life in two days

 

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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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there is a livingness

 

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There is more to our world than inanimate matter and human beings, there is a livingness in nature. [The world] can be seen in an entirely new way, perceiving the rocks we pass by without notice each day as alive and aware.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers

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Carefully placed upon the future, 

it tips from the breeze and skims away, 

frail thing of words, this valentine, 

so far to sail. And if you find it 

caught in the reeds, its message blurred, 

the thought that you are holding it 

a moment is enough for me.


—Ted Kooser
This Paper Boat

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Just now

A rock took fright

When it saw me.

It escaped 

By playing dead.


—Norbert Mayer


 

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red is holy, blue is holy

   

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Red is holy. Nobody understands it. 

It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding.

Blue is holy. 

Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. 

And the heart…the heart can’t wait. 
Revolts without understanding. 

Boom. Goes on. 
Without the world’s understanding.


—Tennessee Williams
Oriflamme, c. January 1944

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if you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places

   

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To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. 

At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
 

―N. Scott Momaday

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Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …’

—W.B. Yeats

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I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. 

I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.
 

—George Morrison, Grand Portage Ojibwe

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the song sings the singer

 

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There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now and that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent.

What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self, you are already that. The fact is, you are ignorant of your blissful state. Ignorance supervenes and draws a veil over the pure Self which is bliss. 

Attempts are directed only to remove this veil of ignorance which is merely wrong knowledge. The wrong knowledge is the false identification of the Self with the body and the mind. This false identification must go, and then the Self alone remains.

Therefore realisation is for everyone; realisation makes no difference between the aspirants. This very doubt, whether you can realise, and the notion 'I-have-not-realised' are themselves the obstacles. 

Be free from these obstacles also.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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People need to be liberated from their systems of symbolism 

and become more intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world.

—Alan Watts

 

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My grandma told me that the Universe is singing in the snowflakes, the raindrops, in the trees, the water, and all Creation. Physicists call this holistic holographic universe. Lakotas call it Taku Wakan Skan Skan/Mitakuye Oyasin, which means everything is connected and related in divine rhythm, vibration. 

Remember, the Lakotas know that the song sings the singer. The Spirit sings the song.

—Basil Braveheart

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real illusions

  

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I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

—Albert Einstein

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The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One. 

That art thou.

Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all's well


—E. E. Cummings

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like this

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He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendours of the constellations, and the invisible splendour of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. 

In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.


―Victor Hugo
Les Misérables

 

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To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. 

To keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. 

Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below.


—Marcus Aurelius 121 - 180 CE
Meditations 

  

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we are that

   

Sabrina Nangala Robertson
Water dreaming (Ngapa Jukurrpa) -- Pirlinyarnu

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A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.

—Carl Rogers
Becoming a Person

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We are slowed down sound and light waves; a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. 

We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.

—Albert Einstein

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Dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information. —Richard Doyle

    

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The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

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The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). We say “my” body and “your” body and “his” body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. 

[...] This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it.
 

—Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, exerpts

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Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

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shanti, shanti, shanti

  

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Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

—Clarice Lispector

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I am the dream changing before your eyes. 

I am my body, a house for blood and breath. 

I am a man on earth and a god in heaven. 

While I travel the deserts in frail form, while I grow old and weep and die, I live always as a child inside the body of truth, a blue egg that rocks in the storm but never breaks. 

I sleep in peace in my mother’s lap, a child mesmerised by sunlight on the river. My soul is swallowed up by God.

Out of chaos came the light.

Out of the will came life.

—The Egyptian Book of the Dead

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The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.


—Eugenio Montejo
Peter Boyle version

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from an untitled poem

tears

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To sing is to begin a sentence

like “I want to get well." 

I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:

Heaven never wept
over nothing.

—Thomas Merton

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conjectures of a guilty bystander

   

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In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. 

It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… 

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

—Thomas Merton
excerpts 

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I am not to speak to you, 

I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone, 

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, 

I am to see that I do not lose you.

—Walt Whitman

To A Stranger

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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart. —Yeats

  

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Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


—Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

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We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. 

Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.

—Red Pine :: The Heart Sutra

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Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, 

and within it is the Creator:

Within this vessel are the seven oceans, 

and the unnumbered stars.

The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;

And within this vessel the Eternal soundeth, 

and the spring wells up.

Kabir says: “Listen to me, my Friend!

My Beloved Lord is within."

—Kabir

 

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The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. —Teilhard de Chardin

 

eye of a female humpback whale, rachel moore

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I could be both an I 

and the world. The great eye 

of the world is both gaze 

             and gloss. To be swallowed 

by being seen. A dream. 

To be made whole 

               by being not a witness, 

but witnessed.

—Ada Limón

  

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all these things are mind

   

dolphin eye

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My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done." 

If you have regard for me, remember my words. 

The knowledge "I Am” is the greatest God, the Guru; be one with that, be intimate with it. That itself will bless you with all the knowledge relevant for you and the proliferation of that knowledge will lead you to the state which is eternal.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj 

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Everything that you see is this mind. All manifestation, all the past, the present and the future, all the gods, the heavens and the hells - all these things are mind. What a power this mind has! 

It will pretend to help you by giving you visions or pleasurable inner states, but it will do everything in its power to keep you away from that thought-free encounter with your own Self.

—Papaji

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Though you may be spoken of, you have neither name nor form. 

Whether you are divided or undivided, there is nothing here but you. 

O mind, O shameless, wandering mind! Why do you weary yourself so? 

I am nectarean knowledge, unchanging bliss; I am everywhere, like space.

You and I are not attached to this world of ephemeral forms; It is only the shameless mind which divides the One in parts. 

Division and non-division are the same to you and me; I am nectarean knowledge, unchanging bliss; I am everywhere, like space.

—The Song of the Avadhut

 

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Save all your energies for breaking the wall your mind has built around you. —Nisargadatta

  

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Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition.

Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!

In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. "Tell me, Lobsang," I said, "if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?"

My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, "How many human beings do you see?”

—Jacob Needleman

Time and the Soul

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merrily, merrily

  

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You want to know yourself. For this, keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. 

Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.

Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. 

That is enough.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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It is you who pervade this universe, and this universe exists in you. 

You are truly pure Consciousness by nature. 

Be not petty-minded.

—Ashtavakra Gita

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Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart longs for, and have no fear. 

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. 


―W. B. Yeats

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a conversation between stones

 

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Nouns are mainly designated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate. The word stone, akin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. 

Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are not the same as they were to me in English. 

I can't write about a stone without considering it in Ojibwe and acknowledging that the Anishinabe universe began with a conversation between stones.


—Louise Erdich
Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart

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When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.


—Joy Harjo

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later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

—Warsan Shire
What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

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earthspeak

  

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Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

—Rabindranath Tagore

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Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.


—Jane Hirshfield

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I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than

mountains and rivers and the great wide earth,

the sun and the moon and the stars. 

—Dogen

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You are all things, and all things are your soul. —Conrad Aiken

    

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Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward. And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.


—Kahlil Gibran

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I am not this hair,

I am not this skin,

I am the soul that lives within.


—Rumi

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I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. 

We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.


—Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist

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