Open and listening

I expect nothing in return – I love tranquility.
Even windswept chaff of quarrels
will weigh upon me
like a heavy oil press’s plank.

But I’m open to everyone
and I can admit that I’ve erred
and by way of truth’s light
I rejoice in it.

I want to receive the truth from everyone –
and it is not my nature to hold on, but to listen.
After all, what is a human being but a misjudgment.

              Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish

 

Poem: Wait

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven’t they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become interesting.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. The desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don’t go too early.

You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair,

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

                         Galway Kinnell

Good thoughts

To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. 

If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down 

into ever-increasing unhappiness. 

To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. 

This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about.

                    James Clavell, Shogun