This poem rocks. I put it on one of my fliers and my sweet business partner said, “ahh! I just don’t get it! Can we use a yoga quote?” i changed it because I was laughing – imagining her panicking at the front desk trying to explain it to the students!…

I thought e.e. was so yogic though! He puts into words so beautiful what I haven’t been able to – that ego-less, open, ethereal experience of the beauty found in non-duality.

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing…

as a description of an ego-less experience of perception.

This:

…any–lifted here from…

as an expression that extracting any sense perception is a division of the experience itself which lacks such division-boundaries…

this:

…the no
of all nothing–human merely being…

as a word-play-image of the “no” of “nothing” but compounded with the word “all.” I also like the rejection of the usual “human being” phrasing as a way to suggest that we are, rather than individuals, simply “being.” While cummings doesn’t use the word “god”, I think that’s what he’s invoking by rejecting the human label and sticking with “being.”

doubt unimaginable You?

This is fabulous — how can we doubt something we can’t imagine? What becomes, truly, un-image-able? Isn’t it only the “seer” behind the mind — consciousness itself — the one aspect of existence that is not captured by mind?

It seems to me that with this poem, cummings manages something I’ve never accomplished: for several years now, I’ve tried to find a way to articulate the immediacy of the freedom and liberation that is available to people who get trapped in their own notions of mind and body and determinism. The answer, I think, is embedded in seeing through the constraints to simple “being” itself.

I think that may be what cummings is saying here.

Maybe you could work it a bit into something you could use like this:

How wide will you let your heart open?

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings; and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted here from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I’m still processing the second to last stance – what do you think he means there… how can we doubt the mystical force of God that is manifesting everywhere all around us?

The ultimate irony for me is that I’ll be applying these quotes to the walls of the yoga studio with the same vinyl lettering that I poke fun at in my LDS friends homes! My one friend who worked for “the writing on the walls” and held parties around the Stake, had a quote you’d all appreciate: (smile)
“If your mind is too open, your brains will fall out.”
Hmm… no author on that one!

Can I accept this, too?

I’m still looking for the perfect one…

Right here, right now

-Ram Dass

Evince the plainness of undyed silk.

-Tao Te Ching

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.

- R.D. Laing

Are you not thinking what I’m not thinking?

Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.

-Siddharta Gautama

Form is emptiness; emptiness form.

-The Heart Sutra

The inner – what is it?
If not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming?

- Rilke

Truth is a pathless land.

-Krishnamurti

If going away is what it is to be a monk
then coming back
really
really
is what it is to be a Buddha.

But surely you can only really come back
if you’ve really gone away?

- Ko Un

May our lives mingle with the truth.

-Tibetan prayer

Practice with eyes of ice and hearts afire.

-Zen proverb

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

- e. e. cummings

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.

-John Milton

Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise ones of old;
Seek what they sought.

-adapted from Matsuo Basho

The Lover and the Beloved are One.

“Smile, breathe and go slowly”
- Thich Nhat Hanh