I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman

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The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep.

They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.
 

—Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark

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We can never directly see what is true, that is, identical with what is divine: we look at it only in reflection, in example, in the symbol, in individual and related phenomena. We perceive it as a life beyond our grasp, yet we cannot deny our need to grasp it.

[...] The highest achievement of the human being as a thinking being is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.


—Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

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In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

 

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The Universal Force of Love

  

Banksy

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In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of Albert Einstein, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them, for Lieserl Einstein.

“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…

If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet. However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.

When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer!

Your father,
Albert Einstein"

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love is every only god

   

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love is every only god 

who spoke this earth so glad and big
even a thing all small and sad
man,may his mighty briefness dig

for love beginning means return
seas who could sing so deep and strong

one queerying wave will whitely yearn
from each last shore and home come young

so truly perfectly the skies
by merciful love whispered were,
completes its brightness with your eyes

any illimitable star


—E. E. Cummings

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breaking down the molecules of mistranslation

 

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love is every only god 

who spoke this earth so glad and big
even a thing all small and sad
man,may his mighty briefness dig

for love beginning means return
seas who could sing so deep and strong

one queerying wave will whitely yearn
from each last shore and home come young

so truly perfectly the skies
by merciful love whispered were,
completes its brightness with your eyes

any illimitable star


—E. E. Cummings

.

 

Advent(ure

 

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So I called my Jesuit friend, Tom, who is a hopeless alcoholic of the worst sort, sober now for 22 years, someone who sometimes gets fat and wants to hang himself, so I trust him. I said, “Tell me a story about Advent. Tell me about people getting well.” He thought for a while. Then he said, “OK.” 

In 1976, when he first got sober, he was living in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, going to the very hip AA meetings there, where there were no fluorescent lights and not too much clapping – or that yahoo-cowboy-hat-in-the-air enthusiasm that you get in L.A., according to sober friends. And everything was more or less all right in early sobriety, except that he felt utterly insane all the time, filled with hostility and fear and self-contempt. But I mean, other than that everything was OK. Then he got transferred to Los Angeles in the winter, and he did not know a soul. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “I was afraid to go into entire areas of L.A., because the only places I knew were the bars. 

So I called the cardinal and asked him for the name of anyone he knew in town who was in AA. And he told me to call this guy Terry." Terry, as it turned out, had been sober for five years at that point, so Tom thought he was God. They made arrangements to go to a meeting that night in the back of the Episcopal Cathedral, right in the heart of downtown L.A. It was Terry’s favorite meeting, full of low-bottom drunks and junkies – people from nearby halfway houses, bikers, jazz musicians. “Plus it’s a men’s stag meeting,” says Tom. "So already I’ve got issues.

There I am on my first date with this new friend Terry, who turns out to not be real chatty. He’s clumsy and ill at ease, an introvert with no social skills, but the cardinal has heard that he’s also good with newly sober people. He asks me how I am, and after a long moment, I say, ‘I’m just scared,’ and he nods and says gently, ‘That’s right.’ I don’t know a thing about him, I don’t what sort of things he thinks about or who he votes for, but he takes me to this meeting near skid row, where all these awful looking alkies are hanging out in the yard, waiting for a meeting to start. I’m tense, I’m just staring. It’s a whole bunch of strangers, all of them clearly very damaged – working their way back slowly, but not yet real attractive.  

The people back in Berkeley AA all seem like David Niven in comparison, and I’m thinking, Who are these people? Why am I here? All my scanners are out. It’s all I can do not to bolt. Ten minutes before the meeting began, Terry directed me to a long flight of stairs heading up to a windowless, airless room. I started walking up the stairs, with my jaws clenched, muttering to myself tensely just like the guy in front of me, this guy my own age who was stumbling and numb and maybe not yet quite on his first day of sobriety. 

The only things getting me up the stairs are Terry, behind me, pushing me forward every so often, and this conviction I have that this is as bad as it’s ever going to be – that if I can get through this, I can get through anything. Well. All of a sudden, the man in front of me soils himself. I guess his sphincter just relaxes. Shit runs down onto his shoes, but he keeps walking. He doesn’t seem to notice. However, I do. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and my eyes bugged out but I couldn’t get out of line because of the crush behind me. And so, holding my breath, I walk into the windowless, airless room. 

Now, this meeting has a greeter, which is a person who stands at the door saying hello. And this one is a biker with a shaved head, a huge gut and a Volga boatman mustache. He gets one whiff of the man with shit on his shoes and throws up all over everything. You’ve seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming, right? That’s me. That’s what I look like. But Terry enters the room right behind me. And there’s total pandemonium, no one knows what to do. The man who had soiled himself stumbles forward and plops down in a chair. A fan blows the terrible smells of shit and vomit around the windowless room, and people start smoking just to fill in the spaces in the air. Finally Terry reaches out to the greeter, who had thrown up. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. 'Wow,' he says. 'Looks like you got caught by surprise.' And they both laugh. Right? Terry asks a couple of guys to go with him down the hall to the men’s room, and help this guy get cleaned up. There are towels there, and kitty litter, to absorb various effluvia, because this is a meeting where people show up routinely in pretty bad shape. So while they’re helping the greeter get cleaned up, other people start cleaning up the meeting room. 

Then Terry approaches the other man. 'My friend,' he says gently, 'it looks like you have trouble here.' The man just nods. 'We’re going to give you a hand,' says Terry. So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn’t covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about grace. 

Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn’t have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. So I’ll tell you what the promise of Advent is: It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time."


—Anne Lamott

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season of the heart

   

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We give thanks for the blessing of winter:
Season to cherish the heart. 

To make warmth and quiet for the heart. 

To make soups and broths for the heart. 

To cook for the heart and read for the heart. 

To curl up softly and nestle with the heart. 

To sleep deeply and gently at one with the heart. 

To dream with the heart. 

To spend time with the heart. 

We give thanks for the blessing of winter:
Season to cherish the heart. 

—Michael Leunig

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Shapechangers in Winter

   

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This is the Solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future,
the place of caught breath


—Margaret Atwood 
Eating Fire

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In the depth of winter, 
I finally learned 
that within me there lay 
an invincible summer.

―Albert Camus

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winter trees (note to self)

  

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All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.


—William Carlos Williams 

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You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.

—W. H. Auden

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together in the whole night

 

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What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.


—Crowfoot 
Blackfoot warrior and orator 
1830 - 1890

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch.


—Annie Dillard

The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great ʻōhiʻas and honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the bright birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back


—W.S. Merwin
the solstice

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I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn. —Sri Nisargadatta

 

  

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The Soul has two eyes 

One looks at time passing 

The other sends forth its gaze into eternity. 


—Angelus Silesius

.

[Man] sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; he takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end. But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part. 

Nature is one. There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.

—Masanobu Fukuoka

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We all have our time machines.

Some take us back, they're called memories.

Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

—Jeremy Irons
allchannels

 

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Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible. —Rumi

   

 

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If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it
and you will see the world


—Robert Kaplan

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From the earliest times, it was understood that the visible world implied the existence of an invisible world, where everything was infused with the supernatural and the felt sense of the sacred. 

Thomas Yellowtail expressed: ‘A man’s attitude toward the nature around him, and the animals in nature, is of special importance, because as we respect our created world, so also do we show respect for the real world that we cannot see.’ 

Through the traditional wisdom of American Indians we learn that there are ways of knowing that are obtained through the earth that allow human beings to listen and learn directly from the Great Spirit.


—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Parabola Magazine
Fall 2017 Issue: “The Sacred” 

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Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. It counts the totality of what isn’t there. By this reasoning it must be everywhere with regard to this and that: with regard, for instance, to the number of humming-birds in that bowl with seven — or now six — apples. Then what does zero name?


—Robert Kaplan

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Could I live like this? I ask myself

and I know, somehow, I must.

More and more my life is peeling paint,

straight horizons.

More and more my name dissolves in the air,

salt, something invisible I taste,

and forget.


—Naomi Shihab Nye
At Otto’s Place, excerpt 

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december night

    

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The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch
The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these

White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins
And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon

The water flows through its
Own fingers without end
Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men


—W. S. Merwin

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there is a way

 

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At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see 

no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one by one
that turned to colors around us 

a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it
burns through the words that no one has abelieved


—W.S. Merwin
The Pupil, 2001

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There is a way between voice and presence where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.

With wandering talk it closes.


—Rumi

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fields of life

    

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Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. 

He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

. 

Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.

In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life.

What we do to benefit life automatically benefits all of us because we are all included in that which is life.


—David R. Hawkins

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Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.

—David Bohm

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somewhere in space hangs my heart

   

Paris by night, from the International Space Station

click to see

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You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

—Alan Watts

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This must be well grasped: the world hangs on the thread of consciousness.  No consciousness, no world. 

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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On foot
I had to walk through the solar system
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself. 

Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air, 
to other reckless hearts. 


—Edith Södergran (1892-1923)
Stina Katchadourian version

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Religion is the reconnection - re-legio - between man and reality. —E. F. Schumacher

  

we are beautiful

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In order to keep the mind on one thing it is necessary to preserve attention and so lead it into the heart: for so long as the mind remains in the head, where thoughts jostle one another, it has not time to concentrate on one thing. But where attention descends into the heart, it attracts all the powers of the soul and body into one point there. 

This concentration of all human life in one place is immediately reflected in the heart by a special sensation that is the beginning of future warmth. This sensation, faint at the beginning, becomes gradually stronger, firmer, deeper. At first tepid, it grows into warm feeling and concentrates the attention upon itself. 

And so it comes about that, whereas in the initial stages the attention is kept in the heart by an effort of will, in due course this attention, by its own vigour, gives birth to warmth in the heart. This warmth then holds the attention without special effort. 

From this, the two go on supporting one another, and must remain inseparable; because dispersion of attention cools the warmth, and diminishing warmth weakens attention.

—Theophan the Recluse, 1815-1894

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For silence is not God, nor speaking; 
fasting is not God, nor eating; 
solitude is not God, nor company; 
nor any other pair of opposites.

He is hidden between them, 
and cannot be found by anything your soul does, but only by the love of your heart. 

He cannot be known by reason, 
he cannot be thought, caught, 
or sought by understanding. 

But he can be loved and 
chosen by the true, loving will of your heart.


—the cloud of unknowing

.

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listening

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We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common.

It has to be everybody or nobody.


—Buckminster Fuller

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Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I'm still singing my song during this period,
Don't know who's listening.

Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.


—Hermann Hesse
wait - what ?

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if you want

 

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If
you want
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime
intimacy, the divine, the Christ
taking birth
forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us
is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation
come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim—
the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is
His beloved servant
never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking
down the street pregnant
with Light 
and sing ... 


—St. John of the Cross 
1542 – 1591
Advent Poem 


 

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the path goes down

.

On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky.

Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. 

At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die. This love is bodhichitta. It is gentle and warm; it is clear and sharp; it is open and spacious. The awakened heart of bodhichitta is the basic goodness of all beings.

—Pema Chödrön
Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

.

 

Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious, there has the mind made a swing: Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never ceases its sway.

Millions of beings are there: the sun and the moon in their courses are there: Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on. All swing! the sky and the earth and the air and the water; and the Lord Himself taking form: And the sight of this has made Kabîr a servant.


—Kabîr
Song of Kabîr
Rabindranath Tagore version

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