Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Terra Mobilis
Monday, December 11, 2023
Illimitable Spirit
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."
- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."
- Richard Bach (1936 - )
Friday, September 22, 2023
A Moment
He asks in a very loud voice.
And this one? Not anymore either.
All you have is the moment to come.
The present is already past.'"
- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
The Essential Doesn't Change
...
By all means, nothing simpler.
It’s the natural order.
...
Let us do something, while we have the chance!
It is not every day that we are needed...
To all mankind they were addressed,
those cries for help still ringing in our ears!
But at this place, at this moment of time,
all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
Let us make the most of it,
before it is too late!
...
We always find something, eh,
to give us the impression we exist.
...
There’s no lack of void.
...
The essential doesn't change."
- Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)
Waiting for Godot
Sunday, June 11, 2023
A Personal Universe
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."
- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Saturday, June 03, 2023
Coastal Forms
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Quiet Light II
- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
To Bless the Space Between Us
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Serene Illumination
- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
The Art of Just Sitting
Sunday, March 05, 2023
The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit
- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe
Saturday, March 04, 2023
The Celestial Way
- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong
Friday, March 03, 2023
I Am
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translation by Stephen Mitchell (The Enlightened Heart)
Wednesday, March 01, 2023
Into Another Intensity
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."
- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Eternal Energy
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Friday, February 24, 2023
Gentle Traces and Imprints
the present never lasts.
Time glides by without a trace.
Who can be wise in this constant flux?
I take each day as its own
sustaining myself until I’m released.
After so much wandering,
I have arrived here—
twenty years seen through a cloud."
- Taigu Ryokan (1758 - 1831)
The Kanshi Poem of Taigu Ryokan
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Another World
- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Infinitely Visible World
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
One Model of Reality
born is just one model of reality.
Other cultures are not failed
attempts at being you; they
are unique manifestations
of the human spirit."
- Wade Davis (1953 - )
Saturday, February 04, 2023
Worlds Within Worlds
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Liminal State of Awareness
- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage
Thursday, December 08, 2022
Plenum Model of the Ground
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground