What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
during which we knew them. And they have
    changed since then….

We must
       Also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Don’t surrender your loneliness
       So quickly
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
       As few human
Or even divine ingredients can

Something missing in my heart tonight
        Has made my eyes so soft,
           My voice
               So tender,

My need of God
          Absolutely
                Clear.

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forgot or refuse to go 
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

To speak of sorrow
Works upon it
              moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall—
out in the light it 
shows clear, whether
shrunken or known as
a giant wrath—
               Discrete
at least, where before

its great shadow joined
the walls and roof and seemed
to uphold the hall like a beam.

Days pass and the years vanish as we walk
sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes 
with seeing and our minds with knowing.

Let there be moments when your Presence, like
lightening illumines the darkness in which we 
walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that
the bush burns unconsumed.

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for 
holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled
with awe is this place and we did not know it”.

You nights of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more
     deeply to accept you,
Inconsolable sisters and, surrendering, lose
      myself in your loosened hair. How we 
       squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
To see if they have an end. Though they are really
Seasons of us, our winter…..

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and will power
But is already there, in relaxation and letting-go.
Don’t  strain yourself, there is nothing to do.
Only our search for happiness prevents us from seeing it.
Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences,
They are only rainbows.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you relax this grasping, space is there
--open, inviting, and comfortable.

So, Make use of it. All is yours already.
Don’t search any further….
Nothing to do.
Nothing to force,
Nothing to want
--and everything happens by itself.

I am the water. I am the thorn.
that catches someone’s clothing….

There’s nothing to believe.
Only when I quit believing in myself
did I come into this beauty.

Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.
Now in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of which was mine.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come
because you were not up to the magnitude
of the pain that was entrusted to you.
Like the mother of the world,
Who carries the pain of the world in her heart,
Each one of us is part of her heart,
And therefore endowed
With a certain amount of cosmic pain

Those who will not slip beneath 
    the still surface on the well of grief

Turning downward through its black water
    to the place we cannot breathe

Will never know the source from which we drink,
    the secret water, cold and clear,

Nor find in the darkness glimmering
    the small round coins
         thrown by those who wished for something else.