• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • wormholes

mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: suffering

Four Noble Truths

30 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2019, 7*, Bodhichitta, doing, doors, eyes, fly, flying, food, Four Noble Truths, glass, ignorance, liberation, light, sound, suffering, thinking

Four Noble Truths

                and here comes the fly
                brandishing eye-bulbs in seventeen directions

                unaware of in or out
                looking for light or food to go

                finds one truth against the glass and
                findsssszzz the second against the glass

                in seventeen different directions
                at once – in to the room straight

                by my head: do I duck and swat
                (hideous temptation that shudder reminds me

                 no), do I guide it’s flight with foolscap sheet
                (and look at those bodies hung en-wrapped in cornered webs

                 no), the door remains open,
                it has but to fly through, the remaining

                two truths unfound and all unrealised; may the
                supreme and precious jewel

                Bodhichitta take birth
                where it has not yet done so

                where it has taken birth
                may it not decrease but may it increase

                infinitely

 

what more fitting way to conclude this meditating-occupation than the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths (there is suffering in life, suffering is caused by grasping, grasping can be loosed, by letting it all go) for liberation and Bodhichitta to extend that liberation universally …

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Bodhichitta wormhole: none and all
doing & sound wormhole: ‘and is there homage …’
doors wormhole: ‘from the cathedral window two stories / high …’
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
glass & light wormhole: ‘not sure …’
thinking wormhole: despite all / depiction

 

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eyes like petals

07 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2019, 6*, anger, Arya Lalitavistara, attachment, Bodhi Tree, Buddha, compassion, earth, eyes, government, hate, identity, life, lotus, lust, Mara, orbit, power, self-grasping, sitting, stillness, suffering

                the variety of grotesquery
                with which beings grasp their self

                the various grips of power
                through summits of council

                and various arrays of stake and brandishment
                appear as the armies of Mara,

                the thirty two ways of seducing
                that would fill life to the full

                over both his shoulders
                while sat under the Tree as endlessly still

                as the orbiting earth;
                the Bodhisattva turned his head,

                clean as no motivation at all
                to exposure and scattered diaspora,

                but looked on them all
                with eyes like petals

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Buddha wormhole: Candaka
compassion wormhole: at Kreukenhof
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – sooner; / and later
identity & life wormhole: none and all
power wormhole: the Bodhisattva set out / for the Seat of Awakening
sitting wormhole: quietly in my quiet house

 

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the mantra of Maitreya

15 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, reflectionary

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2018, 8*, acceptance, anger, attachment, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, delusion, emptiness, falling, fire, flower, ground, life, love, Maitreya, mantra, openness, others, peace, sentient beings, suffering

                                                                the mantra of Maitreya

                                oh my loves,

                wriggling on the very thorns you couldn’t live without
                struck by the match over the gasoline you just poured
                falling like a stone through the emptiness you cannot evade

                you wave your arms at me
                you entice me in your dancing embrace
                you collide with me completely oblivious

                let me place the flower in the barrel of the gun
                let me accept-wide your disfigurement, your awkwardness
                let me be the ground, flat as the palm of a hand

                                open
                                open
                                open

                                SOHA

 

Maitreya will be the next being to manifest as a Buddha in this world after the teachings of the current Buddha have been lost; the mantra is actually OM MAITRI MAITRI MAHA MAITRI ARYA MAITRI SOHA; insofar as it can be translated it reads ‘OM love, love, great love, sublime love SOHA’, where ‘OM’ is ‘regarding everything from the most-bottom line’ and ‘SOHA’ is ‘let it be so, as it already is’; the poem flowered quite petally from Bodhisattvacharyavatara, chapter VI, verses 37-38: [37] And like this, when they are so bewildered under the spell and influence of the kleśas, they will even destroy and, finally, take their own treasured life, then, how might it be hoped they would hold themselves back from harming or killing the bodies of others? [38] Even if I have lost, or cannot develop, compassion for these beings intoxicated and driven mad by their kleśas, who are engaged within their own self-destruction – lost in their own perdition, chained within their own fall – and who are, even now, committed to my destruction, then, how could I develop anger towards them? The least I could do would be to restrain from anger.

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

acceptance wormhole: DANSE RUSSE by William Carlos Williams
emptiness wormhole: sun setting over a lake, 1840
life wormhole: it’s / not what you do or what you say / if it ain’t got that swing
love wormhole: the reach turned to love
Maitreya wormhole: birth in the world
openness wormhole: transferring
others wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra

 

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all // are // none

28 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2017, 8*, arrival, being, billow, Buddhas, creation, desert, doing, end, everything, gargantuan, journey, light, love, mountains, night, quote, reaching, samsara, start, suffering, true nature, tuning, waft, waiting, waves

                                all

                that Enlightened beings do
                is be, but without
                flinch, reach or

                conjuration; a wave-
                length with neither
                start nor end which

                tunes the few to their
                own true nature
                with neither start

                nor end, the basis
                both from and to
                which they might

                both journey and
                arrive; external light
                that caps the peaks

                of mountainous
                night lost in waft
                and billow;

                                are

                they on the edge of
                everything gargantuan
                and frightening in all

                their detailed beneficence,
                are they everything that
                gives me the nod and

                wink waiting for me
                to get it, are they in
                amongst us suffering

                the arrows that we
                sling all about in outrageous
                discontent, are they

                la porte etroite or the
                desert of love, are they
                always there for us,

                are they never there;
                they are none of these,
                they are all of these

                that we make them
                to be – light neither
                emanating nor pervading

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being wormhole: all the low clouds keeping pace / through the train window, / always arriving, whether fast or / slow, but never actually moving
doing wormhole: I
light wormhole: so / do I keep on writing now I’ve retired, or … / Rumplestiltskin
love wormhole: ‘oh my girls and muse …’
night wormhole: transferring
samsara wormhole: inner / hegemony
waiting wormhole: Bexhill 140215
waves wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call

 

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to arms, then;

12 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1907, 2017, 8*, attention, Bodhichitta, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, body, carelessness, eyes, fate, fields, fire, focus, hell, ideals, identity, inner-self, karma, kleshas, laziness, Louis de la Vallee Poussin, mind, mindlessness, monster, mother sentient beings, narcissism, opportunity, over-reaching, phantom, practice, rebirth, resolve, smoke, staying, suffering, superhero, surprise, talking to myself, torture, translation, war, Warrior

                but there are plenty of opportunities
                to shave off indolence

                there are too many surprises
                to meet-off heedlessness, and stay;

                no use wailing and whimpering
                enfeebled by narcissism,

                when being unremittingly tortured
                of body and mind

                it’ll be way too late,
                I shall have nothing left but bad fate;

                the thing is, they don’t plot, they don’t
                manoeuvre and they

                hardly ever show
                themselves, so how is it I walk eyes-

                wide-open into each of their snare and
                realm; there, monsters

                slavering astride horizon cower me to
                craven identity, fires

                hot to match all my defences, afflicting
                me without notice

                or even much effort
                fires of the sun, fires of the atom, I’ll be

                engulfed but not
                consumed to blessed oblivion … oh, give me

                a break! – I’m
                ongoingly consumed even now, as long as I

                continue endlessly playing
                this solitaire, hitting the ‘new game’ button

                again and again
                until I … stop; but the cleverer I get

                with them the cleverer they already are,
                like shadow-boxing –

                these ancient enemies
                of mine; … to arms, then; not super-

                heroically, trying all the more better
                than I only am and

                then finding myself (on acrid fields –
                the smoke of fallen

                ideals and bombed aims) wanting, but
                inwardly, with

                attention and focus, the Way of the
                Steely Warrior; I shall

                be `ard with suffering, I can take it,
                I shall wear my

                oozed bowels and fallen head like medals
                in this, the War

                to End All Wars, not Mr Redfordman
                who is or isn’t

                good enough, but the wish and drive to fight,
                as long-suffering as mothers …

                … nothing to do with Mark Redford;
                ‘Je ne garde qu’une

                passion: celle de détruire les passions!’,
                these phantoms

                that stir the entire world; ‘dépouille-toi donc’
                the best translation prescribed

 

Bodhisattvacaryavatara IV, 43, French translation by Louis de la Vallee Poussin, Introduction à la Pratique des Futurs Bouddhas, 1907

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

attention wormhole: travelling // arrival
eyes wormhole: animus rises – powieview #37
identity wormhole: stuck in lower realm
mind wormhole: circuitry
practice & talking to myself wormhole: the turtle and the yoke
superhero wormhole: the quiet whale
war wormhole: looking ahead

 

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the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2014, being, cognisance, conception, courage, creativity, depression, doing, emptiness, equanimity, event, flow, heart, heartbeat, hesitancy, honour, key, life, line, meaning, no big deal, nothing, openness, page, passive, pointlessness, presumption, sitting, striving, suffering, thought, time, transcendent, transitive, words, writing

 

 

 

                                the both passive and transitive
                non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being

                                anxiety across the open page unsure,
                perched on the open line

                                ‘what if I put pen to paper and nothing happens?’
                ‘what if there is nothing but empty page and feint line?’ does not trust

                                that I am alive and cognisant to the heart
                of every beat if I had but the courage to face it,

                                all down through the endless steps of line
                whether there are words on the line

                                that I write in flow, or hesitancy, or not
                and whether they make sense or not

                                and whether my sitting was transcendent
                or not, or not done at all

                                and whether I concave at the pointlessness of activity
                or create the key to all strife and striving, or fail, or get depressed

                                I will continue eventful to evenness
                affording honour to is, and ‘no big deal’ to what is not

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & doing & life & sitting wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
creativity & pointlessness wormhole: the writing’s on the wall
depression wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’ or, in the long run, de Chirico’s ‘The Red Tower’
emptiness wormhole: my / superpower
meaning & thought & time & writing wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
openness wormhole: dash
words wormhole: words tumble like / boulders – poewieview #25

 

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what heavy and cantilevered structure

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

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2015, Alan Moore, death, Eddie Campbell, From Hell, inside, karma, life, lifetimes, light, outside, structure, suffering, time, walking, walls, windows

 

 

 

                                                              `comes a time also
                                              when inside and
                                outside do not matter
                anymore – ha ha ha
and what heavy and cantilevered structure in which life in all its wrappening
                                falls away then
                                              and what hideous possibilities
                                we have propelled become in all our many life we are (sic)
                                                              and we suffer them all
                                                                                 step by lifetime-step, accompanied
                                              or alone, within walls, looking
                                                                                 through windows and centuries or just
                                                                                                            outside in light

 

askance from chapter fourteen & the epilogue of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

a little snippet from askance From Hell, askance from chapter ten of From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, gwn’n’avvalook

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Alan Moore & life & time & walls & windows wormhole: the lines are not that straight / after all
death wormhole: 1977
lifetimes wormhole: ‘never a dull moment …’
light wormhole: darkness
walking wormhole: the streets just fill with business

 

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‘never a dull moment …’

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2013, 4*, compassion, lifetimes, looking, passing, people, speech, suffering, walking

 

 

 

                           ‘never a dull moment …’

                           looking at old people
                           looking at their lifetime

                           of attrition and arthritis
                           that makes them drag their feet

                           un-square in-stepped with un-aligned knee
                           and silly grin on their mis-closed mouth

                           I love them all for the pain and strife
                           I already feel in my own knees

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

compassion wormhole: Woolwich Central – making life better II
lifetimes wormhole: Dr Strange VI – to hold my face to the world
looking & people & speech & walking wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
passing wormhole: city twilight

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

recent leaks …

  • “…and may the great elements…”
  • paisley // implicitly
  • this pocketed being
  • the inevitable tock // when we close our eyes
  • time
  • the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament
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