Dynamism is the great law of the universe. Change and movement occur eternally, symbolized by Shiva’s Dance. The recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God - 'sacrifice' in the original sense of making sacred - whereby God becomes the world.
Lila, the play of God, is the creative activity of the Divine; and the world is the stage of the Divine play.
Brahman is the great magician Who transforms Himself into the world and He performs this feat with His 'magic creative power', which is the original meaning of maya in the Rig Veda.
—Dogen
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The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting.
In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them. The old word for having a foot in each world is weird. The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.
An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no “normal” elders. Normal bespeaks the “norms” that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life. In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.
Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply “weirdos,” but strange and unusual in meaningful ways. Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive.
—Michael Meade
About Elders
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Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine no roots are mine that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest and the forest will know it we will both know it and that birds vanish because of something that I remember flying through me as though I were a great wind as the stones settle into the ground the trees into themselves staring as though I were a great wind which is what I pray for it is clear to me that I cannot return but that some of us will meet once more even here like our own statues and some of us still later without names and some of us will burn with the speed of endless departures and be found and lost no more —W.S. Merwin The Carrier of Ladders
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One old man keeps humming the same few notes of some song he thought he had forgotten back in the days when as he knows there was no word for life in the language and if they wanted to say eyes or heart they would hold up a leaf and he remembers the big tree where it rose from the dry ground and the way the birds carried water in their voices they were all the color of their fear of the dark and as he sits there humming he remembers some of the words they come back to him now he smiles hearing them come and go —W. S. Merwin Parts of a Tune
