plural(ities

. 

We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. 

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were. 

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature. 

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.

–David George Haskell

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from another luminous post by

Maria Popova at brainpickings
Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees
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Only if Love Should Pierce You

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Do not forget that you live in the midst of the animals,

horses, cats, sewer rats

brown as Solomon's woman, terrible

camp with colours flying,

do not forget the dog with harmonies of the unreal

in tongue and tail, nor the green lizard, the blackbird,

the nightingale, viper, drone. Or you are pleased to think

that you live among pure men and virtuous

women who do not touch

the howl of the frog in love, green

as the greenest branch of the blood.

Birds watch you from trees, and the leaves

are aware that the Mind is dead

forever, its remnant savours of burnt

cartilage, rotten plastic; do not forget

to be animal, fit and sinuous,

torrid in violence, wanting everything here

on earth, before the final cry

when the body is cadence of shrivelled memories

and the spirit hastens to the eternal end;

remember that you can be the being of being

only if love should pierce you deep inside.

–Salvatore Quasimodo 

Jack Bevan translation

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a young Anne Lockley, 1938
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kiss it break it

. 

At dawn it would watch its three sides

Turned into three glowing wheels

Disappear into the blue of no return

It would take out its fourth side

Kiss it break it three times

And hide it once more in its former place 

—Vasko Popaa
a wise triangle

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The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers
—Joan Miro, 1941
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question

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Why should you bear your load on your head when you are traveling on a train? 

It carries you and your load whether the load is on your head or on the floor of the train. You are not lessening the burden of the train by keeping it on your head but only straining yourself unnecessarily.
 
Similar is the sense of doership in the world by individuals.


–Ramana Maharshi

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doer(ship

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O Rama, the sense of doership (the notion ‘I do this’) which gives rise to both happiness and unhappiness, is fictitious in the eyes of the wise; to the ignorant, however, it is real. 

For, what is the source of this notion? This notion arises when the mind, spurred by the predisposition, endearours to gain something; the resultant action is then attributed to oneself. When the same action leads to the experience of its fruition, the notion 'I enjoy this’ arises. The two notions are in truth the two faces (phases) of the same notion. 

Whether one is engaged in action or not, whether one is in heaven or in hell, whatever may be the psychological conditioning, that itself is experienced by the mind. Hence, to the ignorant and conditioned person there is the notion 'I do this’ whether he is doing something or doing nothing; but such a notion does not arise in the enlightened or unconditioned.

When the truth concerning this is known, the conditioning is weakened and thenceforth the wise man, even while acting in this world, is not interested in the fruits of those actions. He lets actions happen in his life, without attachment to those actions; and whatever be the results of those actions, he regards them as non-different from his own Self.

 
—Yoga Vasistha

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know-the-self
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verb, not noun

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It’s not so much that we don’t have a self, rather it’s that the self we do have is not a thing. It is an impermanent, fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.

—Shinzen Young
The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

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Looking, Walking, Being

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The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in.

—Mark Rudman

...

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.


—Denise Levertov

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life is

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life is a garden,
not a road

we enter and exit
through the same gate

wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice


—Bokonon

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just now

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In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

—W.S. Merwin

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truly written

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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.


–Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

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this truth

.

As I have searched the entire scientific records in more than a half dozen languages for a long time without finding the least anticipation, I consider myself the original discoverer of this truth, which can be expressed by the statement: There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment.

–Nikola Tesla

...

We should face up to something that’s rarely if ever voiced in modern cosmology: the possibility that the true nature of the universe as a whole has nothing to do with the way its parts work, that it indeed lies outside the very characteristics of its components.

–Robert Lanza
Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness and the Illusion of Death

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be the mystery

 

.

Be the mystery.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.


–Rainer Maria Rilke

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truly

.

There is no alternative for you but to accept the world as unreal, if you are seeking the Truth and the Truth alone.


–Ramana Maharshi

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take nothing for the journey

.

The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil

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buffleheadcabin
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It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, / storm and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. / Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we / have to harden our hearts to bear it.

—Robinson Jeffers
The World’s Wonders

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wait - what ?
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song of my(self

.

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
a death-sentence,
The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)
I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music — this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.


—Walt Whitman
song of myself
Section 26

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danielasherer
speakspo
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author(ship

.

In Persian poetry the poet often refers to himself or herself by name at the end of a poem as a sort of signature. Rumi’s variation on this is to refer instead to Shams (over a thousand poems end this way) or to silence. He gives the poetry to its true authorship, including the emptiness after as part of the poem. Five hundred odes conclude with khamush, silence. Rumi is less interested in language, more attuned to the sources of it. He keeps asking Husam, ‘Who’s making this music?’ He sometimes gives the wording over to the invisible flute player: ‘Let that musician finish this poem.’ Words are not important in themselves, but as resonators for a center. Rumi has a whole theory of language based on the reed flute (ney). Beneath everything we say, and within each note of the reed flute, lies a nostalgia for the reed bed. Language and music are possible only because we’re empty, hollow, and separated from the source. All language is a longing for home. Why is there not a second tonality, he muses, a note in praise of the craftsman’s skill, which fashioned the bare cylinder into a ney, the intricate human form with its nine holes?

—Coleman Barks,
On Silence

The Essential Rumi

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whoever brought me here will have to take me home

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look

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We are bees of the invisible.

Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible
in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.


–Rainer Maria Rilke
from a letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

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mystery

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I am the thought that lives in the light.
I live in everyone, and I delve into them all...
I move in every creature...
I am the invisible one in all beings...
I am the voice speaking softly...
I am the real voice... the voice from the invisible thought...
It is a mystery... I cry out in everyone...
I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself
within them, and every mind seeking me longs
for me...
I am she who gradually brought forth
everything...
I am the image of the invisible spirit...
The mother, the light... the virgin... the
womb, and the voice...
I put breath in all beings..

Author Unknown - Nag Hammadi Scrolls
From "Why Religion?" by Elaine Pagels

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roy
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