Kate Vogt's Blog, page 11

Crows – harbingers of light

Night is passing,
sun comes by dawn,
Awaken now,
beauty’s essence,
heart of love.

Hakim Omar Khayyám
Translated by Nahid Angha, PhD

The neighborhood crows regularly greet me as I open the front door in the morning.  Occasionally, one will hop along the railing of the stairway as I descend from our apartment to the street.  Or, they will swoop overhead so closely that I can feel a slight breeze from their wings.  Once in a while one will walk either in front or back of me along the street.  If n...

Giving

I was sad one day and went for a walk:
I sat in a field.
A rabbit noticed my condition and
came near.
It often does not take more than that to help at times-
to just be close to creatures who
are so full of knowing,
so full of love
that they don’t
chat,
they just gaze with
their
marvelous understanding.
(St. John of the Cross, Trans. by Daniel Ladinsky)

 

Autumn is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere.  The daylight hours are slowly giving way to the longer nights, the squirrels are burying th...

Shadow – an invitation to belonging

If God
invited you to a party and
said,

“Everyone in the ballroom tonight will
be my special
guest,”

how would you then treat them when you arrived?

Indeed, indeed!
And Hafiz knows that there is no one in
this world who is not standing upon

His jeweled dance
floor.

Hafiz
Trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

In recent weeks dragonflies, butterflies, and occasionally a hummingbird have floated alongside me for part of my regular neighborhood walk.  That always sparks childlike delight within me.  Yesterday a...

Hollyhock – holiness in the everyday

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
the whole of the flower,
the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

Zenkei Shibayama
Translated by Sumiko Kudo

It is an early morning, and the skies are gray for the first time in days. The grayness is from a heavy, misty cloud cover.  For the prior week the morning greeting had been a different, smok...

Geranium – inspiring resilience

Meditate within eternity.
Don’t stay in the mind.
Your thoughts are like a child fretting
near its mother’s breast, restless
and afraid, who with a little guidance,
can find the path of courage.

Lalla
Trans. by Coleman Barks

Over the past several months I’ve developed a new habit.  It is probably minor in the scheme of all the possible habits, but I’m ruminating on it because it is new.  And, because it has come about not only when a life-threatening virus is sweeping through the world, but also...

Ladybug – spark of joy in a grey world

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups.
They swim the huge fluid freedom.

Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

I was overwhelmed with a sense of joy upon spotting small ladybug along the pathway.   Her distinctive coloring, with bright reddish-orange and splashes of black, stood out on this foggy summer morning.

Only minutes before I had noticed the muted tones of the foliage and the fading shades of the ...

Forest – sacred aliveness

One instant is eternity;
Eternity is the now.
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.

Wu-Men
English version by Stephen Mitchell

As the seasonal cycle once again turned toward summer, the mountain forests held the quietude of winter.  For months, they had been in hibernation with their ground blanketed under mounds of snow.  The immovable settling into prayerful silence absorbed each of these in its own reverent essence:  trees, plants, boulders, and granules of...

Life Trail

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

 

The sky was a deep blue and the earth was covered with swaths of green.  Among the low growing plants, soon to bloom into a rainbow of wildflowers, there was a narrow dirt trail.  It was an offshoot of a larger trail, but it looked inviting in the way it meandered and flowed through the op...

Light – generosity of being

Like a great starving beast
My body is quivering
Fixed
On the scent
Of
Light.

Hafiz
Trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

 

It seems fanciful that a new moon can appear to shimmer. Yet, about once every eighteen months, there is a radiant glow around a new moon. It occurs when the two orbs of the moon and the sun seem to mate in the daytime sky, and the moon partially obscures the sun.

I admire the odd and wondrous relationship between this unlikely pair. They couldn’t be more different in their natures. Th...

Clouds and winds of change

Observe your life, between two breaths.

Breath is a wind, both coming and going.

On this wind you have built your life–
but how will a castle rest on a cloud?

Avicenna
Trans. by David Fideler and Sabrineh Fideler

The skies have been intermittently cloudy over the past few days.  The clouds arrive on the wind, swirl around, morph into different shapes, and then fade into the expanse of the sky.  An hour or so later, another set of clouds appear.

This ever-changing pattern of the clouds amplify my...