Monday, February 22, 2016

Wislawa Szymborska poem No Title Required

No Title Required
 
It has come to this: I'm sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It's an insignificant event
and won't go down in history.
It's not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
 
And yet I'm sitting by this river, that's a fact.
And since I'm here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.
 
Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal's field glasses might scan.
 
This tree is a poplar that's been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn't spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn't beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.
 
And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It's just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.
 
Conspiracies aren't the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don't trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
 
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
 
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own.
 
When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not.
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~
 
(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,
trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

10 to read about end of life care

http://theconversationproject.org/tcp-blog/10-must-reads-about-death-and-end-of-life-care/

Friday, February 12, 2016

Call to Live John O'Donohue and Finding your true home

FINDING YOUR TRUE HOME
Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from ETERNAL ECHOES

THE CALL TO LIVE EVERYTHING
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, ‘Beidh muid sínte siar,’ a duirt sé, ‘cúig mhilliúin blain déag faoin chré’ – We’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from WALKING ON THE PASTURES OF WONDER
John O'Donohue in conversation with John Quinn

TIME
The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held and integrated into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore, it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit-depths of it are already arriving home.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from
TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US) / BENEDICTUS (Europe)

LET YOUR HEART SPEAK
Because the heart dwells in unattended dark, we often forget its sublime sensitivity to everything that is happening to us. Without our ever noticing, the heart absorbs the joy of things and also their pain and care. Within us, therefore, a burdening can accrue. For this reason, it is wise now and again to tune in to your heart and listen for what it carries. Sometimes the simplest things effect unexpected transformation. The old people here used to say that a burden shared is a burdened halved. Similarly, when you allow your heart to speak, the burdens it carries diminish, a new lightness enters your body and relief floods the heart.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from BENEDICTUS (EUROPE) /
TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US)

MAY WE LEARN
Nearer to the earth's heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.
Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.
May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.
John O'Donohue
Excerpts from, 'To Learn from Animal Being'
TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US) / BENEDICTUS (Europe)

A PRAYER FOR YOUR WILD SOUL
Give yourself time to make a prayer that will become the prayer of your soul. Listen to the voices of longing in your soul. Listen to your hungers. Give attention to the unexpected that lives around the rim of your life. Listen to your memory and to the inrush of your future, to the voices of those near you and those you have lost. Out of all of that attention to your soul, make a prayer that is big enough for your wild soul, yet tender enough for your shy and awkward vulnerability; that has enough healing to gain the ointment of divine forgiveness for your wounds; enough truth and vigour to challenge your blindness and complacency; enough graciousness and vision to mirror your immortal beauty. Write a prayer that is worthy of the destiny to which you have been called.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from ETERNAL ECHOES

SOLITUDE
Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from ANAM CARA

A MORNING OFFERING
I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.
All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
I place on the altar of dawn;
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
John O'Donohue
Excerpt from, 'A Morning Offering'
BENEDICTUS (Europe) / TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US)

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Exploring Death and Dying books

DEATH’S SUMMER COAT

What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living
By Brandy Schillace
Illustrated. 266 pp. Pegasus Books. $26.95.

THE GOOD DEATH

An Exploration of Dying in America
By Ann Neumann
240 pp. Beacon Press. $26.95.

IN THE SLENDER MARGIN

The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying
By Eve Joseph
211 pp. Arcade Publishing. $22.99.

THE ICEBERG

By Marion Coutts
272 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $16.

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

By Paul Kalanithi
228 pp. Random House. $25.


Correction: February 8, 2016 
An earlier version of this review misspelled the surname of the author of the 1991 book “Final Exit.” He is Derek Humphry, not Humphrey.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/books/review/the-good-death-when-breath-becomes-air-and-more.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0The Good Death,’ ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ and More