Day: February 15, 2017

Will they need to learn the alphabet

Our minds can range  like leopards in the wild
Tracking down ideas  and soon beguiled
But when our body speaks its needs are plain
Oh,no,it’s that damned broccoli cheese again

Does the one who cooks deserve no praise?
It’s hard to be original every day
And cheese sauce needs both time and care and  skill
And broccoli’s  original as God’s will.

Without a body there will be no mind
Precisely where it lives is undefined.
But mindlessly we stuff ourselves till gross
And care not if our mind  becomes a ghost

The  thoughts of Kant and Wittgenstein can charm
Like lovely ladies on a man’s strong arm.
But even  men like this will need to eat
And wash their underarms  till they smell sweet

The animal we are has many needs
On good food and talk we each must feed
There is no contradiction  in  the mind
And if we have none ,it is hard to find!

To despise the body is an evil  thought
For through its cells the love of Good is sought.
The mind  is not removable we find
By its  proper use we ‘ll be less blind

But starving refugees and battered wives
Are most concerned to save their natural lives.
And only when their basic needs are  met
Will they  need to learn the alphabet.

 

 

Spiritual poetry

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68606

 

 

Spiritual Poetry

22 poems about spirituality and enlightenment.
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

But, no, I’ve been asked to choose, to recommend. The poems I suggest here are this moment’s choices, not “the best spiritual poems” (a phrase weighing nothing in so intimate and personal a context). The “gates” are an equally personal selection of entrance points into spiritual life. Some of the poems are well known, others less so. Each stands representative of many others. Each also, for me, plunges into the heart of the matter at hand, bearing witness in some essential way.

 

GATE 1. PERMEABILITY
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) [translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]
The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.

The poem, by the greatest woman poet of classical-era Japan, is one I first encountered in 1986 while working with Mariko Aratani, my co-translator for The Ink Dark Moon. At first, I had the poem’s words, I had the poem’s grammar, but its meaning eluded. Once it clarified, this became for me a life-altering poem, transforming my relationship to safety, permeability, awakening, and the mouth of the lion.

How illness or strain can affect us

 

 

 

Lepanthes_adrianae.jpghttps://thetroublewithillness.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/illness-can-push-people-into-the-paranoid-schizoid-position/

This interests me as I can see it might have political relevance in cases /conflicts such as Israel-Palestine as well as in sick people.It makes one  be unable to apologise or see another person’s point of view

 

 

Illness can push people into the paranoid-schizoid position

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There are two different ways of responding to anxiety; the paranoid-schizoid  (p-s) and depressive positions.

In the paranod-schizoid position, anxieties are about life and death.   There may be underlying panic and massive fears.

  • time stands still
  • we see things as ‘you OR me’ , ‘your life OR mine’, not ‘you AND me’.
  • selfishness may save our life
  • consideration for others is cut off and out
  • we split people and things into simple categories, depending on whether they will keep us alive or threaten us
  • the capacity for reasoned thought is lost
  • apology is impossible  – responsibility is so frightening it has to be disowned
  • huge, life-threatening self-blame is covered up by blaming someone else
  • people can be afraid they should pay for their sins with their lives – so in order to save their lives, they may deny their sins.
  • forgiveness is not an option
  • other people may be felt as dangerous, threatening, intrusive.
  • other people may be used or manipulated or threatened, as a way of getting rid of terrible anxieties into them and out of the self
  • other people may be seen as cartoon characters:  Perfect Angels or Monsters, Saviours or the Devil himself.”