bim (11/08/82)
I like poems that are comforting (perhaps sad), and here are some of them:
In silence my hopes rise and sink,
In silence I find my heart's delight,
In silence I walk through eternal night,
In silence I bear my defeat and triumph,
In silence I die,
And in silence am born.
--- anonymous
Have you ever wondered
Why each year you live
Seems to pass faster than the year before?
There's a law at work here
Called Transcendence,
Influencing time and space and consciousness of self,
For each year lived has to be a smaller portion
Of one's experience to date.
To the year-old baby a year is a lifetime,
To the ten-year-old a tenth as much,
To the centenarian but one percent of his experience
While people he knows appear, bloom and die
Like flowers in a garden.
The same is as true of space as time.
The baby learns the inch and foot
Before he knows the yard,
Then, as his horizon expands,
The mile, the acre ...the light-year ...
Progression from the finite
Toward the Infinite, you see.
Yet, as you gain the mile, you do not lose the inch,
Nor, as you gain the year, do you lose the minute or the hour,
For finitude is a tool of learning,
Learning the little before the big,
The simple before the complex.
Growing in consciousness,
In awareness of other beings,
Using the tools of finitude,
The self in space and time,
The while developing spiritually
Through life, through death ---
Death that we cannot live without!
-- from the book "The Seven Mysteries of Life"
The perfect Way is without difficulty,
Save that it avoids picking and choosing.
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.
A split hair's difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
-- from one of Zen poems
==================
.... until the next .....
==================