soul sparks

     

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Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, 

"When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."


—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. 

One of the odd discoveries made by small boys is that when two pebbles are struck sharply against each other they emit, briefly, a curious smoky odor. 

The phenomenon fades when the stones are immaculately cleaned, vanishes when they are heated to furnace temperature, and reappears when they are simply touched by the hand again, before being struck.


—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell

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Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.


—Charles Simic
The Voice at 3 A.M.

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The soul should always stand ajar. —Emily Dickinson

  

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Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” 

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.




Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon.
You can’t take it with you.

—Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the roses.


—Louis MacNeice

snow

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Friday I tasted life. 
It was a vast morsel. 

A Circus passed the house —- 
still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. 

The Lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, 
and I hear to-day for the first time 
the river in the tree.


—Emily Dickinson

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theater in the mind

  

Properties of Water, Lee Chee Wai

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Theories don’t give final true knowledge. Theories give a way of looking. The very word theoria in Greek means theater. It’s sort of a theater in the mind that gives insight. 

Science is involved in a perceptual enterprise.


—David Bohm
On Perception

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The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


—Annie Dillard

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there is nothing less real than this body that I touch

  

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The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

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It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. 

The joke part is that we forget it. 

Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. 

We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.


―Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

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Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. 

With that smoke my desire will invent another body. 


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
Elliot Weinburger version

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Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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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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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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you are a divine being

 

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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. 

You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, 
and you will return to those realms.


—Terence McKenna

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There is no less holiness at this time - as you are reading this - than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. 

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.


—Annie Dillard
For the Time Being

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God lurks in the gaps. —Jorge Luis Borges

  

Asahel Curtis, Ms. Nettleton

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We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.


—Annie Dillard
on the meaning of life

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.


—Hélène Cixous
from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

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Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. 

Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.


—Chuang Tzu
Kuang-Ming Wu version

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the still point of the turning world

  

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The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow  of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.  

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


—Annie Dillard 
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.

Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is "prayer,” or “imprecation.” When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are “full of prayer,” open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace.


—Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary

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At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless; 

Neither from nor towards; 

At the still point, there the dance is, 

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity.

Where past and future are gathered. 

Neither movement from nor towards, 

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point, 

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.


—T. S. Eliot
from Burnt Norton
in The Four Quartets

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question

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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?


—Annie Dillard

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In our soul everything
moves guided by a mysterious hand:
ununderstandable, not speaking,
we know nothing of our own souls.

The deepest words
of the wise men teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows,
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

—Antonio Machado
Robert Bly version

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For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one

And bring some peace into your
Beautiful eyes.


—Hafiz

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in(spiritus

  

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Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. 

While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. 

We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.


—Annie Dillard

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Your breath is a bridge between you and your body. Constantly, breath is bridging you to your body, connecting you, relating you to your body. 

Not only is the breath a bridge to your body, it is also a bridge between you and the universe. The body is just the universe which is nearer to you.

If the bridge is broken, you are no more in the body. You move into some unknown dimension; then you can not be found in space and time. So, breath is also the bridge between you and space and time.

Breath has two points. 

One is where it touches the body and the universe, and another is where it touches you and that which transcends the universe. We know only one part of the breath. When it moves into the universe, into the body, we know it. But it is always moving from the body to the "no-body," from the "no-body" to the body.

There are certain points in breathing which you have never observed, and those points are the doors.

Man is trying to reach further, from earth into space, and man has not yet learned the nearest part of his life [...]


—Osho
The Book of Secrets

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together in the whole night

 

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What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.


—Crowfoot 
Blackfoot warrior and orator 
1830 - 1890

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch.


—Annie Dillard

The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great ʻōhiʻas and honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the bright birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back


—W.S. Merwin
the solstice

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needful things (notes to self

   

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An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with “How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!” Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. 

With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

—Annie Dillard

The Maytrees

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We can live any way we want. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.

—Annie Dillard

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Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it’s there and sitting down on it.


—E.E. Cummings

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question

    

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What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat

breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly

it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes

eating bread
while filling up on hunger

it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air


—Anna Kamienska 

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This is all I have to tell you. In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. 

But if you ride these monsters deeper 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 for 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
Total Eclipse
Teaching a Stone to Talk

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looking up after rain

    

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The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. 

The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe.


—Annie Dillard

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So after weeks of rain
at night the winter stars
that much farther in heaven
without our having seen them
in far light are still forming
the heavy elements
that when the stars are gone
fly up as dust finer
by many times than a hair
and recognize each other
in the dark traveling
at great speed and becoming
our bodies in our time
looking up after rain
in the cold night together


—W.S. Merwin
January, The Pupil (2001)

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there is only the world

 

Front foot (tarsus) of a male diving beetle, Dr. Igor Siwanowicz

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May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. 

But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.


—Paul Cézanne
Letter to Emile Bernard, 15 April 1904, 
from Theories of Modern Art, Herschel B. Chipp

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[Shapes] have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them, one recognises the principle and passion of organisms.

—Mark Rothko

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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.

—Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm

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once there was, and once there wasn’t

 

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'once upon a time' in other languages: 

 

korean: “back when tigers used to smoke” (호랑이 담배 피우던 시절에) [x]

czech: “beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers” (za sedmero horami a sedmero řekami)

georgian: “there was, and there was not, there was…” (იყო და არა იყო რა, იყო…)

hausa: “a story, a story. let it go, let it come.” [x]

romanian: “there once was, (as never before)… because if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been told” (A fost odată, ca niciodată că dacă n-ar fi fost, nu s-ar mai povesti…)

lithuanian: “beyond nine seas, beyond nine lagoons: (už devynių jūrų, už devynių marių)

catalan: “see it here that in that time in which beasts spoke and people were silent…” (vet aquí que en aquell temps que les bèsties parlaven i les persones callaven…) [x]

turkish: “Once there was, and once there wasn’t. In the long-distant days of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when genies played jereed in the old bathhouse, [when] fleas were barbers, [when] camels were town criers, [and when] I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep in her creaking cradle, there was/lived, in an exotic land, far, far away, a/an…* (Bir varmış, bir yokmuş. Evvel zaman içinde, kalbur saman içinde, cinler cirit oynar iken eski hamam içinde, pireler berber [iken], develer tellal [iken], ben ninemin beşiğini tıngır mıngır sallar iken, uzak diyarların birinde…)

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The language of birds is very ancient, and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood. 


—Gilbert White
Letter XLIII, Selborne, 

9 September 1778

 

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(all) creatures have territories ...

for some birds, their song is a fence.

—Wendell Berry 

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everywhere the same

 

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At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. 

There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. 

This is it: this hum is the silence. 

Nature does not utter a peep - just this one. 

The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. 

The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk, excerpt

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i want to say

  

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Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.

—Agnes Martin
Writings

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Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.
 

—Annie Dillard
The Writing Life

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seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here


—E. E. Cummings

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