mean(ings

  

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Everything has a hidden face. Hidden, not in the sense that it is intentionally concealed, but in that it can only be seen with different eyes than the physical. A different mode of perception must be used. The hidden face of Nature can only be seen with the heart. 

Everything we encounter in the wildness of the world gives off its own electromagnetic pulse of communication. These waveforms are filled with meanings, living communications that touch us and that we experience as feelings.


—Stephen Harrod Buhner
The Secret Teachings of Plants

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In front of the breast lies the great world of activity; behind it, in the spinal cord, is the vast, illimitable, unfathomable ocean of consciousness, motionless and peaceful. 

The waves of the world are hurling themselves upon the breast, breaking there and sinking down into the deep peace of the ocean within. 

—Sri Anirvan

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Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, mean egotism vanishes. 

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

―Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature and Selected Essays

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the first peace

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The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. 

The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.

—Heȟáka Sápa, Black Elk
The Sacred Pipe, 1953

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Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things,

man will not himself find peace.

—Albert Schweitzer

Kulturphilosophie, 1923 

wait

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notes to self

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Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. 

You are not obligated to complete the work,
But neither are you free to abandon it.


—Pir Aga Mir
We Are Contextual Beings

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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself.

Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.

We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.


—Alan Watts

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Time and space are but physiological colours which the eye makes, 

but the soul is light.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. —William Blake

 

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Much of Earth’s life moves and communicates on a time scale 

humans cannot hope to comprehend. 

—Mose Feldenkrais

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The plant that directs its growth tendency to the light does not understand the arithmetic of wavelengths; it simply perceives light as good in the form of a positive affection. 

Today’s botanists have used ingenious experiments to confirm the subjectivity of plants. They observed that identical plant clones — multiple vegetative twins whose DNA sequences are identical to the letter — behave differently, even though room temperature and substrate moisture are the same. They are clones, but their bodies unfold into individual shapes. They individually choose between different options.

Every sprout has its own preferences. Each is an individual, not simply an automaton carrying out a genetic blueprint. 

Intelligence, according to the meaning of the Latin verb intelligere, means to be in between, to be able to choose. It signifies the ability to make a decision, and hence the judgment of a distinct self for whom a choice means something — survival, growth, flourishing. In this sense intelligence and life are one and the same thing.


—Andreas Weber
The Biology of Wonder, excerpts

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the first sky is inside you, friend

   

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What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you. 

Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first time, shaped
in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gabriel Caffrey version

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Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.

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


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Stephen Mitchell version

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Look at the birds. Even flying
is born 

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open 

at either end of day.
The work of wings 
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.


—Li-Young Lee 
Book of My Nights, One Heart

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love is a place

  

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The Sky where we live
Is no place to lose your wings.

So love, love,

Love.


—Hafiz

 

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March is the month of expectation —Emily Dickinson

 

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III

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.

—e. e. cummings
Spring is like a perhaps hand

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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

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

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted 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


—e.e. cummings

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day(light

  

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When you are out walking in the sunlight,

see the love covering all.

—Rumi

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Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.

Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
"My Life Is Not Mine."

If someone were to play music, it would
have to be very sweet.
We're drinking wine, but not through lips.
We're sleeping it off, but not in bed.

Rub the cup across your forehead.
This day outside is living and dying.
Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you're safe.
"Where, where can I be safe?" you ask.

This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.

This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.

Thoughts take form with words,
but this daylight is beyond and before
thinking and imagining. 

Those two, they are so thirsty, but this gives
smoothness to water. 
Their mouths are dry, and they are tired.

The rest of this poem is too blurry
for them to read.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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invitation

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Come to the orchard in Spring,

There is light and wine, and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.


If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.


—Rumi

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beautiful

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Let's go drifting through the trees
Let's go sailing on the sea
Let's go dancing on the juke joint floor
And leave our troubles all behind and have a party

So easily forgotten are the most important things
Like the melody and the moonlight in your eyes
And a song that lasts forever, keeps on gettin' better
All the time

'Cause life is beautiful
Life is wonderous
Every star above is shining just for us
Life is beautiful on a stormy night
Somewhere in the world, the sun is shining bright

I get crazy, so afraid
That I might lose you one fine day
And I'll be nothing but a tired old man
And I don't wanna be without you at the party

So easily forgotten, the most important thing
Is that I love you, I do
And I want to spend my days and nights
Walking through this crazy world with you

Life is beautiful
Life is wonderous
Every star above is shining just for us
Life is beautiful on a stormy night
Somewhere in the world, the sun is shining bright

So easily forgotten, the most important thing
Is that I love you, I do
And I want to spend my days and nights
Walking through this crazy world with you
That's right, baby

Life is beautiful
Life is wonderous
Every star above is shining just for us
Life is beautiful on a stormy night
Somewhere in the world, the sun is shine, shining bright


—Keb’ Mo’
wait - what ?

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💗

 

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Poor, dear, silly Spring, 
preparing her annual surprise!

 

—Wallace Stevens

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invitation

 

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Let us look for secret things

somewhere in the world

on the blue shores of silence.

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I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

—Pablo Neruda

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delicious trouble

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Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless. 

Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

The sun and stars that float in the open air, the appleshaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand; I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness.

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.


—Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, excerpts

 

 

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This the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.


—Plotinus

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the First Beauty

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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed

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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus

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Both anatomy and astronomy describe you. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  

underwater photo of a breaking wave that shows complex vibration and vortex dynamics 

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The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean.

And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity — because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.


—E.H. Chapin
Sunbeams, May 2021
allchannels

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

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I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. 

Every cell has life. 

Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified.

—Albert Einstein

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words are beings

 

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The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. 

At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.


—Carl Gustav Jung

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But words are beings: the game will bewitch you until you become part of it; you will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into the maze, to lure you into humour. You read and you do not understand what you read, and so you read more, enjoying the power of words to differ from the mundane. Words are waves. You learn to swim out of the tempting wave which covers you with foam. 

Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the mysterious: “Come to me, to me in search of what you know not,” the blue calls to you. 

Luck and the coastguard saved you from certain death with the sound of words. The lamp of the sea still scratches, but you have not shunned your love to the sea, the source of the primal rhythm. 

How is the sea imprisoned in three letters, the second of them overflowing with salt? How do letters expand to make room for all these words? How do words expand to embrace the world?


—Mahmoud Darwish
Absent Presence
Mohammed Shaheen version

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note to self

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Learn to distinguish the immovable in the movable, the unchanging in the changing, till you realize that all differences are in appearance only and oneness is a fact. 

This basic identity—you may call God, or Brahman, or the matrix (Prakriti), the words matter little—is only the realization that all is one. 

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience: ‘I am the world, the world is myself’, you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other.


—Nisargadatta

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hello

 

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Sawubona, a Zulu word for hello, literally translates to 
"I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being."


—Susan David

TED talk

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A Word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day. 

—Emily Dickinson

LXXXIX

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madly wonderful

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Some things, niño, some things are like this,
That instantly and in themselves are gay
And you and I are such things, O most miserable...

For a moment they are gay and are a part
Of an element, the exactest element for us,
In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things
And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,
That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.


—Wallace Stevens
Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun

 

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stop for one second

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The real world is beyond the mind’s ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. 

To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not so hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his wounded hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.


—Pablo Neruda
Keeping Quiet
Ian Sanders

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thou art that

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A knower of the Truth
travels without leaving a trace
speaks without causing harm
gives without keeping an account

The door he shuts, though having no lock,
cannot be opened
The knot he ties, though using no cord,
cannot be undone

If you think otherwise,
despite your knowledge, you have blundered


—Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching

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You know that you are. 

Don’t burden yourself with names, just be. 

Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.

—Sri Nisargadatta

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part(ners

  

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The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.


—James Lovelock

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For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof. 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). 

Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

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There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson.

Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. 

And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. 

Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.


—Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing 

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neighbour god

 

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You, neighbor god, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe
and know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.
They stand before you hiding you like names.
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Poems from the Book of Hours 

 

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four words

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Every child has known god,

not the god of names,

not the god of don’t,

not the god who does anything
weird,

but the god who only knows four words

and keeps repeating them, saying:

“Come dance with Me."

Come
Dance.

—Hafiz

 

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making it real

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We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.’ And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behavior in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).


—Gregory Bateson
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

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