this is what i believe

   

Beth Moon, Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time 

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When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. 

Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. 

So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. 

So they covered each one over with mud. 

And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.


—Zora Neale Hurston, born 1891
Their Eyes Were Watching God

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This is what I believe: That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.


—D. H. Lawrence

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I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he 

who is not afraid of my darkness, will find 

banks full of roses under my cypresses.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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time statue

 

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... 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

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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

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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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listen

  

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This is the first thing
I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.


—Philip Larkin
The North Ship

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imagine this room with 30 or 40 people living and dying together ...

 

  

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Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own? 

—Sogyal Rinpoche

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

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The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. 

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy 

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Master Lu Tzu said : That which exists through itself is called Meaning (Tao). Meaning has neither name nor force. 

It is the one essence, the one primordial spirit. 

Essence and life cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the Light of Heaven. 

The Light of Heaven cannot be seen. 

It is contained in the two eyes.

—Richard Wilhelm, Carl Jung

The Secret of the Golden Flower

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Imagine better than the best you know. —Neville Goddard

 

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As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.


—W. H. Auden

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five invitations

 

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The five invitations are my attempt to honor the lessons I have learned sitting bedside with so many dying patients. They are five mutually supportive principles, permeated with love.


Don't wait.

Welcome everything, push away nothing.

Bring your whole self to the experience.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

Cultivate don't know mind.


—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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Death asked me to join him for dinner
so I slipped into my favorite black dress 
that I had been saving for a special occasion 
and let him walk me to our candlelit tryst.
He ordered a ribeye, extra rare
I ordered two desserts and red wine
and then I sipped 
and wondered 
why he looked so familiar 
and smelled like earth and memory.
He felt like a place both faraway 
and deep within my body
A place that whispers to me 
on the crisp autumn breeze 
along the liminal edges of dusk and dawn
somewhere between dancing
and stillness.
He looked at me 
with the endless night sky in his eyes 
and asked 
‘Did you live your life, my love?’
As I swirled my wine in its glass
I wondered If I understood the thread I wove into the greater fabric
If I loved in a way that was deep and freeing 
If I let pain and grief carve me into something more grateful 
If I made enough space to be in awe that flowers exist 
and take the time to watch the honeybees 
drink their sweet nectar
I wondered what the riddles of regret and longing 
had taught me 
and if I realized just how 
beautiful and insignificant and monstrous and small we are 
for the brief moment that we are here 
before we all melt back down
into ancestors of the land.
Death watched me lick buttercream from my fingers
As he leaned in close and said 
‘My darling, it’s time.’
So I slipped my hand into his
as he slowly walked me home.
I took a deep breath as he leaned in close 
for the long kiss goodnight
and I felt a soft laugh leave my lips 
as his mouth met mine
because I never could resist a man
with the lust for my soul in his eyes
and a kiss that makes my heart stop.


—Gina Puorro
Oh, Death
thank you ian sanders

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night writing

'This doesn't compare to the feel of your skin'

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somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will enclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


 —E. E. Cummings

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true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;
despite what fear denies,what hope asserts,
what falsest both disprove by proving true

(all doubts,all certainties,as villains strive
and heroes through the mere mind’s poor pretend
—grim comics of duration:only love
immortally occurs beyond the mind)

such a forever is love’s any now
and her each here is such an everywhere,
even more true would truest lovers grow
if out of midnight dropped more suns than are

(yes;and if time should ask into his was
all shall,their eyes would never miss a yes)


—E. E. Cummings

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Live to the point of tears. —Albert Camus

  

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The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know, and there are certain customary twins in Russian as in other tongues. 

For instance, love automatically rhymes with blood, nature with liberty, sadness with distance, humane with everlasting, prince with mud, moon with a multitude of words, but sun and song and wind and life and death with none.


—Vladimir Nabokov
An Evening of Russian Poetry

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There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.


—Pablo Neruda

   

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As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.


—Virginia Woolf

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Everything in the world began with a yes. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into physiological change. 

Nothing is more wondrous about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain than their ability to convert thoughts, hopes, ideas, and attitudes into chemical substances. 

Everything begins, therefore, with belief. 

What we believe is the most powerful option of all.


—Norman Cousins
wait - what ?

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the creative point of life

  

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We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. 

That now is the creative point of life. 

So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that. Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as it’s expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence—you wait till later to find out what the sentence means … 

The present is always changing the past.


—Alan Watts

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Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations—no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes, and bodies, and they’re transformations in time. 

Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler with a simplified scale—it’s just three points: was, is, and will be.


—Olga Tocarczuk
Flights

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Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. 

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that at any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.


—Algernon Blackwood
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories

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on being old in Bali

  

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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

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Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. 

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.


—Henri Bergson

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Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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We live by waters breaking out of the heart. —Anne Carson

   

no image source, sadly

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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

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There isn’t time - so brief is life - for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account.

There is only time for loving - and but an instant, so to speak, for that.


—Mark Twain
in a letter to Clara Spaulding
20 August 1886

 

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If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. 

If you're overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. 

If you can't understand them for the life of you, even though you've tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. 

If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. 

You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you're finding life to be the one thing that's trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.


—Henry Rollins
Solipsist

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shapes that renew

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I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same 
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours 
And the songs of every poet past and forever. 


—Rabindranath Tagore
unending love

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The Hermetic marriage is an alchemical symbol found in the nature of all things, for the law of polarity is universal. In the human world it appears as gender - positive and negative, masculine and feminine. 

As all electricians know, positive and negative are opposite poles of one circuit. Spirit itself knows no polarity, but manifests through polarity to the accomplishment of the Great Work.


—Manly P. Hall
The Hermetic Marriage

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To be fully ourselves we must advance in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest—towards the ‘other.’

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. 

There is no mind without synthesis.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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the soul was the song itself

 

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I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and I have been circling for a thousand years. 

And I still don't know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

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People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul was the song itself.  


—Hafiz

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strange creature

  

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In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. 

This is given. It is not learned.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching A Stone To Talk

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In quiet moments in my study, or outdoors, this deeper voice convinced me that the prospects are bleak unless we can once again relate to the Earth not as a thing or as a machine, but as a strange creature that improvises it’s own unfolding in the cosmos through the ongoing creativity of evolution and self-transformation.


—Stephan Harding
Animate Earth

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O human, see then the human being rightly; the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form, and everything is already present, though hidden.

—Hildegarde of Bingen

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play nice

 

thank you, things to read

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the principal element of creation

  

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Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.  


—Rabindranath Tagore

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natur(al forces

 

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The third phase of the outdoor dry stone gallery is completed. It is an unusual walled enclosure with a narrow hall, window, niches, and two sets of stairs. Found objects of iron and rock are displayed on the walls, along with other manmade works of art.  The installation combines art and natural stone, blurring the division between man's creativity and nature's. The centre 'sculpture' is a life-size, abstract, flowingly beautiful acquisition, sculpted and shaped by natural forces. 

The entire installation is called Path Present Future, and can be seen at the AOG near Frankville Ontario.

—John Shaw-Remmington

thinking with my hands 

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Ready-made knowledge can only be memorized; knowledge is not truly our own until we are capable of reproducing the given content in a form of our own making. Memorizing is but a negative condition; true, organic assimilation is impossible without inner transformation of what we learn. All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. 

Only by his divine capacity for production is man truly a man; without it, no more than a tolerably well-devised machine. He who has not—with the same high impulse as the artist who out of the raw material calls forth the image of his soul—his own invention, who has not fashioned the image of his science in all its parts and features in perfect harmony with the archetype, has not truly grasped it.


—Schelling
On University Studies (Lecture 3)

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