deep beauty

 

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What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. 

I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. 

I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. 

His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.


―Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers 

 

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In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence – whether people or things – breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.


—Clarice Lispector


 

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shanti, shanti, shanti

  

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Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

—Clarice Lispector

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I am the dream changing before your eyes. 

I am my body, a house for blood and breath. 

I am a man on earth and a god in heaven. 

While I travel the deserts in frail form, while I grow old and weep and die, I live always as a child inside the body of truth, a blue egg that rocks in the storm but never breaks. 

I sleep in peace in my mother’s lap, a child mesmerised by sunlight on the river. My soul is swallowed up by God.

Out of chaos came the light.

Out of the will came life.

—The Egyptian Book of the Dead

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The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.


—Eugenio Montejo
Peter Boyle version

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Everything in the world began with a yes. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself - but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into physiological change. 

Nothing is more wondrous about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain than their ability to convert thoughts, hopes, ideas, and attitudes into chemical substances. 

Everything begins, therefore, with belief. 

What we believe is the most powerful option of all.


—Norman Cousins
wait - what ?

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a love letter

 

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In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. 

One starts to feel that everything in existence—whether people or things—breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. 

The world’s truth is impalpable.


—Clarice Lispector
Selected Crônicas

 

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Within a circle of one meter 
You sit, pray and sing.

Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.

Within a field a hundred meters large
Grow rice and raise goats.

Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.

Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with raccoons, hawks, poison snakes and butterflies.

Mountainous country Shinano
A hundred kilometers large
Where someone lives leisurely, they say.

Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Walking somewhere on the earth.

Within a circle one hundred thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.

Within a circle a million kilometers large
Upon the spaced-out yellow mustard blossoms
The moon in the east, the sun in the west.

Within a circle ten billion kilometers large
Pop far out of the solar system mandala.

Within a circle ten thousand light years large
The Galaxy full blooming in summer.

Within a circle one billion light years large
Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry flowers. 
Now within a circle ten billion light years large
All thoughts of time, space are burnt away.

There again you sit, pray and sing.


—Nanao Sakaki

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