windthread

5 responses to “324 how the “plane” we move in, experience as human beings, is almost neutral, really…will Be and Give Rise to nothing/everything Equally. What appears to be nothing is equally everything and everything is also nothing.”

1. 

   Mo Crow

   January 19, 2014

   “Metempsychosis” by Jane Hershfield
   
Some stories last many centuries,

   others only a moment.
   
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
   
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.
   Yet even today, to look at a tree

   and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.
   There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.
   Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
   ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.
   Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket

   gives off—

   the immeasurable’s continuous singing, 
before it goes back into story and feeling.
   In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
   
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.
   I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
   
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
   
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.
   I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
   
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,

   and then keep walking, unimaginably further.
   This is the last poem in Jane’s book of poetry “Given Sugar, Given Salt”
   http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-hirshfield.html
   & here’s her beautiful quote about the subtle poetics of cloth
   “Yet another part of poetry’s solace, related to “solutio”(), is the increase of subtlety a good poem provides. Subtlety’s etymological roots rest in loom-woven cloth. It is the name we give to thought that is both finely textured and free of range, able to connect disparate qualities into the unified useable fabric of a new whole. Respect of the uncertain is subtlety’s inscape. In subtle response, thought is stitched into place with it’s own undertows, opposites and extensions with a mind that questions and crosshatches its statements and feelings.”
   from “Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise – Three Generative Energies of Poetry” by Jane Hirshfield
   (p 31) Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series: 7
   (solutio – the medieval alchemist’s process of making something workable and transformable by making it more fluid )

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2. 

   grace

   January 19, 2014

   i wish i could listen to you read this to me

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3. 

   Mo Crow

   January 19, 2014

   I have a dreadful voice to loud and raucous but I’ll get Old Man Crow to recite it and send you the recording through the ether

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4. 

   Minka

   January 22, 2014

   I like that….
   What appears to be nothing is equally everything and everything is also nothing.

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5. 

   grace

   January 23, 2014

   it’s Truly the BEST thought i have Ever had.
   might be the Best thought i will have in a LifeTime.

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