the song of existence

  

Tin-glazed earthenware plate found in a London sewer 

(England, 1661). Creator unknown.

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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. 

The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry “Heresy” on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. 

Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shod animals, than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.


—John Muir
Nature Writings, excerpts

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I and this mystery; here we stand.   

—Walt Whitman

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unit(y

  

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There is not a fragment in all of nature, for every relative fragment of 

one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.   

—John Muir, 1867

 

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If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts:

the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing.

the human soul, living forever within you.

the celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird.


—Carl Jung

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hold steady

  

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Sunrays touch the coastline
On the cutter shows the dust
Long nights are gone with the river
The water has been waiting long enough

We float on the river of time
Hold steady, hold steady
The sea comes 'cause the summer forced out the cold
The boat fought the change of the tides
Hold steady, hold steady
Storm for hours and rainy days

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

Sunrays touch the coastline
Warm our feet, show the glare
We walk through the sand in the warm night
The water will take the weight from us

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home
And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

We sell our lives to the sea
The sky lights up from the beach


—HAEVN
Symphonic Tales 

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There is not a fragment in all of nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. 

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. 

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

—John Muir, 1867

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Bless the spirit that makes connections,

for truly we live in what we imagine.

Clocks move along side our real life

with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,

we are held in place by what links us.

Across trackless distances

antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!

Distracted by each day's doing,

how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors

there where the seed turns into summer,

it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII

Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

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everything is connected and the web is holy —Marcus Aurelius

 

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The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

—John Muir

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