Kauaian Verdure

"Here nature has wrought with bold hands and on a large scale, gouging profound valleys out of massive mountains, scoring them deep with gorges and buttressing them thick with ridges, and then throwing them over them a veil of tropic verdure that half reveals and half conceals and wonderfully softens, the bold hard features of the geologic. Nature has contributed the magnificent semi-circular bay with its fine beach and swimming, a succession of splendid cliffs and broad fertile valley, bounded by mountain walls down whose sides leap numberless thread-like waterfalls which now and again lose themselves in the foliage."

- J. M. Lydgate (1854 - 1922)

The Wreck of the Saginaw: Notes of Halford Interview

Memories ... regarding the wreck of the ship

“Saginaw” off the coast of Hanalei (Kauai, Hawaii)

Matter is Spirit

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(1881 - 1955)

Doing Things from Your Soul

"When you do things from your soul,

you feel a river moving in you, a joy."

- Rumi

(1207 - 1273)

Trees are Poems

"Trees are poems

that the earth writes

upon the sky."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Sand and Foam

Postscript: watch one humble human planting his poems here.

Direct Experience

"Seeing is perception 

with the original, 

unconditioned eye. 

It is a state of consciousness 

in which separation of 

photographer/subject, 

audience/image dissolves; 

in which a reality beyond words 

and concepts opens up, 

whose "point" or "meaning" is 

the direct experience itself."

- John Daido Loori

(1931 - 2009)

Parts of the Universe

"A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!"

- Richard Feynman

(1918 - 1988)

Wandering through Outer Worlds

"The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. 

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet. 

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune. 

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end. 

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!'

The question and the cry `Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!'"

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Gitanjali: Song Offerings