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 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 eye, 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 heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.
Self-Protrait is a poem David Whyte(1955) wrote after looking in the mirror one morning -- 'something' was calling him to stand up, wake up, and be honest about what his life was needing him to be and do. The whole theme of Whyte's poem is authenticity. David whyte was born and raised in the north of England, studied marine zoology in Wales, and trained as a naturalist in the Galapagos Islands. He now lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two children, and works full-time as a poet, reading and lecturing throughout the world. He is one of the few poets to bring his insights to bear on organizational life, working with corporations at home and abroad. He has published four volumes of poetry, and has also written two best-selling prose books.
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
"The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 in his collection Mountain Interval. It is the first poem in the volume, and the first poem Frost had printed in italics. The title is often misremembered as The Road Less Traveled, from the penultimate line: “I took the one less traveled by”.
Be still Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try To speak your
Name. Listen To the living walls. Who are you? Who Are You? Whose Silence are you?
Who (be quiet) Are you (as these stones Are quiet). Do not Think of what you are Still less of
What you may one day be. Rather Be what you are (but who?) be The unthinkable one You do not know.
O be still, while You are still alive, And all things live around you Speaking (I do not hear) To your own being, Speaking by the Unknown That is in you and in themselves.
"I will try, like them To be my own silence: And this is difficult. The whole World is secretly on fire. The stones Burn, even the stones They burn me. How can a man be still or Listen to all things burning? How can he dare To sit with them when All their silence Is on Fire?"
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist Monk, poet and peace activist. He was one of the first Christian monks to take an active interest in the spiritual traditions of the East. He was especially drawn to Buddhism because of its profound understanding of the human mind, and its placing of spirituality in the recesses of the human heart, rather than in outer forms and rituals. Merton was not only a monk but also a prolific, bestselling author and a gifted poet. In this extraordinary poem "In Silence", Merton tells us that even the stones speak, that they know who we are, and that they will tell us if we can be still enough to hear them. The universe, then, is alive with an intelligence that mirrors the light of knowledge that lives in us. Not the information in our frontal lobes, but the intelligence of the heart's deep core. If we can be still enough -- an that if is everything -- Merton says we might hear the stones speak our own true Name.
In 1947, his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a surprise best-seller, and profoundly influenced the immediate postwar interest in monasticism and religion. In the sixties, he became one of the first authoritative Christian voices to take a serious interest in Eastern spirituality, especially Buddhism. He translated Buddhist poets, and in 1968 attended an interfaith meeting of monastic superiors in Bangkok. On that same journey, he met the Dalai Lama in India, and they recognized each other as kindred spirits. Tragically, Merton was electrocuted accidentally in his Bangkok hotel room, and died there.
