j15


When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire,
take down this book,
and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once,
and of their shadows deep;
how many loved your moments of glad grace,
and loved your beauty with love false or true,
but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
and loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
murmur, a little sadly, how love fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead,
and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

WBYeats

r19


Walking, surrounded by these violet, bare, rocky mountains, suddenly there was solitude.
Complete solitude.
Everywhere, there was solitude;
It had great, unfathomable richness;
it had that beauty which is beyond thought and feeling.
It was not still; it was living, moving, filling every nook and corner.
The high rocky mountain top was aglow with the setting sun
and that very light and colour filled the heavens with solitude.
It was uniquely alone, not isolated, but alone, like a drop of rain
which holds all the waters of the earth.
It was neither joyous nor sad, but alone.
It had no quality, shape or colour;
these would make it something recognizable, measurable.
It came like a flash and took seed.
It did not germinate, but was there in its entirety.
There was no time to mature; time has roots in the past.
This was a rootless, causeless state.
So it is totally new, a state that has not been
And never will be,
for it is living.

Krishnamurti’s notebook.

p24



Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

W.Whitman

p9


Love, death, creation are inseparable;
you cannot have one and deny the others;
you cannot buy it on the market or in any church; those are the last places where you would find it.
But if you don’t look and if you have no problems, not one,
then perhaps it might come when you are looking the other way.
It is the unknown, and everything you know must burn itself away, without leaving ashes;
The past, rich or sordid, must be left as casually, without any motive,
as that girl throwing a stick over the bank.
The burning of the known is the action of the unknown.
Far away a flute is playing and the sun is setting,
a great big red ball behind the walls of the town,
and the river is the colour of gentle fire
and every bird is coming in for the night.


Krishnamurti's notebook

m2


Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.


This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.


RL Stevenson

f36



Stay near me. Speak my name.
Oh, do not wander by a thought’s span, heart’s impulse, from the light we kindle here.
You are my sole defender (as I am yours) in this precipitous night, which over earth, till common landmarks alter, is falling, without stars, and bitter cold.
We two have but our burning selves for shelter.
Huddle against me. Give me your hand to hold.

So might two climbers lost in mountain weather on a high slope and taken by the storm, desperate in the darkness, cling together under one cloak and breathe each other warm.
Stay near me.
Spirit, perishable as bone, in no such winter can survive alone.

P. McGinley

o11


The day dawned softly, a gentle rain having come in the night. When I reached the bottom of the hill, the fog was so thick that only the willows in the foreground could be seen, the other trees fading away quickly into the gray wet nothingness. The small yellow leaves, which just this week had begun to be offered at the tips of rust-colored branches, were, like all colors this morning, muted in the mist.