Live It Yourself

“My mother should love me—is that true? This is the death of a dream. Can you see one good reason to keep the story that anyone should love you, ever? Have you ever tried to love your perceived enemy? It’s hopeless. Who would you be without this story that your mother should love you? You’d be you, without all the efforting. Without the mask, the façade. It feels like freedom to me.

Wanting your mother to love you is like being in a straightjacket. It’s like being a dog on the floor just crawling and begging, with your tongue hanging out: ‘Love me! Love me! I’ll be good! I’ll be good!’ Make a list of everything you want her to do for you, then do it for yourself, and do it now. This is the real thing. You want it from her? Turn it around and live it yourself.”

~ Byron Katie, from Question Your Thinking, Change the World

Let the Love Begin

Happy is the heart that still feels pain
Darkness drains and light will come in again
Swing open your chest and let it in
Just let the love, love, love begin

~ Ingrid Michaelson

• Ingrid Michaelson’s YouTube Channel
• Rekindle Warmth Toward Yourself and Others
• Mindfulness Strategies for Unpleasant Feelings

To Be Swallowed Up

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

~ Louise Erdrich, from The Painted Drum

@jonathancarroll

Love What You Are

Lines for Winter
by Mark Strand, from New Selected Poems

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know, which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

See also: Lines for Winter recited by Mary Louise Parker

@JSCarroll

A Process of Being Here All Along

Excerpt from “Unconditional Confidence,” by Pema Chödrön:

One of my favorite ways of expressing this attitude of gentleness [in response to fear or panic] is a quote from Trungpa Rinpoche where he says, “It’s not about cultivating one part of our self and rejecting another, but about simply looking openly at ourselves just as we are.”

So when the fear arises, it’s not trying to get rid of the fear, but looking open-heartedly. Dropping the storylines. Turning toward instead of running away. Opening up our minds and hearts because what you open up into is such a groundless, vulnerable, tender situation. But it has its huge heart. It has, not even the seeds of compassion and love, but it is a gesture of love in itself.

It probably isn’t quite accurate to say “love for the fearful mind,” but it is in a way love for a total, unconditional acceptance of your own experience. You would think that that  would be the same thing as indulgence. You would think that would lead to an escalating into self-absorption and only thinking about yourself, but strangely—I think because it’s so raw and because you’re staying with the rawness—it totally demolishes the way that we protect ourselves. The way that we put on a suit of armor or develop a thick skin or go into ourselves and don’t care other people. No tenderness for ourselves translates as no kindness, no compassion, no mercy for others.

So this loving-kindness, this atmosphere of warmth, is allowing yourself to be as you are without justifying it or condemning it. This allowing is a process of being here all along. Not just when we like how it’s going. And as I say, instead of that making you more self-absorbed, it makes you very decent, very sane, and very open to the world and other people.

Put the Lid on the Kettle

You Suspect This Could Be Yours
by Rumi, translated by Daniel Liebert

you suspect this could be yours
with a little contrivance

only death to contrivance
will avail you

something good or bad
always comes out of you
it is agony to be still;
the spool turns
when mind pulls the thread

let the water settle;
you will see moon and stars
mirrored in your being

when the kettle boils
fire is revealed
when the millstone turns
the river shows its power

put the lid on the kettle
and be filled
with the boiling of love.

Obliterating Boundaries

“More than ever, I have come to appreciate how deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others.”

~ Paul Auster, from I Thought My Father was God: And Other True Stories from NPR’s National Story Project

[Thanks, Mary!]

What You Love

Guilty of Dust
by Frank Bidart, from In the Western Night

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
                •
then I saw the parade of my loves

those PERFORMERS comics actors singers

forgetful of my very self so often I
desired to die to myself to live in them

then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained
SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations

love and guilt and fury and
sweetness for whom

nail spirit yearning to the earth
                •
then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

The Head is an Overstated Organ

Robert Patterson, who has Alzheimer's disease, speaks with his wife, Karen, from StoryCorps:

Robert: I feel like I’m the same person, but I know I’m kind of a big load to deal with.

Karen: You know how we talk sometimes about who we really are. What is our essence? Memories are not who you are.

Robert: Well, I think one thing I experience with Alzheimer's is I live in the moment ‘cause I can’t remember what happened yesterday—I can’t remember what happened ten minutes ago, but I’m much more present, I think.

Karen: Do you think about the future?

Robert: I know that there’s probably a bad time that comes in the future. This disease gets more wicked, but I don’t obsess on it. I do a nice job of ignoring it.

Karen: With this disease, you moved from somebody that lived in their head a lot to somebody who lived in their heart.

Robert: The head is an overstated organ; the heart is where all the action is. I remember things that occur in my heart much better than things in my head: having fun with the kids, laughing, our new grandchild.”

Karen: Speaking of this new grandchild, is there something you’d like him to know?

Robert: I would like him to know that I fell in love with him the first time I saw him in the hospital. And every time I see that sweet little face, it just makes me feel good. I’m looking forward to hanging with him and teaching him things that I think are really important. That’s my job for the rest of my life.

Karen: I don’t know if you even remember this, but once we were listening to a book on tape. It talked about the greatest thing you could do if you loved somebody, that you would be the one that was left. And that you would be the one that could care for your lover.

You are not alone. And I’m honored that I’m the one that can care for you. I always will.

Robert: You always have. Thank you.

From Joy to Joy to Joy

for Aaron & Michelle

From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee, from Rose 

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward  
signs painted PEACHES.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into  
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Remembering Life Together

"Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, came to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny's final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen."

~ StoryCorps

Look Back with Firm Eyes

 

Self Portrait
by David Whyte, from Fire In the Earth

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

If We Cantaloupe

To my favorite honeydew, do you carrot all for me?
My heart beets for you, with your turnip nose, and radish face.
You are a peach. If we cantaloupe, lettuce marry.
Weed make a swell pear.

~ Author Unknown

What We Do

Love Poem With Toast
by Miller Williams, from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

[Thanks Jonathan Carroll!]

Time Standing Still

Excerpt from “Time,” Radiolab (February 25, 2005).

Robert Krulwich: And to you, I guess, the joy of time—the deepest most ecstatic version of it—is when you lose it completely.

Jay Griffiths: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s something in prayer, in meditation, in art—and in love, actually— is that people lose that very fretful, ticking-off-sense of clock time. And what you fall into is something transcendent. All that you have to have done is loved somebody to know that. And to hold them for half an hour and you can know that half an hour has lasted an eternity.

Robert: Time standing still at a moment like that is like a really swollen now.

Jay: Yes! Exactly. Exactly. And that in a sense that’s when the moment meets the eternal. That is all that matters is just this moment that you’re holding in your hand. 

What’s a Flower?

 

February
by Dar Williams

I threw your keys in the water, I looked back,
They’d frozen halfway down in the ice.
They froze up so quickly, the keys and their owners,
Even after the anger, it all turned silent, and
The everyday turned solitary,
So we came to February.

First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year,
Then we forgot that we’d planted at all,
Then we forgot what plants are altogether,
and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting and
The nights were long and cold and scary,
Can we live through February?

You know I think Christmas was a long red glare,
Shot up like a warning, we gave presents without cards,
And then the snow,
And then the snow came, we were always out shoveling,
And we’d drop to sleep exhausted,
Then we’d wake up, and its snowing.

And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together.
You stopped and pointed and you said, "That’s a crocus,"
And I said, "What’s a crocus?" and you said, "Its a flower,"
I tried to remember, but I said, "What’s a flower?"
You said, "I still love you."

The leaves were turning as we drove to the hardware store,
My new lover made me keys to the house,
And when we got home, well we just started chopping wood,
Because you never know how next year will be,
And well gather all our arms can carry,
I have lost to February.

Proud Flesh

 

For What Binds Us
by Jane Hirshfield, from Of Gravity & Angels

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Greater than Just Romantic Love

“Part of what this poem meant for me was the idea that somehow I would be in love and that someone would love me back was a profound revelation…I think the very first library book I ever checked out was a collection of poems by E.E. Cummings which included this poem…But being in your body, giving love through your body, getting love back through your body, is something that I think is greater than just romantic love relationships.”

~ Quang Bao

i like my body when it is with your
by E.E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new from

At the Centre

by Har-Prakash Khalsa

Wider and Deeper

“In Zen literature the word intimacy is often used as a synonym for enlightenment. In the classical Zen enlightenment stories, a monk or a nun is reduced simultaneously to tears and laughter as he or she suddenly recognizes that nothing in this world is separate, that each and every thing, including one’s own self, is nothing but the whole, and that the whole is nothing but the self. What are such stories telling us if not that love is much wider and deeper than an emotion? Love is the fruition of, the true shape of, one’s self and all that is.”

~ Norman Fischer, from Taking Our Places