- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
To Bless the Space Between Us
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Quiet Light II
Monday, May 22, 2023
Quiet Light
- John Sexton (1953 - )
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Consciousness
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
We cannot get behind consciousness.
Everything that we talk about,
everything that we regard as existing,
postulates consciousness."
Wednesday, October 05, 2022
Latent Divinity
Everything has Divinity latent within itself.
For she enfolds and imparts herself
even unto the smallest beings,
and from the smallest beings,
according to their capacity.
Without her presence nothing
would have being, because she
is the essence of the existence of
the first unto the last being."
- Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600)
Friday, September 30, 2022
Subjective Wholes
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Relation Between Observer and Thing
- W. Ross Ashby (1903 - 1972)
Monday, September 19, 2022
Little Ripples
edge of a world of which
we have no experience, and
where all our preconceptions
must be recast."
- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Trust in Nature
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Contemplation
- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)
Friday, September 09, 2022
The Sage's Heart-Mind Mirror
- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Monday, August 29, 2022
Known and the Unknown
- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)
Postscript. This diptych contains far too many "meanings" and associations than I can possibly make explicit using mere words. And yet, apart from images and words (as accompanied by omnipresent sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings & intuitions), what is our "world" if not an ever-churning ineffable broth of shared-but-solitary experiences that we wish to communicate some vestiges of to others? This past week, my wife and I had the honor and privilege of settling our youngest child (Josh) into college. It was simultaneously a most joyous and beguilingly melancholy affair, as all parents with college-age offspring know all-too-well. The images in the diptych above were taken a day after we waved to Josh one last time during our "settling-him-in visit" as he headed off to his dorm, at a beach not too far from his college. I was drawn to the fleeting patterns of sand and weeds as they self-organized by the gentle lapping of the waves, only to disassemble and re-organize into myriad other related shapes and geometries as each new wave rolled in. What are we if not conscious bits of "sand and weeds" trying to retain (and understand?) our own transient patterns in the vast - and vastly unknown - phantasmagoric "reality" we call life? What future manifestations of the "pattern" we now call "Josh" will the "waves" of life sculpt in future times? And so, here are some loose associations that this diptych will for me henceforth always be accompanied by whenever my eyes gaze upon it: rhythms (of waves, of winds, and life's energies); ephemerality; yin/yang; known & unknown; memories, longing, and anticipations; the simultaneity of past, present, and future; and - simply and irreducibly - a bird leaves its nest as Josh goes away to college.
Friday, July 29, 2022
Primordial Purity
empty essence of your awareness
is not created by anyone.
Without causes and conditions,
it is originally present.
Don't try to change
or alter awareness.
Let it remain exactly as it is!
Thus you will be free
from straying and awaken
within the state of
primordial purity."
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Higher Dialectic
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
Science of Logic
Monday, July 18, 2022
Transient Beauty
- Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence
Wednesday, July 06, 2022
Listen When the Mind is Quiet
Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.
You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.
If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.
When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain"
- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Web of Time
strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate,
intersect or ignore each
other through the centuries,
embraces every possibility.
We do not exist in most of them.
In some you exist and not I,
while in others I do,
and you do not"
Saturday, December 04, 2021
Slow Time
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time."
- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)
"How It Seems To Me" in So Far So Good
Thursday, December 02, 2021
Longing
- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Wandering
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Constructions in Space
- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)