reframe

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

// September 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, Leadership Development

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted…

And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town. In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a sea of fog

In Memory of Those Who Melt the Soul Forever

// September 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

(Photo by Arun Siva)

Their spring meadows

are desolate now. Still, desire

for them lives always

in our heart, never dying.

These are their ruins.

These are the tears

in memory of those

who melt the soul forever.

I called out, following after

love-dazed:

You so full with beauty,

I’ve nothing!

I rubbed my face in the dust,

laid low by the fever of love.

By the privilege of the right of desire for you

don’t shatter the heart

Of a man drowned in his words,

burned alive

in sorrow.

Nothing can save him now.

You want a fire?

Take it easy. This passion

is incandescent. Touch it.

It will light your own.

- Ibn Arabi (أبن عربي),

Different Ways of Laughing

// August 15th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

“Another Place” by Antony Gormley.

All the Hemispheres

// July 26th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Art, Music & Poetry

(Click to enlarge)

Eurydice- Sue Hubbard

// July 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

Strolling a pedestrian underpass between Waterloo and the Thames I chanced upon the most beautifully eloquent language I have read in years. Stenciled upon the walls, so publicly hidden from view, is “Eurydice”by Sue Hubbard.

“I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train’s wet glass,

will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city’s green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look.
Second fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.”

- Sue Hubbard.

Instamatic Focal Point: Siwa, Egypt

// June 15th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, Travel

And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child

And

For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the Sun’s mouth
And dissolve

And

For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around

And

For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally
To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf

And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I Am.

The Gift

// June 6th, 2007 // No Comments » // My Personal Journey

Quietness- Rumi

// June 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

If there was a heart that speaks other than the heart that knows, this would be their lovemaking. I sit forlorn and emptied, yet no shiver can touch my soul, for it too has gone with Rumi.

An Interlocking Rubaiyat in Celebration of Platform Staff in General and London Victoria in Particular in the Spirit of a Monist Metaphysic

// March 23rd, 2007 // 4 Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, My Personal Journey

Sitting on a train, with the Ethics on my mind.
Spent hours scoping out Spinoza, and trying hard to find
How consciousness and matter can so manifest
In such a single Substance, all things of one kind.

Stepping from my day dream, fleeting passed the rest.
My station has approached, so I reason that it’s best
To alight unto the platform, where shortly it’s laid bare
“My bag and laptop left me”, to the Monos I confessed.

I rush to Platform Staff, and to these best of Men I share,
“My most necessary possessions to Victoria will fare”.
Alarmed they race to radio a colleague down the line
No hopes they give, nor promises, yet act in utmost care.

The minutes pass and hope falls flat, but curse no luck of mine
Knowing full determinism, to fate I must resign.
At last a call, a railway man- my laptop he did find.
From”Deus sive Natura“through these such Men doth shine.

______________________________________________________________

Commentary on “An Interlocking Rubaiyat in Celebration of Platform Staff in General and London Victoria in Particular in the Spirit of a Monist Metaphysic“.

1- In case it wasn’t clear, thank you thank you thank you for returning my laptop, thus saving me from having to fall into a fetal position and give up all efforts concerning written language.
2- I guarantee this is the only Spinoza-themed customer feedback form that South West Trains has ever received.
3- One of my favourite pieces in The Onion, “I Could Write A Better Rubaiyat Than That Khayyam Dips:^t“. Ahh, rubai humour.
4- Watch out for me in bars; “Anyone here written a freaking rubaiyat? I wrote one once… Mighty fine set of quatrains that was…”

Faith by David Whyte

// November 30th, 2006 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

I want to write about faith
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow night after night

faithful even as it fades from fullness
slowly becoming the last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness
but I have no faith in myself
I refuse to give it the smallest entry

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith

- David Whyte

Photo from Blue Ridge Muse