Unknowableness - Richard Wehrman

He searched for certainty
in an uncertain world;
he looked at the unseen,
and since it was unseen,
sought to bring it near,
to refine its sharpness,
to make it holdable, to
find tangibility.  His
efforts all failed; he sought
to make water solid, to 
give soul a distinct form,
to quantify love so that
he could hold it in a box,
to carry it with him.

His efforts all failed.
With every new attempt
he saw the outcome, his
patterns became transparent,

yet he still walked  familiar
paths; only old age
seemed to offer help, taking
away his capacities; the
way one thing became
another, without his knowing
how.  Only unknowableness
seemed to offer any
way in, to bring him,
unexpectedly, relief from
his mind.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

~  

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Waking - Richard Wehrman

He woke again, as he always
did, out of nothing into
something; the wind woke too,
barely there, a dry exhale of
breath over the leaves,
over the dry grass, and he noted
how complete he felt, in this
almost not hereness, only the
edge of awareness, the quality
that noted, that attended to,
and beyond that nothing else
at all, though it was coming back,
the body's sense of being...

...and the single
sounds that arrived before
sight, for he had not yet opened
his eyes -- so a single scrape,
a rough-edged rasp, which carried
no meaning...
(was it the sound of a bird?)...
he could not tell; just the arrival
of sound, before you called it
sound, and it was just it,
what it was, and now he opened
his eyes, and the hill streamed in,
simply in that moment was,
where before it was not, as it
was again as his eyelids closed,
and the heat of the sun on his legs
as the bird, a different one,
called three single cries,
and as the wind moved again,
he smiled.

Richard Wehrman

From: Being Here

~

Photo taken by my brother
Bethel, Maine

 

Unintentionality - Richard Wehrman

The words, he felt, obscured, as
at the same time some revealed,
and it became a task of separation,
as of stones on the beach, the white
from the black, the large from the
small; yet this too exposed
artificiality, a point of view, an
ordering of the universe that denied
the given order, where all things
arrived together, and only an
analytical eye, a mind of obsession,
sought to make order, by grouping
what seems the same, from what
seemed not to belong.  And he saw
his unease with the way things were,
the need to shift reality to align
with his preference, his desire, so
that he wondered, why can I not
leave things alone?  But the words
(for this was where he started) when
left to themselves did their own
sorting, the way the wind mixed
maple leaves with ash, willow with
walnut, and the patterns of November
dazzled the eye, in its own ordered
disorder, and its truth was apparent,
its unintentionality soothed the
heart and settled the soul.  And he
said: words, whoever let you loose,
do what you will.

Richard Wehrman

From: Being Here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Struck - Richard Wehrman

The leaves, turned for some
time, of the maple, the oak, lit by
the afternoon light, shattered the air,
the eye, in color alight like no
other, only their own with the sky
behind, crystalline and pale blue, the
air stripped of otherness, only the
instantaneous transmission of
luminous ether, from interstellar
to earthly receptor; one was
struck dumb, dropped to the knees
felt by Saints upon stones,
hands folded, eyes lifted upward
as angels descend, yet the only
action was to be struck stone still,
movement arrested, unbelievableness
standing present in the everyday,
there, with the everything else -
cars moving down the street,
people walking this way and that,
geese heading west before they
turned south; so the procession
proceeded, the unnoticed noted by
few, you could hardly say it
mattered, another Fall day - yet it
fell, it landed, as unlikely as
any fiery chariot out of the sky, the
ordinary unveiled; bliss beheld in
one simple moment's blessing.

Richard Wehrman

From - Being Here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
The photo with my old i-5phone
 just doesn't do justice to this flaming wonder
against the moonlit sky tonight... 

 

Traveling Toward Life - Richard Wehrman

He was surprised
to see the gray clouds,
for the sunrise was clear
with blue sky, and he
assumed, as he always had,
that the sky moved
as the sun moved, east
to west, yet here the clouds
came. traveling west to
east, and he thought of
the trajectory he imagined
his life took, of birth
to death, infancy to old age,
and he wondered if he
had missed something,
if the winds moved
differently than he supposed,
if death also traveled
toward life, if there were,
more currents than he
could imagine, and if
imagining itself, setting
a distinct course, one he
planned in advance, kept
him from seeing; if he
were at this moment
actually growing younger,
at the same time he grew
older; if he was in fact
moving in ways he could
barely sense, into another
life, into other worlds.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here
Original title: "Traveling"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Loss - Richard Wehrman

More and more he felt
that those things he thought
he controlled, those powers
he believed he once had, were
slipping away; his capacities
to do diminished, his thoughts
multiplied and went in their
own directions, his ability to
remain one-pointed, to
meditate, ended in sleep.  He
judged himself harshly, but
letting that go, he found he
ended up with less and less,
whereas when he was younger
his imagination told him, by
this time, he would be stronger,
more focused, accomplished
in wisdom and knowledge.
Yet here he was, a snowman
melting away.....
This black mood matched
the time of year, and that was
reassuring: to understand
that everything is stripped
away before anything new
can be born.

Richard Wehrman
from: Being Here

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Snow Bunny - eventually
took shelter in the brush
near the tree. 

Wanting A Way & Nowhere To Go - Richard Wehrman

Not yet, the not knowing
says, now is not the time
to know, this is what I've
given - uncertainty -
as your mind tries to scale the glass
mountain, impenetrable;
not glass, but quartz, not
quartz, but diamond, clear,
all the way through, but no
way to get in or out, not by
looking for a door, for a key;
frozen in the this or that,
wanting a way - your way -
when ways, plans, paths,
maps and agendas, are
destinations past, continents
left behind, earlier stages of
evolution, your childhood,
your schoolyards, your old
ways of loving; what is coming
you can't know, it has no
existence, the formless has
nothing to offer, as something
arrayed in the future, only
this arriving now, gone as
you try to grab on, arriving
again and again, unknown,
brilliant and new.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

He was crossing an unknown
land, one he no longer knew,
though the landmarks were
identifiable and familiar; it was
the mystery of what stretched
before him, as the distance
lessened, as time in the outward
sense contracted, but inwardly
expanded and deepened, as
goals and achievements hour
by hour, day by day, lost their
imperative, and what he had once
set as a destination had been
passed with only slight remarking.
Now he had no where to go, and
the distance between somewhere
and nowhere was steadily
decreasing; in a similar manner
his excitement, his sense of
the immensity of some thing he
could not name grew, as though
that which he searched for
his whole life unknowing, and
which he called by many names,
which had been refracted by
art, music, certain writings...
by men of gravity and honor,
drew near, but was none of these.
And he felt the thrill,
and it hummed in the air.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

~

Photo taken by my husband
 on a hike many years ago :)

Trajectory of Life - Richard Wehrman

He was surprised
to see the gray clouds,
for the sunrise was clear
with blue sky, and he
assumed, as he always had,
that the sky moved
as the sun moved, east
to west, yet here the clouds
came, traveling west to
east, and he thought of
the trajectory he imagined
his life took, of birth
to death, infancy to old age,
and he wondered if he
had missed something,
if the winds moved
differently than he supposed,
if death also traveled
toward life, if there were
more currents than he
could imagine; and if
imagining itself, setting
a distinct course, one he
planned in advance, kept
him from seeing, if he
were at this moment
actually growing younger,
at the same time he grew
older; if he was in fact
moving in ways he could
barely sense, into another
life, into other worlds.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here
original title: Traveling

The Sky Remained Blue - Richard Wehrman

He saw there was nothing to
do with the blue sky, no act to
perform with the leaves speaking
in the high branches, nowhere
to take the fallen leaves curled
into brown upon the dry grass;
they as well needing nothing from
him, other than his presence,
his being, which was not his
to take away, to withhold, to
give to some other.  They were
each the all of it, arising wherever
arising occurred; they filled the
silence with their being silence,
his silence and theirs was the
same.  The dancing sunlight,
the sounds of men making and
doing in the world - these also
were the silence sounding itself,
calling to him in his semi-separation,
whispering the right way, the way
to slide in to that which was out,
to enfold them all and to be
enfolded, to holds hands all the
way back to the beginning, and
ahead to the infinite yet-to-be,
intimately each the all.  And
the sky remained blue, and the
birds called, as he, and all the
leaves above him, listened.

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here
Original title: He Listened

"Leaving" - Wehrman

Could he, he asked again,
walk out into the desert
of himself, let his self go.
the one built by the labor
of lifetimes - this one -
drop away into the ageless
void; and as he asked, he
knew; this is what it comes
to anyway, tonight as he
slept, or tomorrow, as the
result of old age, a natural
death, that waited closer
each day, a wordless chant,
it will all go, all of it,
castles and skyscrapers of
who you are, who you built
yourself to be; it ends at
the end - that's the idea - you
step from here, your
construction, into there,
the body abandoned - and
you saw it was not a despair,
but a ship to be boarded,
unmoored.....
free.....

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

What Wants to Come - Richard Wehrman

Out of that space that she
could not command, could
not direct, could extract
nothing from, except what
was given by the space itself,
out it came - what wanted
to come in its own way - and
she.....

the one along on the hurtling
ride, though space itself
was Silence itself, unmoving,
unmoved, unmovable - yet
it drew her in, into its very within,
she.....
who had been with-out, powerless,
hands pressed
against the glass of its sides,
like Alice to the looking-glass,
then she fell.....
was lifted in, was absorbed
into all she saw,
the all that was, that is,
heard, smelled, touched, tasted,
though none of these senses were,
only the clear light,
flooding the field, the transition
of the seasonal air, as Summer
shimmered into non-existence,
and clarity stood in silent
reveling: color and light and
form, falling upon her...

Poem - Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

~

Top Photo via No Mind's Land

Bottom Photo - mine - a mistake, color enhanced
Can you see the form of a woman in pink with
arms outstretched? :)

Lay It Down - Richard Wehrman

Could he really lay
it down, he wondered,
all the accumulated
projected desires, partly
his own, but most of it laid
out by others, in books,
in talks, in teachings
that said, this is your goal:
the unattainable, the
spiritually pure - you, the
ignorant, the unwashed and
uneducated - this is your
way to become better
than you inherently are.
No sense that you were [already]
what you were meant to be,
only what you might 

be molded to, chiseled into,
added onto your skeletal
frame of lack and loss.
For laid down, what would
he have but himself,
the very thing they convinced
him was worthless the
way it was.
What if this was all
he had, all he was... ?

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

Original title: "All He Had"