Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

 

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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. 

And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.


―Ingmar Bergman

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Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.


In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.


—Jarod K. Anderson
PACT 

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Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.


We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.


—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

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complicate your complexities

 

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Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again.

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.


—Hermann Hesse
excerpted from Steppenwolfe 
by Maria Popova
here

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All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

—Kurt Vonnegut

. 

To see materials as static is an illusion. If the human life span were a day, flowers might seem as enduring as rocks. 

If we lived a thousand years, rock might seem mobile. 

—Anne Whiston Spirn
The Language of Landscape

 .

 

 

the shape of all shapes

 

Black Elk

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Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.

—Black Elk

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And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

―Black Elk

Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt

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Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. 

Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. 

Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. 

A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. 

Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.


―John (Fire) Lame Deer
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

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this short life is long and beautiful

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Beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things.

It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.

And there it is ahead of all as the Beloved, toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which brings them into being.


—Pseudo-Dionysius, late 5th to early 6th century mystical theologist, Neoplatonic philosopher, from The Divine Names

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Open the letter of the body’s life inside the words. 

This body, your life, is a letter to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if the words are right. If they are not start another!

And do not think it easy to open the body and read the secret message. This is the most courageous work, not something for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you have said it says? If you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! 

Bring only what should be given.

—Rumi

The Soul of Rumi

Coleman Barks version

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Life is an island. People come out of the sea, 

cross the island, and return to the sea. 

But this short life is long and beautiful. 
 

—Martiros Saryan

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as the light allows

  

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

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Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.

But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super - efficiently, there would be hardly any left over - and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. 

This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.


—Peter Wohlleben
The Hidden Life of Trees

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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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There is only Seeing. 

Both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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i love you much(most beautiful darling)

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i love you much(most beautiful darling)
 

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming
 

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess
 

(except my life)the true time of year-


and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each


nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love


—E. E. Cummings

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all of life dies all of the time

 

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Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of an abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet. 

There are some creatures who do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cells, living all over again. 

The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with its stock and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively to produce more of themselves.

Who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainty of the death of all birds? A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing. It is a natural marvel. 

All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. […] I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my back yard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.

I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage. There are 3 billion of us on the earth and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something more than 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. 

We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors.

Less than half a century from now (2024), our replacements will have more than doubled in numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. 

We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. 

Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.


—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, 1974, excerpts
(treasure)

 

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the this and the that

     

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The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life, that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right, that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. 

He understands that nothing is absolute, that since every point of view depends on the viewer, affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other is called "the pivot of the Tao." When we find this pivot, we find ourselves at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, while Yes and No keep chasing each other around the circumference, endlessly. 

Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through. The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It does not believe that this is a this or that that is a that. 

Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn't exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? 

When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds - that was you as well. At the center, the eyes open and again it is the sweet morning of the world. There's nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there is no one here - not even you.

—Stephen Mitchell (treasure
The Second Book of the Tao

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on the road home

  

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It was when I said,

“There is no such thing as the truth,”

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You….You said,

“There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth.” 

Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.

We were two figures in a wood.

We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,

“Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by eye.”

It was when you said,

“The idols have seen lots of poverty,

Snakes and gold and lice,

But not the truth;”

It was at that time, that the silence was largest,

And longest, the night was roundest.

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest, and strongest.

—Wallace Stevens

 .

little miracles of self-reference

     

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We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theatre, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. 

We watch the world from the dark theater of our skull. The darker the room, the more luminous the screen. 

It is important to understand what we’re participating in, to realize that we rest in darkness and experience vision. 


—Nathaniel Dorsky, experimental filmmaker

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When you see that the mind invents everything 

All will vanish

The good will vanish, the evil will vanish  

And you will remain as you are

—Ramana Maharshi

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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.  We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them.  Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. 

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.


—Douglas Hofstadter, physicist, computer scientist, professor of cognitive science
I Am a Strange Loop

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fields of life

     

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Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. 

He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi master, professor of musicology, poet, philisopher

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

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Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.

In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. 

What we do to benefit life automatically benefits all of us because we are all included in that which is life.


—David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

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Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.

—David Bohm, quantum physicist, philosopher

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place(ment

  

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Our hands imbibe like roots,
so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.

I fold them in prayer, and they
draw from the heavens
light.


—St. Francis of Assisi

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the elements alter into one another

 

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I go to the parties

Throw my hands in the air

I drink what they pour me

The cups of who cares

Go up in the night sky

Up in the clouds

Fly over the houses

I'm looking down

Joy to the city

Joy to the streets

And joy to you baby, wherever you sleep

Tonight, tonight, tonight

Tonight, tonight, tonight

No ghosts in the graveyard

That's not where they live

They float in between us

'what is' and 'what if'

And cast our own shadows

Before our own eyes

You don't get them up here though

They don't come up high

Joy to the city

The parking lot lights

The lion of evening

With the rain in its eyes

Joy to the freeway

Joy to the cars

And joy to you baby, wherever you are

Tonight, tonight, tonight

Tonight, tonight, tonight

There's pain in whatever

We stumble upon

If I never had met you

You couldn't have gone

But if I couldn't have met you

We couldn't have been

I guess it all adds up

To joy to the end

Joy to the city

The heatwave and all

To the lion of evening

With the storm in its paw

Joy to the many

And joy to the few

And joy to you baby

Joy to me too

Tonight, tonight, tonight

Tonight, tonight, tonight

Tonight, tonight, tonight

.

To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. 

To keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. 

Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below. 

—Marcus Aurelius, 161 to 180 CE

Meditations

.

 

 

 

the world is made up of networks of kisses

  

.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. 

A stone is prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event'. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. 

The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most 'thing-like' are nothing more than long events.

—Carlo Rovelli

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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

.

One regret, dear world

That I am determined not to have 
When I am lying on my deathbed 

Is that 
I did not kiss you enough.


—Hafiz

 

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love is a direction

     

.

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

.

 

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

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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)

.

 

for the time(beings

 

.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. 

Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc.

Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge. 

But some of these rules and disciplines are good for beginners.


―Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

Since time is distance in space, time is memory on the structure of space. Without memory, there is no time. 

Without time, there is no memory. 

It then follows that the energy that we perceive as the material world must be information, or energy on the structure of space.


—Nassim Haramein, physicist 

.

Time moves in one direction, memory another.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.


—William Gibson, speculative fiction writer and essayist
Distrust That Particular Flavor

.

 

 

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

Night Sea, 1963, Agnes Martin
oil, gold, canvas

.

In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by” and I am content.

—Agnes Martin

.

.

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. 

It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. 

And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. 

This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light

.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell,
but the point vierge between darkness and light,
between being and non-being.

You can tell yourself the time by their waking,
if you are experienced. 

But that is your folly, not theirs.


—Thomas Merton 
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

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