Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
—Fernando Passoa
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.
Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.
―Ingmar Bergman
[...] I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
—Pablo Neruda
Researchers have captured the first image of what dolphins see using echolocation.
"When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs,” Reid said. “Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object."
—John Stuart Reid
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together.
My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
― Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea
.
When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
‘Have I outlived my vocation ? Said already
all that was mine too say ?’
There’s a remedy –
only one – for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands: Remember the great ones, remember
Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing. Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(not by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding. Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm: Know and forget, know and forget.
It’s not only
the passion for getting it right (though it’s that , too)
it’s the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized –
and remembrance dismays you. And then, look,
some reflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced. You can, you must
proceed.
—Denise Levertov
For Those Whom the Gods Love Less
You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. So can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image exists from which springs thought, thought must always create fear. Then you either rationalize your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear of death. Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity.Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says, 'Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it'- but you are thinking about it. When you say, 'I won't think about it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened of death because you have postponed it.We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear. That interval, that time, is created by fear. Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas. That is what we call living, and we are afraid to die, which is to end this misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.
We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day.We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
Freedom from the Known, p. 75-77
from Kevin, who walks the walk
💗
Listen, my child, to the silence.
An undulating silence,
a silence
that turns valleys and echoes slippery,
that bends foreheads
toward the ground.
—Federico García Lorca
.
.
You are me, and I am you.Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”?You cultivate the flower in yourself,so that I will be beautiful.I transform the garbage in myself,so that you will not have to suffer.I support you;you support me.I am in this world to offer you peace;you are in this world to bring me joy.—Thich Nhat Hanh
[...] When a grasshopper sits on a blade of grass, he has no thought of separation, resistance, or blame… The green grasshopper blends completely with the green grass… It neither retreats nor beckons. It knows nothing of philosophy or ideals. It is simply grateful for its ordinary life.Dash across the meadow, my dear friend, and greet yesterday’s child. When you can’t see me, you yourself will return. Even when your heart is filled with despair, you will find the same grasshopper on the same blade of grass…Some life dilemmas cannot be solved by study or rational thought. We just live with them, struggle with them, and become one with them… To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.—Thich Nhat Hanh
.
put some honey and sea water by your bed.
acknowledge that your being needssweetness and cleansing.
that it is sore.
that you are soft.
—Nayyirah Waheed
.
In this classic masterwork of perspective, Abbott examines the science of multiple spatial dimensions while satirizing the absurdity of truth by consensus and extending a subtle invitation to consider how what we take as our givens limits our grasp of reality, presenting us with a false view of the world warped by our way of looking at it.
The story is narrated by a protagonist named A. Square, a native of Flatland — a world whose geometric denizens only live and see in two dimensions. But the square has a transformative experience that renders him “the sole possessor of the truths of Space.” On the eve of a new year, he has a hallucinatory vision of journeying to a faraway place called Lineland, populated by “lustrous points” who see him not as a shape but merely as a scattering of points along a line. Frustrated, he tries to demonstrate his squareness to their king by moving from left to right. The king, ignorant of directions, fails to perceive the motion and clings to his view of the square as points on a line.
But then the square himself is visited by a creature from another world — a sphere from the three-dimensional Spaceland. The very notion of three dimensions is at first utterly unimaginable to our hero — he sees the visitor merely as a circle. And yet when the sphere floats up and down, thus contracting and expanding the radius of the perceived circle based on its distance from our grounded observer, the square begins to suspect that he, like the inhabitants of Lineland, might be congenitally blind to the existence of another dimension.
When he returns to Flatland and tries to awaken his compatriots to the revelatory existence of a third dimension, he is met only with obtuse denial and declared mad. Decrees are passed to make illegal any suggestion of a third dimension and all who make such claims are to be imprisoned or executed.
The square himself is eventually thrown in jail, where he spends seven years and composes Flatland as a cautionary memoir he hopes will inspire posterity to see beyond the limit of two dimensions.
—Maria Popova
Edwin Abbott Abbott, 1884
Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimension
The mythologist Joseph Campbell was asked by an interviewer how a regular person could preserve his sense of the mythic when so many feel too besieged by the claims of every day living.
He said, "You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, in your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what you owe anyone or what anyone owes you.
You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are."
—Joseph Campbell
By itself nothing has existence.
Everything needs its own absence.
To be is to be distinguishable, to be here and not there,
to be now and not then, to be thus and not otherwise.
Like water is shaped by the container, so is everything
determined by conditions (gunas).
—Nisargadatta Maharaj
That winter when this thought came -- how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute -- we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.
At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, "You're studying too hard,"
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father's gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can't keep up with our dreams.
—William Stafford
The Way It Is
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Lord
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
It's got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down south
They got no work to do
If you're going down to Chicago
A-ah, a-ah, a-ah
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move, ooh
All last night sat on the levee and moaned
All last night sat on the levee and moaned
Thinkin' 'bout my baby and my happy home
Ah-oh
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Goin'
I'm goin' to Chicago
Goin' to Chicago
Sorry, but I can't take you, ahhh
Goin' down, goin' down now
Goin' down, goin' down now
Goin' down, goin' down
Goin' down, goin' down
.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.
What we feel most has no name but amber, archers,
cinnamon, horses and birds.
—Jack Gilbert
Tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.—James Joyce
Ulysses
You wear coarse wool, but you're a king,
as the soul's energy hides, as love
remembers. You enter this room in a human
shape and as the atmosphere we breathe.
You are the central pole through the nine
levels connecting them and us to absolute
absence. So that we can have what we want,
you give failure and frustration. You want
only the company of the lion and the lion
cub, no wobbly legs. That man there, you
suggest, might remove his head before
entering the temple. Then he could listen
without ears to a voice that says, My
creature. A month of walking the road, you
make that distance in one day. Never mind
gold and silver payments. When you feel
generous, give your head. My beauty,
you have no need for a guide. The one
who follows and the one who leads are
inseparable, as the moon and the circle
around it. An Arab drags his camel town
to town. You go through your troubles
and changing beliefs, both no different from
the moon moving across or basil growing
and getting cut for a bouquet. It doesn't
matter you've been lost. The hoopoe is
still looking for you. It is another
beginning, my friend, this waking in a
morning with no haze, and help coming
without your asking! A glass submerged
is turning inside the wine. With grief
waved away, sweet gratefulness arrives.
—Rumi
Ghazal (Ode) 2935
Coleman Barks, Nevit Ergin version
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul,
of the soul.
—Rumi
I turn within... I am not turning up to the sky - I am not turning anywhere outside of my own being - I am not looking around for holy temples or holy teachers or holy books. I am turning within.
Here am I. The very seat and source of God is within me, the abiding place of God. God is within the inner sanctuary of my own being. I am not seeking for my life, what I shall eat or what I shall drink. I am not seeking for health, employment or opportunities. I am seeking Thy kingdom, Thy grace.
—Joel Goldsmith
Take a plane to London.
From King's Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you'll be on the moors. There's a pub,
The Drovers, where it's warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculier.
For a moment everything will be all right. You're back
at a beginning. Soon you'll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You'll walk for hours. You'll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.
—Joseph Stroud
Of this World
Some gods say, the tiny ones
"I am not here in your vibrant, moist lips
That need to beach themselves upon
The golden shore of a
Naked body."
Some gods say, "I am not
The sacred yearning in the unrequited soul;
I am not the blushing cheek
Of every star and Planet--
I am not the applauding Chef
Of those precious sections that can distill
The whole mind into a perfect wincing jewel, if only
For a moment
Nor do I reside in every pile of sweet warm dung
Born of earth's
Gratuity."
Some gods say, the ones we need to hang,
"Your mouth is not designed to know His,
Love was not born to consume
The luminous
Realms."
Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.
—Hafiz
Ladinsky version
Surrender. Be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.
—Rumi
Be quiet. Ra is in the wind.
He speaks when the earth is silent and he alone existed until he named the names of things.
River, he said, and River lived.
Nile. Mountain. Beetle. Fisherman.
From his tongue springs words of water.
The river quakes with the sound of his voice.
Air escaping from his nose. Breathe deep.
The wind a sigh from his mother.
Such things are made everyday:
Duck, Mandrake, Raisin.
Grape, Pomegranate, Melon.
Cypress, Palm, Osiris.
—The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like somebody suddenly born into colour.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.
—Rumi
Coleman Barks/John Moyne version
A woman's body, like the earth, has seasons;
when the mountain stream flows,
when the holy thaws,
when I am most fragile and in need,
it was then, it seemed, God came closest.
God, like a medic on a field, is tending our souls. Our horns get locked with desires, but don't hold yourself too accountable; for all desires are really innocent. That is what the compassion in His eyes tell me.
Why this great war between the countries - the countries inside of us?
What are all these insane borders we protect?
What are all these different names for the same church of love we kneel in together? For it is true, together we live; and only at that shrine where all are welcome will God sing loud enough to be heard.
Our horns got locked with the earth and sky in some odd marriage ritual; so what, don't worry. We should be proud of ourselves for everything we helped create in this magic world. And God is always there, if you feel wounded.
He kneels over this earth like a divine medic, and His love thaws the holy in us.
—St. Teresa of Avila
Daniel Ladinsky version
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
I’ve figured it out, something that was never clear to me before—how all creation transposes itself out of the world deeper and deeper into our inner world, and why birds cast such a spell on this path into us.
The bird’s nest is, in effect, an outer womb given by nature; the bird only furnishes it and covers it rather than containing the whole thing inside itself.
As a result, birds are the animals whose feelings have a very special, intimate familiarity with the outer world; they know that they share with nature their innermost mystery.
That is why the bird sings its songs into the world as though it were singing into its inner self; that’s why we take a birdsong into our own innerselves so easily. It seems to us that we translate it fully, with no remainder, into our feelings.
A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning
as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.
He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,
how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.
Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,
except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,
you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.—Billy Collins.
After two years of absence due to the health crisis, the Burning Man festival made a grand return. For this 9-day edition in 2022, nearly 80,000 festival-goers trod the sands of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. And it was truly a sight to behold! For the first time since its creation, a show featuring 250 drones criss-crossed the Nevada sky, delivering a full-scale space invader spectacle.
Although ephemeral, Burning Man is one of the most anticipated artistic events in the United States. After two years of interruption due to the Covid-19 crisis, the grand festival makes a return for a Burning Man 2022 edition that promises to be wild! In addition to the usual caravans, magical decorations, and provocative artistic sculptures, the Black Rock City pulled out all the stops: nearly 250 drones played space invaders in the sky above the sands of the Black Rock Desert.
But what is Burning Man? It’s the world’s largest temporary artistic ecosystem. For 9 days, community creators and organizers come together to celebrate art and local initiatives from around the world. These individuals, called “Burners,” gather in the Nevada desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis.
Characterized for its unconventional culture, Burning Man is dedicated to producing a positive spiritual change on a global scale. “Our intention is to generate a society that connects each individual to their creative powers, to community participation, to the wider domain of civic life, and to the even larger world of nature that exists beyond society,” is written on the event’s official website.
However, Burning Man does not want to be defined as a festival but rather as a gathering of a community, at the heart of a temporary city in the Nevada desert. This event is known for the festive cremation of a giant puppet, in reference to its name Burning Man, meaning “the burning man” in French.
For this 2022 edition, more than 80,000 festival-goers, called “Burners,” gathered at Black Rock City. And as every year, the show was on point, but even more so this year! Each artistic creation is dedicated to art, self-expression, and autonomy for all.
To make a mark, the BRC 2022 wished to create a unique show in which over 250 drones played space invaders in the sky under the theme “Waking Dreams.” These were piloted by the festival-goers themselves. A regulation was carefully established to ensure compliance with the general flying conditions, in accordance with Black Rock City’s safety guidelines. These drones then delivered a spectacle at more than 400 feet, away from the crowds and emergency teams, and, of course, outside of the period of the Temple’s burning.
—Hasan Jasim
