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#1761 - Thursday, April 8, 2004 - Editor: joyce (know_mystery) 

Photo: Alan Larus ~ TrueVision

music: hope.mid from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Panhala/ 

Bill Kelley ~ DailyDharma archives

The great sea stirs me.
The great sea sets me adrift,
It sways me like the weed on a river-stone.

The sky's height stirs me.
The strong wind blows through my mind.
It carries me with it,
And moves my soul with joy.

~  an Inuit Shaman  ~

From the journal, "Heron Dance," published by Heron Dance

 www.herondance.org

Kristi Shelloner ~ NondualitySalon archives

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
 
~ Wendell Berry ~

Lisbeth ~ Monks_Mystics 

looking together             across the frozen lake             the heron and I             ~  Jan van den Pol  ~

Photo: Alan Larus

  Skye Chambers/Andrew McNabb ~ NondualitySalon archives
 

Shojiro has just told me that when Fukuoka was a young man
he was a scientist (microbiologist) working for the Tokyo
quarantine when he discovered he had a illness something
like pneumonia which nearly killed him. During the illness
he thought he experienced something like *all that is*

"I was finally released from the hospital, but I could not pull myself out of my
depression. In what had I placed my confidence until then? I had been
unconcerned and content, but what was the nature of that complasensy?
I was in an agony of doubt about the nature of life and death. I could not sleep,
could not apply myself to my work. In nightly wanderings above the bluff
and beside the harbor, I could find no relief.

One night as I wandered, I collapsed in exhaustion on a hill overlooking the
harbor, finally dozing against the trunk of a large tree I lay there, neither
asleep or awake, until dawn. I can still remember that it was the morning of the 15th of May. In a daze I watched the harbor grow light, seeing the sunrise and yet somehow not seeing it. As the breeze blew up from below the bluff, the morning mist suddenly disappeared. Just at that moment a night heron appeared, gave a sharp cry, and flew away into the distance. I could hear the flapping of its wings. In an instant all my doubts and the gloomy mist of my confusion vanished. Everything I had held in firm conviction, everything upon which I had ordinarily relied was swept away with the wind. I felt that I understood just one thing. Without my thinking about them, words came from my mouth: "In this world there is nothing at all..." I felt that I understood nothing. I could see that all the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications. My spirit became light and clear. I was dancing wildly for joy. I could hear the small birds chirping in the trees, and see the distant waves glistening in the rising sun. The leaves danced green and sparkling. I felt that this was truly heaven on earth. Everything that had possessed me, all my agonies, disappeared like dreams and illusions, and something one might call "true nature" stood revealed.

I think it could safely be said that from the experience of that morning my
life changed completely."

Freyja ~ NondualitySalon archives  

Photo - Alan Larus ~ TrueVusion   Dinner for Heron   Spotting a great blue meandering gracefully along the bank of the little pond   Reaching one end Crossing the width to the other side   Catching a glimpse of movement moving towards, inch by inch   Ah!  A fish!  Don't care what kind no- mind knows not "what kind"   Staying perfectly still Poised for the one fell swoop   Unsuspecting fish plucked out just like that!  just like that!   Fish dangling from magnificently curved beak for a spell   Placing it on ground Fish flapping about a bit, heron quickly snatching it up (repeating as many times as needed)   Bringing fish over to the picnic spot.... and....Voila!   giant fish disappearing down long, slim elastic neck of heron   HA!  Now you see it, now you don't What a slight of hand...or simply just energy changing forms ....doing its thing..... in the circle of life   ~  freyja  ~

Alan Larus ~ TrueVision archives

  Blue Heron's Relaxing Front Porch     And I just wondered
Is the Blue Heron the bird
I saw this summer,
when I was swimming in the lake.
 
I did not move at all, it came to look for fish
spotting me just above my head,
and my search engine gives me
  Blue Heron Softshell Inn
Blue Heron Pines
Blue Heron Rafting
Blue Heron Environmental Network
Blue Heron Catering
Blue Heron Realty
Blue Heron boating adventure
Blue Heron Guide Service
Blue Heron Kayak Tours
 
Great Blue Heron Records
and need a Blue Heron Softshell Case
while someone on the radio sings
'what do you do in the bath?'
Finally, number 62, it was
the same bird
and a photo too
  
  
~ Alan  ~  

 Mace Mealer ~ Illuminata archives

Standing breathless words evaporate as two white herons cross an azure sky. ~ Mace Mealer ~

Heron www.mamohanraj.com/Everglades/everglades12.html

Panhala ~ Joe Riley

Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond
 
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings
 
open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
 
of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.
 
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is
 
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
 
back into itself --
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.
 
And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn't a miracle
 
but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body
 
into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
 
~ Mary Oliver ~
 
(What Do We Know:Poems and Prose Poems)

know_mystery When the Green Shoots Come We went out to watch the comet that night across the road, where the break in the trees opened to heaven. The nights were warmer by then, that April night, and climbing the short fence between roadway and nature, you stumbled into grasses left flattened by snow. I broke your fall. And do you remember how i spun you to the East? At my feet, the heron's neck bent at the wrong angle, and the nylon filament wrapped feathers and bone, flightless. I never told you. For five seasons now, I've watched the marshes... the geese, the swans, the coots... One blue heron... Wondering if they mate for life like coyote? quail...loons... for five seasons since... Today i am enthralled when the green shoots come to the surface of the field like an ocean of spring. There wading through grasses, the birds lean skyward and, gathering momentum, rise up to soar. Both of them.   The herons.   ~  joyce  ~ 14 April, 2003

Photo: Alan Larus ~ TrueVision

 Panhala ~ Joe Riley

Vocation
 
This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.
 
I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.
 
Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."
 
~ William Stafford ~
 

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Vocation.html

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150. Fingers pointing at the moon,
The heron's cry in the snow;
Standing in the moonlight,
How alike we are.

151. Breeze through the reeds,
Birds on the rippling waters,
effortless their coming and going,
Willow shadow on the bank.

152. Incense smell of pines,
Subtle in its inspiration,
Sitting in the smoke shadow,
Dreaming of stillness.

~  By Rev. Tasogare Shinju  ~

From "Rememberance of Buddha"

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