listen

  

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People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. 


—Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth

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Understand the secret unseen ways of 
heart to heart contact like this:

When two lamps are being lit 

The lamps will remain separate 

But their light will become intermixed.


—Rumi 

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Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.

Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.

Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

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phase-lock

  

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We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment…

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. 

Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Telling is Listening
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

 

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For Serres, information is emitted, stored, processed and received by all entities, from humans to crystals, and human communication is only a quiet whisper in the cacophony of the information exchange between entities in the world. 

Where Morton’s ecomimesis remains anthropocentric (for only people do ‘nature writing’), Serres’ Great Story is geocentric in a way that does not exclude human communication, but does not give it a qualitatively privileged status either. 

So for Morton, a mark will always be “either a squiggle or a letter” (Ecology 50), with nothing in between, but Serres is painting on a broader canvas and, for him, what might be a squiggle or a letter for us human beings (or neither, if its information falls outside our visible spectrum or range of audible frequencies, for example) could well carry a thousand different meanings to a thousand different information receivers, and be meaningless or inexistent to ten thousand more.


—Christopher Watkin
Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology

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The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large. 

—Louis Pasteur

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steep

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We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. 

Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.


—Charles Darwin, 1868

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Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness.

You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? 

Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.

You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law of your own nature makes these a necessity for you?


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968

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a sweet question

  

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Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. […] 

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal - always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything - all beings - including what we generally class as things, objects.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Deep in Admiration, excerpts
(Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet)

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The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,
“The sun has been my faithful lover 
For millions of years.
Whenever I offer my body to him 
Brilliant light pours from his heart.
Thousands then notice my happiness 
And delight in pointing
toward my beauty.

Hafiz, 
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?”

And I replied, 
"Dear moon, 
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often

So I might instruct you 
How to become
Who you
Are!"


—Hafiz

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These days I can see us clinging to each other 

as we are swept along by the current 

I am clinging to you to keep you from 

being swept away and you are clinging to me 

we see the shores blurring past as we hold 

each other in the rushing current 

the daylight rushes unheard far above us 

how long will we be swept along in the daylight 

how long will we cling together in the night 

and where will it carry us together


—W.S. Merwin
Here Together
Garden Time

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We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible. —Novalis (1772 - 1801)

  

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This unity of all human beings, their interconnection and interdependence, is the primary vision of mysticism. It says that the virtue mystics practice is necessary not only because of its functional utility but because it is realistic. One should treat the other as oneself because below the surface we are all aspects of one being; the Golden Rule is not an arbitrary, culturally determined morality but an expression of the actual nature of the world. 

Our continued existence as a species and our further development depend on our capacity for recognizing this reality despite the compelling influence of the object self.

—Arthur J. Deikman

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It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. 

My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.


― Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea

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on every act the balance of the whole depends

Earthrise, Apollo Astronauts

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There’s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries… The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. 

And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.

—Samantha Harvey
Orbital, a novel
more from Maria Popova's Marginalian here

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Do you see how an act is not like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it? When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. 

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

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Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

—Dan Gerber

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clearly

Earth and Moon as seen from Space by Japanese satellite Himawari-8

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The world is sacred, of course,
it is full of gods, numina,
great powers and presences.

We give some of them names –
Mars of the fields and the war;
Vesta the fire;
Ceres the grain;
Mother Tellus the earth;
the Penates of the storehouse.
The rivers, the springs.

And in the stormcloud and
the light is the great power
called the father god.

But they aren’t people.
They don’t love and hate,
they aren’t for or against.
They accept the worship due them,
which augments their power,
through which we live.


—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

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This material dimension is just samsara. See it and you see samsara for what it’s worth. But what does it mean? 

Nothing but shifting names and changing forms. But when the ego drops away you experience this Flux. And it is beautiful not just because it is dazzling, but because the act of seeing it as it is necessitates the ego’s oblivion. The Veil is lifted and you see clearly.


—Chuang Tzu
excerpts

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wait - what ?

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years and distances, stars and candles

   

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Researchers have captured the first image of what dolphins see using echolocation.

"When a dolphin scans an object with its high frequency sound beam, each short click captures a still image, similar to a camera taking photographs,” Reid said. “Each dolphin click is a pulse of pure sound that becomes modulated by the shape of the object."


—John Stuart Reid

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It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together.

My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.


― Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea

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Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge

 

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Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things. 

Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. 

Let there be deep snow in your inbreath
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses. 

Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

—Ursula Le Guin
Always Coming Home

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