The Inner Valley

I spent all my savings on a Chagall lithograph and placed it beside an oak leaf I had picked up on the road something we can put a price on and something we can’t something that human heart and hand have produced and something that Nature has. The Chagall is beautiful. The oak leaf is also beautiful. I get up and make tea, with soft afternoon sunlight falling on the table. Looking at the Chagall, those days spent with her come back to me. When I look at the oak leaf I think of the creator’s delicacy. A leaf and the Chagall both are irreplaceably precious. The sound of Ravel on the piano heightens. Today becomes one with the eternity. Heart and body melt into the blue sky beyond the window. ... Where do these tears come from? ******* ✎ Shuntaro  Tanikawa (Tokyo, Japan, 15 December 1931) ◙  Artwork: Marc Chagall

I lived in those times. For a thousand years I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted; When all human decency was imprisoned, I was free amongst the masked slaves. I lived in those times, yet I was free. I watched the river, the earth, the sky, Turning around me, keeping their balance, The seasons provided their birds and their honey. You who live, what have you made of your luck? Do you regret the time when I struggled? Have you cultivated for the common harvest? Have you enriched the town I lived in? Living men, think nothing of me. I am dead. Nothing survives of my spirit or my body. ******* ✎  Robert Desnos (Paris, France, 4 July 1900 ~ Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, Czechoslovakia, 8 June 1945).

"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived." ******* ✎   Milan Kundera (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1 April 1929). ◙ Artwork: Ludwig Meidner

Select your sorrows if you can, Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile. Adjust to a world divided Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles What natural alchemy lends To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth's fabled stare. If you must cross the April park, be brisk: Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar Lest you be held as a security risk Solicit only the evening star. Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun Crown a host of unassorted sorrows You never could manage one by one. The world that jibes your tenderness Jails your lust. Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk: It may be only you can understand: On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man Beat on the ocean's floor the same saraband. ******* ✎ Car

"The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. " ******* ✎   Leonard Cohen (Westmount, Quebec, Canada, 21 September 1934 ~ Los Angeles, California, 7 November 2016 ).

Zengetsu, a Chinese master of the T'ang dynasty, wrote the following advice for his pupils: Living in the world yet not forming attachments to the dust of the world is the way of a true Zen student. When witnessing the good action of another encourage yourself to follow his example. Hearing of the mistaken action of another, advise yourself not to emulate it. Even though alone in a dark room, be as if you were facing a noble guest. Express your feelings, but become no more expressive than your true nature. Poverty is your treasure. Never exchange it for an easy life. A person may appear a fool and yet not be one. He may only be guarding his wisdom carefully. Virtues are the fruit of self-discipline and do not drop from heaven of themselves as does rain or snow. Modesty is the foundation of all virtues. Let your neighbors discover you before you make yourself known to them. A noble heart never forces itself forward. Its words are as rare gems, seldom displayed and of great value. To