To Look at Any Thing
To look at any thing
If you would know that thing
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say,
‘I have seen spring in these
Woods,’ will not do—you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.
– John Moffitt
From: Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach, ed. Sam M. Intrator & Megan Scribner.
Originally published in The Living Seed, a collection of poems by John Moffitt, 1962. For 25 years, John Moffitt was a monk of the Ramakrishna order, then converted to Catholicism. In addition to his poetry, he wrote on the spiritual parallels between Ramakrishna and Jesus, and the interconnectivity of Eastern religions and Christianity.
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By Means of This Awareness
When you gaze at an object,
you bring blessing to it.
For through contemplation,
you know that it is absolutely nothing
without the divinity that permeates it.
By means of this awareness,
you draw greater vitality to that object
from the divine source of life,
since you bind that thing to absolute nothingness,
the origin of all.
– Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch
Translated by Daniel C. Matt,
from the book The Enlightened Mind, edited by Stephen Mitchell.
Rabbi Dov Baer was one of the earliest and most important leaders of the Hasidic Jewish movement in the 18th century, and was chosen as a successor to the founder of the modern Hasidic movement, the Ba’al Shem Tov.
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Photo from W.S. Merwin’s garden, courtesy of The Merwin Conservancy https://merwinconservancy.org/our-story/
