Marie Bortolotto 2020

Sometimes Mysteriously
by Luis Omar Salinas

Sometimes in the evening when love
tunes its harp and the crickets
celebrate life, I am like a troubadour
in search of friends, loved ones,
anyone who will share with me
a bit of conversation. My loneliness
arrives ghostlike and pretentious,
it seeks my soul, it is ravenous
and hurting. I admire my father
who always has advice in these matters,
but a game of chess won't do, or
the frivolity of religion.
I want to find a solution, so I
write letters, poems and sometimes
I touch solitude on the shoulder
and surrender to a great tranquility.
I understand I need courage
and sometimes, mysteriously,
I feel whole.

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

 

Marie Bortolotto 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 2 Video Sketches by Artist Alf Lohr

crossing the river from Dr. Lohr on Vimeo.

 

 

observation NIZAMUDDIN from Dr. Lohr on Vimeo.

Marie Bortolotto 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marie Bortolotto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marie Bortolotto 2020

 

 

Marie Bortolotto 2020



Joy and sorrow come and go in turn:
Now failure daunts us, now success cheers us.
I prefer to be free of all this;
Against all the world I choose Simplicity.

- Hsieh Ling-yun (385-433 CE) Chinese poet 


 

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

     

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Has my Heart Gone to Sleep?

Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped working, the waterwheel
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?

No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming—
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence.

- Antonio Machado, Spanish poet 

1875 - 1939 AD

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

“Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen 
would later emphasize for me, isn’t 
about turning your back on the world; 
it’s about stepping away now and then 
so that you can see the world more 
clearly and love it more deeply. ” 

- Pico Iyer - The Art of Stillness:
Adventures in Going Nowhere

Marie Bortolotto 2020


The Poet's Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.


So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

- Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet 1904 - 1973

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Dying and giving birth go on
inside the one consciousness,
but most people misunderstand

the pure play of creative energy,
how inside that, those
are one event.

Lalla - Kashmiri Mystic Poet 1320 - 1392 AD

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Body, like the mountain
Heart, like the ocean
Mind, like the sky

- Dogen, Japanese Buddhist, poet, writer
philosopher (1200-1253 AD)

Marie Bortolotto 2020


Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

- Adam Zagajewski, 1945 -
Polish poet, novelist, translator


“Disdain for poetry (or any form of art)
reveals an interesting cultural anxiety
about the space for imagination in our lives…
poetry is this space where every single
particle of language is charged with the
most meaning.”

Quote by Bob Lerner, Author 1979 -

Marie Bortolotto 2020


“I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life,
you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes,
I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense
of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering
out either. It is just going steadily along.”

Quote by William Stafford,
1914 - 1993 American poet



"Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating
the same movements over decades are not simply
warming up or mechanically training their muscles.
They are learning how to attend unswervingly,
moment by moment, to themselves and their art;
learning to come into steady presence…
Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration
appears - paradoxically - at the moment willed effort
drops away… At such moments, there may be some
strong emotion present - feelings of joy, or even grief -
but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears.
We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention,
or else vanish into attentiveness itself. This may explain
why the creative is so often descried as impersonal and
beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its
etymology implies, something “breathed in”.

- from Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
by Jane Hirshfield, 1953-, Poet, Translator, Author

Marie Bortolotto 2020


In a Dark Time
by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood —
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is —
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Marie Bortolotto 2020

Marie Bortolotto 2020