real(ity

. 

... [Einstein's General Theory of Relativity] describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea...

And all of this ... was not a tale told by an idiot in a fit of lunacy or a hallucination caused by Calabria's burning Mediterranean sun and its dazzling sea.

It was reality. Or better, a glimpse of reality, a little less veiled than our blurred and banal everyday view of it. A reality that seems to be made of the same stuff that our dreams are made of, but that is nevertheless more real than our clouded, quotidian dreaming.


—Carlo Rovelli
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

.

I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.

May I not reply with a parable?

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.

That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.


—Albert Einstein, when asked if he would define himself as a pantheist

.

A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.

.

When the mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it stays in the Heart, the names and forms disappear. Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart is what is called ‘inwardness’ (antarmukha). Letting the mind go out of the Heart is known as ‘externalisation’ (bahirmukha).

Thus, when the mind stays in the Heart, the ‘I’ which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self which ever exists will shine.

Whatever one does, one should do without the egoity ‘I’. If one acts in that way, all will appear as of the nature of Siva.

Who am I?’ is not a mantra. It means that you must find out where in you arises the I-thought which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find this vichara marga (self enquiry) too hard for you, you can go on repeating “I, I” and that will lead you to the same goal.

There is no harm in using ‘I’ as a mantra.

It is the first name of God.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

the curve of one position

.

God illumines the mind and shines within it.

One cannot know God by means of the mind.

One can but turn the mind inwards and merge it in God.

If you believe that God will do all the things that you want Him to do, then surrender yourself to Him.

Otherwise let God alone, and know yourself.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

Be aware that the two paths of jnana (knowledge) and bhakti (devotion) are inseparably related. 

Therefore, without separating one from the other through the delusion that they are different, practice both simultaneously and harmoniously in your heart.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

The heart can think of no devotion 

Greater than being shore to ocean 

Holding the curve of one position, 

Counting an endless repetition.


—Robert Frost

.

questions

.

Now, of course, reality—from a philosopher’s point of view—is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me: what do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that, I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept. So, in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept. And reality itself is not a concept. Reality is, and we won’t give it a name.

Now, it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not—out there, as constellations—already grouped in the sky.

So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say, that we become interiorally silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time, that is to say, we talk to ourselves.


—Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Essential Lectures, Meditation

.

the outlines of being and its expressings

.

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.


—Wallace Stevens
Large Red Man Reading

.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung

.

We have seen so much.

Reality has almost used us up ...


—Tomas Tranströmer
Windows and Stones

.

time statue

. 

... in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images.

The tree's shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.


—Alan Moore
Jerusalem

.

Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts.

Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.

A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling.

No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.


—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

.

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

.

kindred

.

... down deep, at the molecular heart of life,
we are essentially identical to trees.


—Carl Sagan

.

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

.

beloved of the beloved

.

You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up. “Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?”

Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach Earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old."


—Frances O’Roark Dowell

.

Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you. 

We are all the beloved of the beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know.

Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is.


—Rumi

.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. —Arthur Eddington

. 

That which is above is like that which is below

and that which is below is like that which is above,

to achieve the wonders of the one thing.


—Hermes Trismegistus

.

Outwardly, I am one apple among many.

Inwardly, I am the Tree.


—Alan Watts

.

I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God. —Sufi

.

Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.


—Marcus Aurelius
Meditations 4:40

.

Real courage is possible only through seeing. It’s not possible through belief in the divine self, which we all share in common, as if that were something you could believe in. This is only to be discovered through not hanging on to anything, not having any armour, not having any beliefs, not having any kind of gimmick with which you try to hold the weaving smoke in position. You don’t need it. If you really are the basis of the world, you don’t need a belief that that is so.

... The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved. Living thus from the past, with echoes taking the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a bit late to the feast.


—Alan Watts

.

some(times

.

Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.


—Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma

.

The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law.

An austere line
Gathers the body’s play of strength
In a bold balance.

Shall my soul meet
This curve, as a bend in the road
On her way to form?


—Dag Hammarskjöld
Single Form

.

the stars write

. 

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.

Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.


—Octavio Paz

.

questions

.

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?

That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future?

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.


—Herman Hesse
Siddhartha

.

divinity's way and purpose

turtle shell/sound waves

.

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself.

All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and coincidental diversity of mere appearances, despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman who scorns diversity, who seeks unity.

Blue was blue, river was river, and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and divine lived hidden, so it was still that very divinity's way and purpose, to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest, and here Siddhartha. 

The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.


—Herman Hesse
Siddartha

.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

—Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children

.

'The world,’ said the Buddha, 'is an ever-burning fire.'

.

[...] to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. ‘All life,’ said the Buddha, 'is sorrowful’; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. 

'The world,’ said the Buddha, 'is an ever-burning fire.’ And so it is. 

And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By

💗

If you are falling …. dive. —Joseph Campbell

.

You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance.

Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.


—Gustave Thibon

.

We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast and anxiety comes along. All you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is, joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.


—Joseph Campbell

.

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling, they're given wings.


—Rumi

(notes to self

behind all words

.

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never–shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never–shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.


—Wallace Stevens

.

Happy are those who know:
Behind all words, the Unsayable stands;
And from that source alone, the Infinite
Crosses over to gladness, and us

Free of our bridges
Built with the stone of distinctions;
So that always, within each delight,
We gaze at what is purely single and joined.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

the realm of the densely packed

.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. 

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others. For the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.


—Albert Einstein

.

We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly,
Into Infinity.

But the distinction between

past, present and future is
nothing but an illusion.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
are not consecutive, they are connected
in a never-ending circle.


—Albert Einstein

.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified. 

—Terence McKenna

.

the cosmos is a vast body

.

The moon is a white strange world, a great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist.

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. 

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time … Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.


—D. H. Lawrence

.

two is not twice one

.

According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the four dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time.


—Roy H. Williams

.

No experience has been too unimportant,
and the smallest event unfolds like a fate,

and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand

and is laid alongside another thread
and is held and supported by a hundred others.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It maybe conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. 

But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.


—G.K. Chesterton

.

The only things we can ever perceive … are our perceptions. —George Berkeley

.

In reality, time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. Discard all you are not and go ever deeper.

Just as a man digging a well discards what is not water ... so must you discard what is not your own, till nothing is left which you can disown.

You will find that what is left is nothing which the mind can hook on to. 

You are not even a human being.

You just are - a point of awareness, co-extensive with time and space and beyond both, the ultimate cause, itself uncaused.

If you ask me “Who are you?”, my answer would be: “Nothing in particular. Yet, I am.”


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



 

.

sway in the rift between beats

.

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out.

This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.


—Joseph Campbell

.

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now." it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and beloved, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.


—Wendell Berry

.

pray without ceasing

.

Meditation must be unceasing even when one is engaged in work. 

Particular time for it is meant for novices.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.


—Henry David Thoreau
Walden: Where I lived and What I lived for



 

.

 

in the garden of forking paths

.

We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost ... And yet, and yet ...

Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations.

Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of.

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.


—Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths

.

the three oddest words

.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times, which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

Through our daily rambles on the web, where each array of links is a bifurcation of alternatives, labyrinthine time has become a familiar part of our lives.


—Paul Halpern
The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality

. 

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.


—Wislawa Szymborska
The Three Oddest Words

.

listen

.

This is the first thing
I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.


—Philip Larkin
The North Ship

.

queerly various

. 

You taught me the courage of stars before you left. 

How light carries on endlessly, even after death. 

With shortness of breath, you explained the infinite. 

How rare and beautiful it is to even exist.


—Sleeping at Last
Saturn

.

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. 

Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.


—William H. Gass
Omensetter’s Luck

.

on being “old” in Bali

.

It has been suggested that the linear theory of time is related to the experience of time in the Northern (and Southern) hemispheres, where it is marked by seasonal changes: life begins in the spring, matures in the summer, and dies in the fall, to begin a new cycle the following spring.

Bali, however, lies in the region of tropical rain forests near the Equator where there are no reasons to synchronize the growth schedules of all livings things. Instead, the processes of growth and decay proceed at different rates all over the forest, all the time. A flower is on a short, rapid growth cycle; a tree, a much longer one; a rock, longer still. The cycles mesh in this world, the Middle World, to create life.


—J. Stephen Lansing

.

questions

.

Perhaps we don't love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?


—Franz Kafka
Letters to Milena

.

love flows down

.

Love comes with a knife, not some
shy question, and not with fears
for its reputation! I say
these things disinterestedly. Accept them
in kind. Love is a madman

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains, drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing annihilation.

You've been walking the ocean’s edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under and deeper under,
a thousand times deeper! Love flows down.

The ground submits to the sky and suffers
what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse
for giving in like that?

Don’t put blankets over the drum!
Open completely. Let your spirit-ear
listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur.

Let the cords of your robe be untied.
Shiver in this new love beyond all
above and below. The sun rises, but which way
does night go? I have no more words.

Let soul speak with the silent
articulation of a face.


—Jelalludin Rumi 1207 – 1273
Coleman Barks version

.

like this

.

When someone quotes the old poetic image

about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe.

Like this.

—Rumi

.

how to write the world

a large strawberry squid

photo: NOAA Fisheries

.

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. 

One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves.

Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

.

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.


—The Chryptonaturalist

.

buffleheadcabin

.

the forgotten astonishment

 

.

the invisible walls,

the rotten masks that divide one man

from another, one man from himself,

they crumble

for one enormous moment and we glimpse

the unity that we lost, the desolation

of being man, and all its glories,

sharing bread and sun and death,

the forgotten astonishment of being alive

—Octavio Paz

Sunstone (Piedra de Sol) excerpt

.

Love is not the last room: there are others after it,

the whole length of the corridor that has no end.

—Yehuda Amichai

.

no image source, sadly

.

commeration

.

They made love among the hazel shrubs
beneath the suns of dew,
entangling in their hair
a leafy residue.

Heart of the swallow
have mercy on them.

They knelt down by the lake,
combed out the earth and leaves,
and fish swam to the water's edge
shimmering like stars.

Heart of the swallow
have mercy on them.

The reflections of trees were steaming
off the rippling waves.
O swallow let this memory
forever be engraved.

O swallow, thorn of clouds,
anchor of the air,
Icarus improved,
Assumption in formal wear,

O swallow, the calligrapher,
timeless second hand,
early ornithogothic,
a crossed eye in the sky,

O swallow, pointed silence,
mourning full of joy,
halo over lovers,
have mercy on them.


—Wislawa Szymborska

.

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.

They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.

If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.

If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.


—Anne Stevenson
vertigo

.

you shall not lose your way

.

We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass.

Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we have to shatter that plate glass, we have to reach in there.

So the old world observer simply has to be crossed off the books and we must put in the new term: participator. In this way we have come to realize that the universe is a participatory universe.


—John Wheeler

.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part.

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.


—Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, excerpt

.