Shadow Belongs to Light

"All material in nature, the mountains
and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent, and
this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light."

- Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974)

Journey of a Thousand Miles

"The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet"

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

A Sea of Looking-Glass

"But when ... he cast his eyes around him, the most horrible despair was infused into his soul. Before him stretched an ocean without limit. The dark sand of the desert spread further than eye could reach in every direction, and glittered like steel struck with bright light. It might have been a sea of looking-glass, or lakes melted together in a mirror. A fiery vapor carried up in surging waves made a perpetual whirlwind over the quivering land. The sky was lit with an Oriental splendor of insupportable purity, leaving naught for the imagination to desire. Heaven and earth were on fire.

The silence was awful in its wild and terrible majesty. Infinity, immensity, closed in upon the soul from every side. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a flaw on the bosom of the sand, ever moving in diminutive waves; the horizon ended as at sea on a clear day, with one line of light, definite as the cut of a sword."

- Honoré de Balzac (1799 - 1850)

Life and Sound

"Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound."

- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

Old Wood

"The whole world is, to me, very much 'alive' - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on - within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Through the Silence Something...

"I have always loved the desert.
One sits down on a desert sand dune,
sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet
through the silence something
throbs, and gleams..."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 - 1944)

Magnificent Desolation

"'Isn’t that something!' Neil gushed. 'Magnificent sight out here.'

I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, 'Magnificent desolation.' It was a spontaneous utterance, an oxymoron that would take on ever-deeper dimensions of meaning in describing this strange new environment.

Turning in Neil’s direction, I tried out a few steps and a couple of short jumps to test my maneuverability and recovery, and to figure out the best way to maintain my balance. With the heavy backpack altering my center of mass, I leaned slightly forward in the direction I was moving to keep from falling backwards.

Then for the first time since stepping on the surface, I looked upward, above the LM. It was not an easy thing to do in a pressurized suit, inflated as stiff as a football, with a gold sun visor jutting out from my helmet. But I managed to direct my view homeward, and there in the black, starless sky I could see our marble-sized planet, no bigger than my thumb.

I became all the more conscious that here we were, two guys walking on the moon, our every move being watched by more people than had ever before viewed one single event. In a strange way there was an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and everyone back on Earth."

- Buzz Aldrin (1930 - )
Magnificent Desolation

Nature's Sculpture

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

One Seen as Many

"Being the one, the universal Soul is present in all beings. Though one, It is seen as many, like the moon in the water ... Just as it is the jar which being removed (from one place to another) changes places and not the Akasha ['fifth element' or ether] enclosed in the jar – so is the Jiva [individual, embodied soul] which resembles the Akasha ...When various forms like the jar are broken again and again the Akasha does not know them to be broken, but He knows perfectly. Being covered by Maya [cosmic illusion that veils the true nature of reality], which is a mere sound, It does not, through darkness, know the Akasha (the Blissful one). When ignorance is rent asunder, It being then Itself only sees the unity."

- Amritabindu Upanishad (100 BCE to 300 CE)

The Great Silence

"The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the idea that the desert was merely a sea of sand? ...The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms, and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.

...

The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but do-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.

...

All, all to dust again; and
no man knoweth the
why thereof."

- John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932)
The Desert