I took shape in the universe, and alighted here, on blue planet.
Have I been diverted by some misfortune, fooled by some illusion?
For in rest or in exaltation, emerge
other images, other feelings, other spaces, other impulses,
which bring to me the fugitive and moved perfumes of a remembered elsewhere.
I am seated astride here and elsewhere.
Everything here is stranger to me than elsewhere.
Here is submerged by clamours and amazements;
elsewhere is irrigated by friendship, scintillates from enthusiasm,
is shrouded in silence, and is patient ad infinitum.
Elsewhere and here are meeting in an intimate and secret haven.
(Wherever you are, clicking twice takes to the top of this page)
Passer-by,
I know you are.
This log, you see, is a simple and intimate dialogue.
You can, if you wish, make your voice heard, here in comment, or else
at this place.
No matter!
For I am not seeking,
but scanning.
(Passing the cursor over the words which are underlined allows you to check their meaning.)
Three days ago, as I had started again to read the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, in the beautiful translation of Charles Grolleau (from a translation by Edward Heron-Allen), it occured to me suddenly to open the book at random, asking it seriously to offer me a message as a gift. And I came across the 77th quatrain:
Drink wine, that will banish thy abundant woes,
and will banish thought of the Seventy-two Sects;
avoid not the alchemist, for, from him,
thou takest one draught, and he banishes a thousand calamities.
That quatrain, I understand it so:
“Enjoy your living, remember that you are happy now, and henceforth everyday. Towards religion, you are now in harmony with yourself, having reached an attitude suitable to you; what you had to learn belongs to you now, and it is time for you to move to the next subject. Move towards joy!”.
Anna Moï, L'écho des rizières (The echo of the paddy fields):
“Mistakes are seldom fatal.
They're even rather happy, reflecting thus a subjective view which does not match other people's reality.
During the time necessary to correct it, they give to things an out of step identity: a freshness.”
Is the fact that an out of step identity is given to things a mistake?
And if there is an error, isn't it the fact of believing that an error is possible?
And if there is no mistake, there is thus nothing to correct.
A proverb says: “Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum / to err is human; to persist (in error) is diabolic.”
What is diabolic belongs to the Devil, in other words to the one who divides.
Error (mistake) has the same root as errare (wander, roam). Isn't wandering the rightest way to walk on one's own path, the path which is a “subjective view which does not match other people's reality”?
Which leads me back to the first post of this blog...
Is it diabolic to want to make one's own way?
Would it be only one and the same way for all beings, and not as many ways as beings?
For my part, I don't attach such a dramatic status to mistake. Mistake, it is the unforeseen, the unexpected, it may be a present that life offers to me in order to escape the narrowness of my own view by reminding me that the possibles never stop being created.
.
Lama Chagdud (or Chakdud) Tulku Rinpoche (epigraph of L'écho des rizières which translation I have found at emdots' home):
“Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion.
Practice good-heartedness toward all beings.
Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.
What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream.
The trick is to have positive intention during the dream.
This is the essential point.
This is true spirituality.”
If there is no other mistake than believing that mistake is possible, in the dream that life may be, then correcting that only mistake, taking off that veil which distorts vision, isn't it that positive intention which allows to dwell in dream.
And to conclude about that positivity:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Compensation) (thanks to emdot):
“Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”
The other day I watched four dancers, three women and a man, gliding in the intimacy of a small room. I felt wrapped in a gentle serenity, I liked what I was seeing, I was in full harmony with the place and the time.
But I am not able to give my full attention to something for a long time, so my mind was not slow to start floating irresistibly.
It was about informal and formal speech (in French “let up / sustain” one's speech), about the violent rigidity the defenders of the French language show against every attempt to make its rules more flexible, then about the fact that the tensions of the body, which origin is psychological, consume a lot of energy so that they remain stable. Sustain, let up, that is speaking with the voice of effort.
Suddenly appeared to me the meaning of that “delirium”: my mind were translating into a conscious language the dialogue between my body and dance. But what did dance tell to my body? A very simple thing:
“Rigidity is what consumes energy. Look at me, I move fluently, but nevertheless with tone, and never do I freeze. I am a unique movement, I am the swaying life, light and supple,”
Dance conversed intimately with me, it lavished on me the subtle nourishment I needed. It spoke about my body, so rigid because of all my tensions, because of my so hard and so shortened muscles, about the almost daily limbering-up exercices I had just starded doing. It was my own body speaking through dance:
“Don't fight tooth and nail against my rigidities, for they have protected me from many a violence. If you shake me too brutally, I will tense myself even more, for fear I might break. But be patient and gentle with me: if you are not, who else will be? The stronger my resistance will be, the greater be your gentleness, the more confident be your patience. Allow me to open myself at my own pace, allow me to be the only guide, for I am the only one who knows what is good for me. Do treat me thoughfully, do speak to me tenderly, do love me, for I am you and you are me.”
My mind knew all those things already, for it had read or heard about them many a time. But only my mind knew them. I mean I did know nothing actually.
