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Tag Archives: prose poetry

Tolerance and Street Poetry

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by elainestirling in General

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Elaine Stirling, essay, prose poetry

bus window

The funny little man sat in the front seat of the bus and talked nonstop to the driver. Most of his teeth were missing and he spoke with an accent, maybe Italian. The man said things like, “Do you know why I know everything, even though I no schooled?” He pounded his forehead with the ball of his hand. “Because God put it all in here.” Then he cackled and gazed out the window, giving us passengers, if we were lucky, three precious seconds of silence.

In between hyperbole: “I’ve had the best life…life’s not easy…no one’s worked harder than me,” the man made outrageous racist comments in the form of life counsel. “Whenever you see XXX people, you can be sure dey have money in their pocket. You think they’re broke, dey always say they are, but they’re not.” Our driver happened to be of that race, but he never once took offense, never pushed back or corrected him. A few times, when the man stumbled over his words, couldn’t get his thoughts out, the driver calmly said, “It’s okay, I’m listening.” The driver said good morning to every new passenger.

The night before, we’d had torrential rains, and the two of them talked about it. “What time did you get home last night?” the driver asked the man.

“Two a.m. I couldn’t get no taxi from the terminal, so I had to walk.”

“You walked in that rain? All the way home?”

The man laughed. “Yeah. It rained like crazy, but I walk like summer.” He gazed out the window and said it again, more slowly.

It rained like crazy.
I walk like summer.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
The evocative image of a bus window comes from http://www.ilovethebus.wordpress.com.

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Pages Ripped from the Secret Diaries of a Blocked Writer

12 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by elainestirling in Flash Fiction

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

American novelists, divisiveness, Elaine Stirling, fertility gods, flash fiction, humour, irreverence, magical realism, prose poetry, purple prose, soft porn spoof, the myth of writing block, the nature of time, Tom Robbins

block of writers_4

The following contains mild profanity and euphemisms. Reader discretion is advised.

—how would I write if All the Time in the World showed up, uninvited, and offered herself to me? Would I push her away, saying, “Sorry, no time”? Argue in defense of not enough?

This is why I don’t…
This is why I can’t…
This is why I haven’t…

Or would I truly hear her name, All the Time in the World? See her where she stands before me, berry-blushed and naked, legs apart, arms open, a smile playing on lips that make me want to…

Make me want to
Make me want to
Make me want to

…rush. Her lips, slightly open, and all the rest of her make me want to rush. The hammer of my accelerating heartbeat gives my urgency away, while the hair on my arms and other vital parts rise.

All the Time in the World moves closer. I can smell the sandalwood and cedar musk of her. A breeze picks up from somewhere to my left and lifts the corkscrew curls of her reddish-brown hair. The slope of her collarbone, a pair of apostrophes above two cherry pips on sundaes take me back to banana splits at Woolworths with Shirl Hedlock where I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, and then her family moved to West Chester, and I never saw the east-west chest of Shirl Hedlock again.

All the Time in the World wrapped her arms around me. I’m aware of being inconsistent in my tenses. Does she know I’m tense? Present, past and future are balling up in my head like the pungent rolling prize of a scarab. Maybe the hard-working dynastic bugs of old were trying to impress scarab pharaohs, Nefertiti queen beetles, competing for the biggest—shit! If I don’t get serious about my writing soon—

“No, no, no, screw serious! You’re doing fine.”

All the Time in the World pokes my sweaty diaphragm with a cocked finger, and I tip like a bowling pin, like a bottle of milk left on the porch in a sudden squall, onto the bed where I’d been lying and thinking and lying to myself, “I will never write again.” Now, All the Time in the World is lying on top of me, and while I’m having trouble remembering what comes after exhale, lush, ripe pomegranate prose starts pouring out…

~~~

Author’s Note: While debates with no hope of solution at their present level of thinking zing across the airwaves, dividing us in disillusioned heaps of politics, religion, sex and how we orient our sex, a fertility god walks the earth. His name is Tom Robbins. The American novelist, author of Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All, among others, navigates a fine, humourous, invigorating line between all of our insanities. For forty-plus years, Robbins has been penning phrases that are seemingly innocuous, setting them in scenarios so absurd you feel like you’ve found a piece of meteorite or the Meaning of Life. The phrase that got me sprinting to my keyboard this a.m. comes from Tom’s 1971 novel (his first) Another Roadside Attraction. “The uncomfortableness of associations” doesn’t sound like much, I know. As with all Robbins’s work, you have to be there—but only if you want to. In the tradition of the best gods and goddesses, he doesn’t seem to give a flying rip one way or the other.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Randomes

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by elainestirling in This and That

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Elaine Stirling, free verse, gardening advice, husbanding, Nature's Laws, prose poetry, think for yourself, to prune or not to prune

DomeConstruction02

As far apart
as part can be
from whole
the fixed, judicious
yearn through
catalogued
taxonomy
to keep
it so, for
it is so,
and if it’s
so it must
be right
and what
is right
must not
be wronged.

I cannot help but think of how my parents’ parents used their catalogues after they had placed their orders for good stout boots and Mason jars. I don’t recall they ever spoke the word “holistic”.

~~~

Become your own lattice.
Season after season, you
have grown in wealth
and wisdom, while fearful
minds out freezin’ in
the damp and cold of
who knows what, they
come along as sure
as flies in May with
pruning shears to
recommend you
cut the growth
before it gets
a hold to
force
the fruit.

The raspberries agree.
Clematis says, no way.

Judicious, delicious.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image: dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral
in New York City

Our Tapestry

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by elainestirling in Narrative poetry

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

appreciation, completion of task, continuation, Elaine Stirling, narrative poetry, prose poetry, the Graces, transcendence, vibrational reality

graces_2

I

Some things hold true.
We threw true across the room to see if we could break it.

Some things ring false.
We held ears to bells of falsehood to hear what made them ring.

Time stood still
long enough for us to believe that something better awaits.

Space gave way
to thoughts so deep the whales swam in to see what we were up to.

II

Fear crept in
and found that it was welcome;

Doubt looked up
and learned that it could laugh.

III

Gods and muses gathered at the shore.
Who will crack first? they asked one another.
Apart from hairline fissures, no one ever did.

Who are they? asked the prophets.

Nomads, said the dolphins, recently arrived
from a place called Poetry.

What do they want?

Change.

Mercury laughed. That’s all?

Gods and muses rummaged in their pockets, tossing out change until the beach glittered.

Will that be enough?

Dolphins scanned the beach and saw there was no end of change.
A school, as one, they nodded.
Sufficient.

Three women descended from the hills.

The first woman, Clotho, rolled out a tapestry woven by poetic hearts and words and thoughts and feelings. Gods, muses, and prophets moved in for a closer look.

Audacious, murmured some. Others held their breath. The wisest of the prophets breathed deeply.

Lachesis, the second, measured the cloth for wholeness.

On a signal from her sisters, the third and final goddess knelt beside the tapestry with silver shears.

Atropos cut the thread.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Pain Glyphs

27 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by elainestirling in Essay

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Elaine Stirling, imagination, laments, pain, perception, prose poetry, sad poetry, snow shoveling, storm sewers, transitions

coconut-water-splash

The husk around the heart hurts like hell when the freshness within breaks through. Gibran said it better. So did Harry Nilsson who called it belly achin’.

Pain while it gurgles away loves to have its say, but the flow of slush into a storm sewer doesn’t interest me much, even when, especially when, it’s set to verse. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I ignore laments, including my own, in favour of the advent of crocuses.

Shoveling wet, heavy snow, I mourn the friend I can’t get near because of the one who’s deemed herself the myelin sheath that coats his neurons. Two intelligences halved, coconut closed, which, I suppose, is where that unfortunate phrase, “my better half”, comes from.

Well, the melt is under way, so I shall ignore the plow that delivered a fresh rampart of snow cement between me and the world’s roadways. The freshness that broke through kindly allows me to sift through the fragments of erstwhile heart-throbs and desiccated grudge, one of which appears vaguely boat-shaped and may be float-worthy long enough to sail me past and over the gurgles.

Sure enough, I spy an island up ahead, not far at all, with a swaying coconut, lime trees, and a boombox with a sonnet.

See you there!

Essay © Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from mindbodygreen.com

You’re not depressed, you are distracted: Final Part

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by elainestirling in Essay Translation

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activist, Elaine Stirling, Facundo Cabral, moving forward, philosophy, prose poetry, singer, wisdom, writer

In this moment, society is stuck in a traffic jam that has become unconscionable because cities have become unconscionable. Maybe we should stop thinking aboutfacundo cabral___ how to change our ideas and start over.

We have no more great myths to follow, no ideologies. We ought to be communicating with each other, human to human, because this is the era of the individual. This is why Internet will augment our quality of life; the macro will bow to the dominion of the micro.

This means that from here on, there will be no TV, politics or family with the power to extinguish the sacred flame of the soul where intelligence has lived forever, nourished for centuries by the universe.

Those who are asking, move forward. Those who don’t ask will stay where they are. They will die because life is movement; everything is recreated in every instant. For this reason, you must be attentive.

For one woman, you miss the rest; for one house, you miss the world around the corner, missing oceans and river, dolphins, whales, salmon, sharks. For one family, one ideology, one religion, you lose architects, Egyptologists, poets, philosophers, shamans, anthropologists, prophets, thousands of ways of seeing the spirit and the stars.

The orchids of Colombia, Bacon, Giacometti, Nietzsche, the Gulf of Aqaba, Alexandria, Tokyo, Homer’s Greece so beloved by Lawrence Durrell; Guanajuato, where I fell in love with Catherine Valetzka, although I never had the opportunity to tell her so.

Chichicastenango where a dance put my skeleton to rights; Paris where Rilke was seen to wake in beauty every morning alongside Rodin; the Roman Tratévere where Fellini directed his characters; where the Moses of Michelangelo is sick of tourists who asphyxiate him in San Pietrenvincoli, the only place left to him.

London, Berlin, Brussels, Prague where romantic writers held up an idea of happiness so exalted that it could never be reached; and so they felt hopeless with the sadness that excites, pain that’s enjoyed like the singers of flamenco and tango.

Madrid, where Lupe lives always at the precipice of thought but never falls; Miami, the bridge that connects Latins to Saxons; the desert of Sonora where I met Erich Fromm who said that Suzuki was a Buddhist Zen because he had experimented, and that authenticity made him difficult to read because Zen doesn’t give rational, satisfactory answers, but certainly the books of the intellectual west explain things more easily, although he had not experimented with them.

Do not idolize anything or anyone, because to idolize is to lose one’s independence, and this is conflict, a sure sickness. How easy it is to lose what was gained without force, as do the poor who don’t enjoy what little they have left.

The grand step is to move away from egotism that compromises you, that enslaves you to so many extremes, to interior freedom. From there you can reach peace, and peace brings plenitude to your life. It enriches you.

The ultimate saviours are doubters, but they don’t affect the teachings of Buddha or sicken the Bible. The teachings of Buddha are not weakened because one doesn’t believe in reincarnation, nor does the Bible die because it’s confronted by a more realistic view of Earth’s history and the evolution of man.

How innocent it is to think of a society without delinquents, still anything would be better if we propose it. The good intentions of the universe do not suffice; life is what it is, not what we would like it to be.

True faith begins working in oneself when one believes in oneself, and when you are firmly planted within yourself, all that you see becomes animated; then we know reality and from there, we can comprehend more.

Then we save ourselves from deception; we know that behind a mask there will always be another one; we also see the purity in nakedness, the liberties in jazz, and the rictus of dictators. To accept reality is to free oneself from delusions; then truth arranges that we live abundantly.

Don’t delude yourself; no one will delude you. Know with firmness like Buddha, like Jesus, like Espinoza, like Einstein, like Ford, firm but open to the world, attentive to the proposals of life.

Speak of virtues, but do not silence truths. You will never regret having become animated, and you will never forgive yourself for not doing it; besides, you have nothing to lose because not even one of your ears is your doing. And don’t worry about the future because at the end of your life it’s not the mountain summit that awaits you but the peace in the valley.

You will not be held accountable to anyone if you do no harm to anyone, and no one has to explain anything. You don’t have to exhaust yourself in vain efforts to convince and please; what’s important is that you’re convinced and you like what you’re doing. And if you have a grand dream, then you must be willing to realize it, because only the grand achieve the grand.

If you study superficially, you will learn superficially. If you live by half measures, you will only know half of life. If your head is divided, you will see a divided world. If you work because you have to, you will be a worrier, an unfortunate; if you’re afraid, you will not know love that is courageous.

You’re not depressed, you are distracted…

from the present where life is happening, for example, sunrises and sunsets, seagulls, condors, eagles, doves and swallows. The mountains, valleys, rivers and seas; sport, art, agriculture, architecture, the jungles, macaws, monkeys, tigers, lions, crocodiles, elephants, streams; human beings of all colours. The illusory time that pushes you and the eternity that allows you to change course and begin again in every instant.

You’re not depressed, you are distracted from the marvels going on around you, from births to crops, from revolutions to concerts, from football championships to interplanetary travel.

You’re not depressed from something that happened, but distracted from all that is happening now.

I have come to remind you that we are all a part of the grandest enterprise, humanity, that constructs, heals, sows, cleanses, sings and dances. God is waiting for mankind to become a child again, to receive Him to His breast.

You are not depressed, you are distracted.

© Facundo Cabral, 2008
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Stirling, 2012

You’re not depressed, you are distracted: Part IV

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by elainestirling in Essay Translation

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Argentine philosopher, Elaine Stirling, Facundo Cabral, inner peace, letting go the past, prose poetry, singer, universal brotherhood

The continuing wisdom of Facundo Cabral…

Only one who is present can comprehend the whole. He who drinks directly from the fountain of essence, by this means will know everything that happens.

"Love never dies, it only changes places..." Facundo Cabral

“Love never dies, it only changes places…” Facundo Cabral

Nothing will afflict him, and most importantly, by learning of his errors, he transforms them into success.

No one has the right to ignorance. By taking it on, one pays an exorbitant price and casts a tragic shadow over the paths of everyone. Ignorance is the unconconscious method of evil, an ideology that by its separateness has the power to provoke war.

The sage knows his task is to deal with himself and to harmonize differences. He knows that the separated self, in addition to impoverished, is a form of suicide. By separateness, death follows all the way to the soccer field.

The sage does not separate because he knows he’s part of everything; he’s attentive only to the viewing of connections. I have sometimes sung that a star moves whenever a flower is plucked. The sage swims in the uniting river, in the energy that weaves us all. The sage knows he is God’s dream coming true; if we view reality as anything less, it becomes mere sleep.

Where the ignorant see things, the sage sees one and that one is truth. The sage sees himself in what he observes, is illuminated and illuminates; is conscious that he’s light. Light is the state more elevated than being.

What we call death is a more subtle state of light.

If you want light, live in peace. If you want death, live in war. Take care with every word because we are structured by word. Don’t hurt or offend anyone because that passage from one to another can come back to you, transformed into a bomb.

St. Augustine advised: Ask only for justice, but it would be better to ask for nothing, or to put it another way, don’t trouble your puny head with the grand works of the Lord; while St. Francis prayed, Make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is sadness, let me bring joy; where there is darkness, light; where there is hatred, love.

And here, my mother’s prayer: Lord, I ask Your pardon for my sins, above all for having made pilgrimage to your many shrines, forgetting that you are present everywhere. Secondly, I seek forgiveness for having implored Your help so many times, forgetting that my wellbeing worries You more than it does me; and finally, I ask Your pardon for being here begging Your pardon while my heart knows that my sins were pardoned before I committed them, so great is Your loving mercy, dear Lord.

Don’t exhaust yourself in competition. God knows what is yours, and that data resides in your heart too, so do what you love. There is no other way to live.

The same love that He brought me, He brought to you. It’s an error to say that we make love; love made us, and it fashions us day by day, relying on the malleable state of our openness. Being a work of love, the human being is marvelous.

To Him we are indebted for bread, cheese, wine, music, painting, airplanes and computers, among other things. And if man is what He loves, we are all that we were, and all that made us possible: from Buddha to Rembrandt, from Mozart to Picasso, from Copernicus to Freud. We are the wind that refreshes and the rain that renews; we are the winter snow and the flowers of springtime; we are the moon, the sun; we are the fruit of God.

I am newborn, but through the experience that oversees my memory, I don’t wish to hurt anyone now. I know that agression brings sickness. It over-complicates things; we are all part of the process. If I do you harm, I harm myself. Reason, which is subjective, used to move me; now it’s love, the reason of the Universe. But I didn’t lose my fire. If anything, it’s of finer quality now because before I burned, and now I illuminate. That is to say, I transformed from a destroyer to a creator.

To the poor I speak of hope and to the rich, conversion—hope redeems the poor, and conversion purifies the rich. Hope among the poor and conversion among the rich brings our brothers closer, and I came here to bring about that encounter. When all are joined, there will be no locks on door, no borders between nations; that’s when all will be shared and good humour will reign: Clinton and Castro will play tennis in Cancún, and Hussein will take his children to Disneyworld.

You’re not depressed, you are distracted…

by peace, and so I ask, when are you going to stop battling and begin to live? Because one can’t do both at the same time.

You ask me when Jesus will return, and I tell you, he never left; that he’s always been in your heart. You only have to silence your head and listen. No one asks the great question, who am I? Everyone just goes on complying with some law, decided by others, on how to succeed and fail. Everything is seen through bodies and material achievements, and those material things become so important that love begins in parks and ends in courtrooms.

Everyone practices begging in some fashion, forgetting or never discovering that they are princes, part of an extraordinary universe, to the point of disregarding their community, their parish, to focus only on their families.

I recognize many faces and I know a few names, but few individuals know who they are. You ask me where I can be found, and I tell you, anywhere, because I am part of the universe.

Names and titles are distractions, jails, limitation. They are a road that marks us and keeps us so blindly occupied that we never stop to think who we are, and spirit is who we are, and spirit does not accept conditions.

So don’t confuse the material with reality, because there are no borders, even though the majority clings to them out of fear of the infinite. This is why institutions like marriage were invented—nationalism, ideals, the homeland, stakes to which we’ve tied ourselves to avoid living with totality.

The house of one is one, which is why I’m fine anywhere, and through my house thoughts and events come and go constantly. And if I am my house, and I’m part of everything, then my house is this ocean and this beach, those dolphins and this hotel, this chair and that sailboat that leaves a white trail on the turquoise that invents light—that too is my house, like the shadows of labyrinths that occupy the minds of the insane. Those too are my house. Like the music of Mahler, the paintings of Cézanne, the cigars of Chez Davidoff, and rock and roll.

You can’t move your body because it’s too weighted down with the past. Forget your name and start living in this moment, and you will immediately feel that you live in a marvelous world. When you can feel that you’re not what you think, you can fly. Beginning and end, that is to say, life and death are inventions of the mind, like how you suffer when your child goes away because you’ve accustomed yourself to thinking you are only a parent.

Set the past aside and you will feel all of life, only the molecules are dissolved. Consciousness doesn’t die with the material; the light of awareness continues to illuminate the infinite roads of life.

We aren’t as bad as we think we are, and so peace is possible, and peace is the furthest point that we can reach. And from all accounts, God loves us more than we love ourselves because He keeps giving us new opportunities every day.

St. Francis was right: the sun and moon are brothers, animals and plants, our siblings, because we are all creatures of the Lord. And so our works are the brothers and sisters of the sun, moon, animals and plants. And when I speak of works, I mean painting, music, literature, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers.

Don’t look outside yourself for what is within. You can’t ask for love if you don’t give it. You can’t ask for justice, if you are not just. You won’t find peace outside yourself, if you don’t have peace on the inside.

to be continued…

© Facundo Cabral, 2008
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Stirling, 2012
Image from “Bitácora del Trovador”, blog by Olman Briceño

You’re not depressed, you are distracted: Part III

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by elainestirling in Essay Translation

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ego, Elaine Stirling, Facundo Cabral, innocence, living in the now, philosophy, prose poetry, wisdom

You’re not depressed, you are distracted by your ego that distorts, in contradiction FACUNDO_CABRAL-ESTE_ES_UN_NUEVO_DIA-FRONTto the innocence that clarifies. The ego confuses things with its judgment, believes that things are as it thinks they are. Even more, the ego believes that words are things; the ego doesn’t live, it interprets. It is a constant performance that never touches reality.

Meanwhile, innocence treats everything as equal and in doing so, lives closest to happiness, to wealth and tranquility. Innocence, seeing everything in a state of wonder, takes us from fiesta to fiesta. Innocence believes that life is a grand adventure; it’s excited because it’s seeing everything, always, for the first time, so the world is filled with novelty. For innocence, all things are a mirror because when we are innocent we’re conscious of being a part of God; and like God, innocence sees itself in all things.

Fun comes easily to the innocent because everything captures its attention: a grazing cow, the trunk of an old tree, black butterflies above a golden wheat field, a hummingbird paused in midair, a baker taking bread from the oven, the starry night, winter rain, logs burning in the fireplace, the sketches of Matisse, caravans of ants and of Bedouins, a Sunday sermon in the morning and football in the afternoon.

The ego assigns names to things, but innocence sees them; ego judges, innocence lives. Ego divides, innocence harmonizes differences; ego relies on the head, innocence the heart.

The ego is old because it relies on memory, while innocence is birthing anew in every moment. The ego exhausts us because it is always battling; innocence floats with grace because it is constantly giving way.

The ego is boring because it can’t give up searching; the innocent moves from wonder to wonder because it’s always finding and can carry on eternally enjoying the same horse, the same flower or the same star; innocence delivers itself fully to life and is therefore in a state of perpetual change.

In this way, the same is never the same, and innocence remains forever fresh.

Now that you are alone and tranquil, forget what you are because that’s how the rest of them create, and you’re listening to your heart:

What do you want to be? What do you want to do now, because life is always now.

Forget what you believe yourself to be and begin to be here now, and enjoy conviviality with all things. It is so gratifying to live without divisions, good, bad, rich, poor, black, white, friend, enemy, compatriot, foreigner.

The lightness of being when there are no enemies is such that we can soar at a moment’s notice because happiness works in sympathy with magic.

You didn’t lose your innocence, you just hide it away, fearing the ridicule of those who can only catalogue because they’ve lost theirs.

Set it free, and you’ll begin again the play of your early years enriched by intelligence. Free yourself from the preconceptions of memory and see everything for the first time; then you’ll be liberated from the boredom that overshadows people who think they know everything.

Don’t confuse activity with living. There is the sun, exactly there for you to see it; there’s the old tree that’s been around forever, so that you can appreciate anew the marvel it is.

Free yourself from the images that helped you forge the idea of other, and return to the innocence that is your natural state. Then you’ll be content with the wrinkles that confirm all you’ve seen, and what’s more, only in the state of innocence will you feel a part of all that surrounds you—that is to say, only with innocence can you see God.

You’re not depressed, you are distracted by good information, information that’s unavoidable if you want a good life. Try Solomon or Borges instead of the newspaper, Mahler or Bach instead of TV; intelligent and positive friendships instead of ignorant and lazy losers, unhappy with their choices. This is how you’ll receive the best, the essential energy because growth is natural to life. Constant movement is its cause, and to be ready for change we must be free and attentive, our tools ever ready for use when change moves through us; otherwise, it will vanish like smoke from a chimney.

It’s best to stay close to good receptors, the awakened ones, the curious like Bertrand Russell, Schopenhauer, Asbury, Bradbury, Eco, Paz, Krishnamurti, Osho, to name just a few.

Einstein’s secret was to follow minds more elevated than his own; Campbell’s secret was to immerse himself in all the secrets of history. Only the intelligent can detect how all the important things of life are intertwined. Only intelligence can connect us to the universe, to the point of comprehending that we are a part of it and contain the same energy.

Nothing repeats itself. This is why you have to live now; full life resides in every act just as everything is born from a single atom. And intelligence is what you see before seeing, that which knows where it’s going, is speaking and doing—the greatest consequences from the least attitude.

to be continued…

© Facundo Cabral, 2008
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Stirling, 2012
Image: cover of Facundo Cabral’s 2008 album, This is a New Day
 

You’re not depressed, you are distracted: Part II

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by elainestirling in Essay Translation

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christianity revisited, Elaine Stirling, Facundo Cabral, philosophy, prose poetry, wisdom

The Wisdom of Facundo Cabral, continued

Don’t get tangled up in a few homicides and suicides: goodness holds the majority Facundo teachingbut goes unnoticed because it is silent. A bomb makes more noise than a caress, but for each bomb that destroys there are millions of caresses that nourish life. Goodness feeds on itself; evil destroys itself. If the bad guys knew that goodness is good business, they would be good, although they would still insist on negotiation.

You’re not depressed, you are distracted. If you would listen to the other, what you carry inside would know everything. You would find something for yourself in everything, and thus you would rise constantly. There would be no confusion, only nuance; and in your serenity you wouldn’t be searching for things and, thus, you would find all. Being in the present, you would say and do what must be said and done in every moment, naturally and with grace, using no force; everything you do would create fullness in your relationships.

Growing in love, you will be more creative, without limits or conditions.

Ignorance makes us feel enclosed and mortal—that is to say, we enclose ourselves and we are our own limiters. Fear distracts us from love that is knowing and brave because love knows it is immeasurable, without end. Look inside and those clouds of periphery will disappear. Remain in your stillness and silence to hear the sage you carry inside.

He carries the age of centuries, not years like your body does, and for this reason, he is beyond the capriciousness of measurement, of the biases that provoke fear, the son of ignorance.

Your sage is beyond the effects that cause you to believe in good or evil, rich or poor, darkness or light, because he lives in the essential—that is to say, within the very cause, the invisible from which all things surge.

And when you listen to the sage who lives within, you will feel the good, health-giving rain; you will be attentive to the cold, to the cause by which all effects are illuminated. That state of clarity will penetrate all corners, and by this method you will share and everything will come to you graciously. Wealth will multiply for you at every step.

David asked God for wisdom, and God told him, don’t ask for so little because wisdom includes everything. You don’t live within limits; you live within the very center of the miraculous; you are independent of the illusory order of the linear mind, excited by imagination and harmonized by hope.

You are spirit that for a short while occupies a body, an apt vehicle for wandering through oceans and mountains, among dolphins and elephants, between cities and deserts, traversing it all to recount the eternal story. And in the center of the world of spirit, reason plays—the reason that cures cancer, that facilitates communication, studies the terrain of Mars, that puts man on the moon.

Thought takes you to new places and makes you see things differently, more richly than the old way; and this will transform you so greatly that you will change your attitude toward the world, the world you’ve often sought to change instead of understand. And when you change, you will effect the world.

Close your eyes, and you will see all that you’ve become. Freed from historical time, you will travel at the speed of light, and that journey can better the lives of many because the power of thought is incalculable. It is a grand alchemist capable of transforming any circumstance to festivity—that is to say, any gross metal to gold.

Once your interior light has been lit, nothing can put it out. Your light is as perfect and incorruptible as the gold that symbolizes the power of purity, of the essential. Your spirit is enjoying an infinite, marvelous voyage, exploding with every moment that is lived with profundity.

Holiness is the destination of everyone, although few realize or dare to enter the roads that will take them there.

Where the ego is abandoned, miracles begin, and there, without struggle, you will recover your natural power, provoking life by means of love, to the point that you will walk on water and heal by your word.

Remember that Jesus said, “Greater things than these you will see, greater than these you will do.”

to be continued…

NOTE: Part I of “You’re not depressed, you are distracted” can be found by scrolling down a few posts here at Oceantics.

© Facundo Cabral, 2008
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Stirling, 2012

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