Posted on: May 10, 2009
Comments Off
Athena and Heracles, by Douris. 480 – 470 BC.
Peering into the mountain
The universality of spirits
Spirits
For tens of thousands of years
Peering into the cave
It’s all there
All there is
It has been that way
Again and again
For thousands of decades
With new incarnations
Every now and then
Here and there
What makes us so sure
Ours in the only one?
…
[More...]
Posted on: October 18, 2008
Comments Off
Emily Dickinson. 1846. Photo by William C. North
[Guest blogger Tony Jones]
Religiophobia
Blindered by heat-flashes
of banality; the sacred barnyard
tells us nothing except it has
no room for us without our becoming
at once greater and smaller.
This is what it means to have
the mind of Christ; to become as a child
with the heart-space of a 1000 goslings,
arrow-tipped with lightning.
One of the reasons it’s hard to write good religious or spiritual verse — and I am well aware that the terms spiritual and religious are not synonyms — is that the “truths” of religion/spirituality are so public — known by millions and millions — of people that to even utter them in their publicly known form is to start from the realm of cliché and banality. This doesn’t mean those truths really are banal, it just means that they have been pounded deep into the wagon-ruts of collective consciousness, where they often lie lifeless, or at least embalmed.…
[More...]
Posted on: October 5, 2008
Comments Off
[Guest blogger du jour Tony Jones]
Master Po and Kwai Chang Caine
What’s the mystique about mysticism? (Or is the question itself just a misleading fork in the road, excluded middle term, dun leaves dead on a worm-ridden tree, as in “not seeing the forest for the … ”, regarding spirituality).
When I watched Kung Fu as a young child, then as now I was entranced by the mixture of action and the ambiance of a kind of deep inner peace that drove it. I think I missed the master-pupil “grasshopper” dynamic, but I was only two or three years old. But then again, I have never really been content with the notion of master and pupil, either in being a student, or in being a teacher.…
[More...]
