Some stuff I want to share

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--
I keep it, staying at Home--
Within a Bobolink for a Chorister--
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice--
I, just wear my Wings--
And instead of tolling the bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton--sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman--

And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last--
I'm going, all along.
                  --Emily Dickinson

"Prayer"
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
                  --Galway Kinnell

"An Invisible Bee"
Look how desire has changed in you,
how light and colorless it is,
with the world growing new marvels
because of your changing.

Your soul has become an invisible bee.
We don't see it working,
but there's the full honeycomb.

Your body's height, six feet or so,
but your soul rises through nine levels of sky.

A barrel corked with earth
and a raw wooden spile
keeps the oldest vinyard's wine inside.

When I see you,
it is not so much your physical form,
but the company of two riders,
your pure-fire devotion and your love
for the one who teaches you.

Then the sun and moon on foot behind those.
                              --Rumi

     "For this open-air sanctuary that a lot of us live in, without buildings, or doctrine, or clergy, without silsila (lineage), or heirarchy, in an experiment to live not so much without religion as in friendship with all three hundred of them, and all literatures too. It is a brave try for openness and fresh inspiration.
     It is what sent Whitman out walking around Brooklyn. His mother said, He goes out and he comes back in: that's all he does. It is what prompted Thoreau's rambling retreat to Walden Pond. It is Huck floating on the river at night. Melville looks out his study window in the Berkshires and writes the ocean of Moby Dick. Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises slips into an old Spanish church to listen to his thoughts. Wallace Stevens speaks from inside the intensest redezvous, where God and the imagination are one. Joseph Campbell follows his bliss, researching myth and symbol in the New York Public Library. Gary Snyder works on an axe handle in the high Sierra. Annie Dillard stares down into Tinker Creek. REM's Michael Stipe stands on stage, Losing my religion. Iris DeMent suggests that we Let the mystery be. All are participating in this global amateur production. We are lucky to have so many luminous figures in this country, but this lineage is not American. It comes down through such varied innumerable strands that it cannot be called a lineage at all.
     The records of wandering kept by Basho, Cervantes, Homer, and Allan Ginsberg. Mary Oliver's faithful early morning walks with a rainproof surveyors notebook in her hip pocket. John Muir and Audubon. Anyone who heads out to see what happens, just to enjoy the trip. Needn't go far, needn't leave town. Rumi says that merely being in a body and sentient is a state of pure rapture. Form is ecstatic. Those who know that are the ones I'm talking about, and to. Those photographers who love wilderness and the depths of a human facde. The radiant noticing of animals that shows in the cave drawings. It comes through Van Gogh and Cezanne, the way they saw splendor transpiring through what appears. Dutch light. Through Blake. All religions are one, saith Willy, and energy is eternal delight. Hopkins. It comes through south India and the Sufis. Indigenous rock art. Tibet. Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Bodhidarma, Rinzai, and that homely flower Mahakashyap was handed by his friend Gautama. That theology flower of suchness might be a logo for it. No, no names. No flag. Dreamtime drawings. Chekhov's holy chuckle, Dostoyevsky's vivid seekers. The great Greeks and their love of impossible human conversation. Socrates and Plato are saints in this tradition. Saint Francis and my grandson Tuck, too, he will be suprised to know. All children. Gurdjieff. Ramakrishna. Camus and Beckett. Plotinus. Neitzsche prancing naked."
                                           --Coleman Barks, introduction to A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings.

So, I hope you guys enjoy the above. I'm stuck in a building with internet (oh no!) waiting out a wave of back pain, and I found this book.  Normally I don't go in for intro's. Usually I decide I'm only interested in the subject of the book, not some editor's discussion thereof. At best, they're often boring, and at worst, they color your ability to innocently approach the real content.  However, I decided to look at this intro, and MAN!! The poems are from the intro (except the Rumi, which is today's reading), and the excerpt... that was a hard choice. Frankly I thought about putting the whole intro on here. It's exstatic poetry in itself, in my opinion.  Anyway, I highly suggest, if you see a copy of this collection of Rumi, that you read the intro for yourself.  Lovely. :)

Nothing new to report here. It's hot. Thinking about splurging for a hotel and the end of this trip just to spend a day on ice (aaaaaair conditioniiiiiiiing......) Generally, all is well here. Grateful for a wonderful morning ascension and then finding this book. Grateful for the grace given to allow me to see this world through unveiled innocent eyes. Grateful for the mystery and the intimacy of "being in a body and sentient." Somehow grateful for pain and fear, as gifts... but I can't figure out how to explain what I mean by that.  Grateful for faith and the immaculate Presence of God. Grateful for the big oneness, of these trees and sunbeams and all the people mentioned above. "Sticks and stones are both made of energy, like love and language. Eddington says the universe is less like a thing than it is like a thought." (Again, Barks) Eddington isn't the only one to say this... what a thing!! That all this is but a though of the One Great Mind, and that there is no such thing as "me" and "that"...  Yummmmmmmmm....