorts in a round prison of bone.

I realized it plays a game with itself of feeling superior to the other organs, because it is "above" them, and is separate. But it also is isolated and lonely. And it, too, after all, is an organ just like them.

I decided to send my brain a message of nurturance, loving the brain with gentle movements of the head. I forget I am sending this organ hurtling through space whenever I am churning and whipping my head around in dance."

I realize sometimes, walking through the streets of NYC, just how extremely incompatible an environment a city like this is for our nervous systems, for our whole bodies, really. And yet, in the midst of extremes like dense pavement, towering glass and metal buildings, and eardrum-ripping noise, the body goes on adapting, recoiling, uncoiling, and integrating itself. The delicacy is, somehow, a form of great strength, in the end. The ability to sense and constantly renegotiate space is an amazing gift, in the end is our only chance for survival, whether navigating a hurricane or navigating a crushing crowd in Times Square.

Thoughts?