Monday, December 23, 2024

I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman








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The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep.

They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.
 
—Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark



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We can never directly see what is true, that is, identical with what is divine: we look at it only in reflection, in example, in the symbol, in individual and related phenomena. We perceive it as a life beyond our grasp, yet we cannot deny our need to grasp it.

[...] The highest achievement of the human being as a thinking being is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.


—Johann Wolfgang von Goeth



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In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 
The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

 
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