Nothing is known, everything is imagined. Surround yourself with roses. —Fernando Pessoa

.

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

—J.M. Barrie

.

Thought has altitude. Thought has velocity. 

Thought has acceleration. Thought has dimension. 

Thought has edges and vertices. 

Thought has a radius and a circumference. 

Thought dances in front of a thoughtless mirror.

—Ahmed Salman

.

wait

.

bread crumbs

 

.

On land off an ice covered sea the traveler can ... detect the presence of open water, simply because it reflects less light than land or ice.

The open sea’s telltale sign is thus a darkness on the underside of the clouds.


—Harold Gatty
finding your way without map or compass

.

not a need but an ecstasy

 

.

We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is.

—Carl Sagan

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death

.

And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how 
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except 
she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and injured say, 
"Beauty is kind and gentle."

The tired and weary say,
"Beauty is of soft whisperings
She speaks in our spirit."

In winter say the snow-bound,
"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."

All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. 

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see, though you
close your eyes and a song you hear, though
you shut your ears.

People of Orphalese, 
beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.


—Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet

.

like this

  

.

If anyone asks you

how the perfect satisfaction

of all our longing

will look, lift your face

and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness

of the night sky, climb up on the roof

and dance and say,

Like this?

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,

or what "God's fragrance" means,

lean your head toward him or her.

Keep your face there close,

Like this.

When someone quotes the old adage

about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen knot by knot the strings

of your robe,

Like this?

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,

don't try to explain the miracle.

Kiss me on the lips,

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means

to "die for love," point

here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown

and measure with your fingers the space

between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.

When someone doesn't believe that,

walk back into my house.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.

Stare into this deepening blue,

While the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,

light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

—Rumi
Coleman Barks version, excerpt

.

no(thingness

 

.

Here, even the various mind-pleasing blossoming flowers
And attractive shining supreme golden houses
Have no inherently existent maker at all. 

They are set up through the power of thought.
Through the power of conceptuality the world is established.


—Buddha

 

.

When Buddha said "Whatever depends on conditions

Is empty of its own inherent existence,"

What is more amazing 

Than this marvellous advise!


—Tsonghkapa

.

a song on the end of the world

.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now. 

As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now. 

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he is much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.


—Czesław Miłosz

.

starting with little things

  

.

Start with little things.

Love the earth like a mole, 
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --

Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.

Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


—William Stafford 
The Way It Is

.

every(thing is necessary

 

.

Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. 

Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.


—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)

.

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

.

the good secret

   

Gregory Colbert

.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Then when you see what is around you as not other-than-you, and all and everything as the existence of the One; when you do not see anything else with Him or in him; but see Him in everything as yourself and at the same time as the nonexistence of yourself; then what you see is the truth.


—Ibn al-Arabi

.

Love all.

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand.

Love every leaf and every ray of light.

Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment.

If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.


—Dostoevsky

.

this is how love catches up and wants to be our friend, as we hold 

each other, and the good secret inside slides forth continuous

—Rumi

.

There are many great voices but not all are human. —Native American proverb

 

 .

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. 

You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. 

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

—Ram Dass

. 

how to live on earth

  

The Kummakivi (Strange Rock)

Ruokolahti, Finland

.

We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth.

It is the Hopi belief, it is our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it is likely that you will not make it.

Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila... Grandfather.

We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy you've got to drink good water. ... Water is sacred, air is sacred. 

Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth, and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting.

In the Hopi prophecy they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me its not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. Its not negative, its evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it's time, nothing stays the same.

You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection. You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. It is never something like the end. It is like life, there is no end to life.


—Floyd Red Crow Westerman

.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves —Nhat Hanh

 

.

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. 

And therein we err, and greatly err. 
For the animal shall not be measured by man. 

In a world older and more complete than ours they move 
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. 

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

—Henry Beston
The Outermost House 

.

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.

I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;

while there is a criminal element, I am of it; 

while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.


—Eugene Debs
Statement to the Court, excerpt
Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act,
September 18, 1918

.

slow growth

   

 

.

 

The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each

other's eyes and in what flows

between them then. To see your face

in a crowd of others, or alone on a 

frightening street, I weep for that.

Our tears improve the earth. The

time you scolded me, your gratitude,

your laughing, always your qualities

increase the soul. Seeing you is a 

wine that does not muddle or numb.

We sit inside the cypress shadow

where amazement and clear thought

twine their slow growth into us.


—Rumi

.

as light pours like rain

 

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

.

God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

.

garden notes

  

.

All day in the garden
and at night when I wake to it
at its moment I hear a sound
sometimes little more than a whisper
of something falling
arriving
fallen
a seed in its early age
or a great frond formed
of its high days and nights
looking at the sky
made of daybreak the morning sun
and the whole of daylight
the moon and the stars and the clouds
and of the rain descending out of itself
coming down to its own leaf
there is no trace of regret
in the sound or in the stillness
after the falling
no sound
of hesitation on the way
no question and no doubt

—W.S. Merwin

.

merwinconservancy

.

that which abides

   

.

The sea wind sways over the endless oceans -
spreads its wings night and day
rises and sinks again
over the desolate swaying floor of the immortal ocean. 

Now it is nearly morning
or it is nearly evening
and the ocean wind feels in its face - the land wind. 

Clockbuoy toll morning and evening psalms,
the smoke of a coalboat
or the smoke of a tar-burning phoenician ship faces away at the horizons. 

The lonely jellyfish who has no history rocks around with
burning blue feet.
It's nearly evening now or morning.


—Harry Martinson

.

With their round dance the electrons spin
chrysalises of that which abides,
the inmost cocoons
which do not open of their own accord
but are of that which abides.

There it is not a matter of hatching out.

There it is a matter of tending and protecting
the metamorphoses of the inmost
deeper-down swaying,

the innermost playing of women in dance.


—Harry Martinson

.

 

space is not empty

 

.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. 

This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.


—Thomas Merton

.

part(ners

 

.

Spribille describes lichens as the most ‘extroverted of all symbioses’. Yet it is no longer possible to conceive of an organism - humans included - as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with. The biological identity of most organisms can’t be prised apart from the life of their microbial symbionts. The word 'ecology’ has its roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning 'house’, 'household’, or 'dwelling place’. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places. 

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

We can’t be defined on anatomical grounds because our bodies are shared with microbes, and consist of more microbial cells than our own - cows can’t eat grass, for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows’ bodies have evolved to house the microbes that sustain them. 

Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilisation of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our development programmes. 

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome —many symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our own DNA, and at points in our evolution art history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: our mitochondria have their own genome, as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least 8 per cent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into 'chimeras’, formed when mothers and foetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero). 

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing self from 'non-self’. 

Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it. 

Where does this leave you? Or perhaps y'all?


—Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life

.

questions

the original text (c 60-100 CE). The text bears parallels to Luke and other synoptic gospels, yet it is far earlier than any surviving synoptic text.

.

His disciples said to Him, “When will the Kingdom come?”

Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or 'There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

—The Gospel of Thomas, v 113

.

Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’,
say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light
came into being on its own accord and established (itself) and
became manifest through their image.’ 

If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’, say,
‘We are its children, we are the elect of the Living Father.’ 

If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your father in you?’,
say to them, ‘It is movement and repose.’"


—The Gospel of Thomas

.

wait

.