you are the music while the music lasts

 

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There is a being wonderful, perfect; 

It existed before heaven and earth. 

How quiet it is!

How spiritual it is! 

It stands alone and it does not change;

It moves, but does not on that account suffer. 

All life comes from it, yet it does not demand to be Lord. 

I do not know its name, so I call it Tao, the Way, 

And I rejoice in its power.

—Tao Te Ching

25th Chapter

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The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:

The sea has many voices….
the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual….
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised….
The life of significant soil.


—T.S. Eliot
No. 3 of Four Quartets

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