Our depressions, jealousies, narcissism, and failures are not at odds with the spiritual life. Indeed, they are essential to it. When tended, they prevent the spirit from zooming off into the ozone of perfectionism and spiritual pride. More important, they provide their own seeds of spiritual sensibility, which complement those that fall from the stars. The ultimate marriage of spirit and soul, animus and anima, is the wedding of heaven and earth, our highest ideals and ambitions united with our lowliest symptoms and complaints.

--Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

The Shahnameh -- the world's longest poem

Fascinating... hear all about it... courtesy of the BBC.

80,000

My site meter tells me this blog has just surpassed 80,000 "unique" visits since shortly after it was begun in Sept. 2004.  That was a google search from Buxton, Maine for Li-Young Lee.  Rough estimates:  this blog has gotten about 13,300 visits a year or 1,100 a month or 37 a day over 6 years. Very shortly I'll surpass a thousand posts.  This one is #992.

Another Gendun Chopel poem

Someone (his name is anonymous) wrote in to inform me of another Gendun Chopel poem, here.  For more about Gendun Chopel, check out my review of Daniel Lopez's exceptional translation of his selected, In the Forest of Faded Wisdom.

a couple of poems about being a guest house

Going through some poetry I had on file, I couldn't help but remark upon the similarity of these two poems, written some eight hundred years apart.


LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-- Derek Walcott



GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks