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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that moment

  

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And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.


—Pablo Neruda

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Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, 
and each moment then, 

In the faces of men and women I see God, 
and in my own face in the glass, 

I find letters from God dropped in the street — and everyone is sign’d by God’s name, 

And I leave them where they are, 
for I know that whereso'er I go 

Others will punctually come forever and ever.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

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All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death, but only longing for what belongs to us and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
 

—Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God 

 

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conjectures of a guilty bystander

   

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In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. 

It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… 

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

—Thomas Merton
excerpts 

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I am not to speak to you, 

I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone, 

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, 

I am to see that I do not lose you.

—Walt Whitman

To A Stranger

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mercy

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To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;

Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them,

All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. 


—Walt Whitman

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Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

—Groucho Marx, 1890-1977

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knowing with an(other

  

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One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. 

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. 

And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

—Joseph Campbell

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According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. 

The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous. 

―Deepak Chopra

Synchro Destiny

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I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

—Walt Whitman

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I am large. I contain multitudes. —Walt Whitman

  

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The secret teachings lead the pupil further. They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body. He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing of all that is from him, is him. He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity, his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

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Celebration … is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder – the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this.


—Martin Heidegger

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I need to be silent for a while. 

Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Expands His Being

Daniel Ladinsky version

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... every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Walt Whitman

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It has been said since ancient times that the nature of reality is much closer to music than to a machine, and this is confirmed by many discoveries in modern science. The essence of a melody does not lie in its notes; it lies in the relationships between the notes, in the intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. 

When a string is set vibrating we hear not only a single tone but also its overtones—an entire scale is sounded. Thus each note involves all the others, just as each subatomic particle involves all the others, according to current ideas in particle physics.

—Fritjof Capra

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Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. 

Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.


—Søren Kierkegaard
Works of Love (1847)

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Shakespeare

Hamlet

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questions

 

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There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. 

And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. 

And, going further, what did Time look like? 

Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. 

That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.

—Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles

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Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” 

This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

―Natalie Goldberg

Long Quiet Highway

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I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk of the beginning and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world …

—Walt Whitman

Song of Myself

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the vast similitude

  

grandmother rock, Patrick Smith

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On the beach at night alone, 
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song, 
As I watch the bright stars shining, 
I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. 

A vast similitude interlocks all, 
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, 
All distances of place however wide, 
All distances of time, all inanimate forms, 
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, 
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, 
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, 
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, 
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, 

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, 
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.


—Walt Whitman
on the beach at night alone

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I celebrate myself, and sing myself, 

And what I assume you shall assume, 

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.


—Walt Whitman

song of myself, 1892

 

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delicious trouble

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Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless. 

Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

The sun and stars that float in the open air, the appleshaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand; I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness.

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass - the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.


—Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, excerpts

 

 

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This the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.


—Plotinus

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the lesson of Nature

  

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It is, admittedly, a strange thought: that one could achieve transcendence by immersing oneself in lived experience, that transcendence was not to be found “out there,” but only in a deeper exploration of life. But this idea is precisely what drew young Nietzsche to Emerson.


—John Kaag
Hiking With Nietzsche

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There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. 

This is the thought of identity - yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. 

In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. 

Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.

The quality of being, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.


—Walt Whitman

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song of my(self

   

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And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass 

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this is what you shall do

    

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There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world. 

—Walt Whitman

 

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This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,

Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,

Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,

Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,

Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,

And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,

And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.


—Walt Whitman,
born 1819
Leaves of Grass

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human be(ing

  

💗

 

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. 

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
a death-sentence,
The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)
I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music — this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.


—Walt Whitman
song of myself
Section 26

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dreaming ourselves awake

    

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All architecture is what you do to it
when you look upon it, 

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone?
or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets,
it is not the oboe nor the beating drums,
nor the score of the baritone singer singing 
his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus,
nor that of the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they.


—Walt Whitman 
Leaves of Grass

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Whatever happens, happens to you by you, through you; 

you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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I and this mystery here we stand. —Walt Whitman

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The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep.

They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.
 

—Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark

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We can never directly see what is true, that is, identical with what is divine: we look at it only in reflection, in example, in the symbol, in individual and related phenomena. We perceive it as a life beyond our grasp, yet we cannot deny our need to grasp it.

[...] The highest achievement of the human being as a thinking being is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.


—Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

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In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

 

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I and this mystery; here we stand. —Walt Whitman

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The sensibility in perceiving all things as a sign of the Mystery 

is the tranquil truth of the human being.

—Fr. Giussani

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We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.


—Wendell Berry

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here we stand

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I and this mystery; here we stand.

—Walt Whitman

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