darkness within darkness

  

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The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

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You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

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fishing for falling light

 

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The changing of bodies into light and light into bodies is very comfortable to the course of nature which seems delighted with transmutations.


—Sir Isaac Newton

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Use your own light and return to the source of light.

This is called practicing eternity.

—Lao-Tzu

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If each day falls 
inside each night, 
there exists a well 
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim 
of the well of darkness 
and fish for fallen light 
with patience.


—Pablo Neruda

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