Stillness

  

"When I am liberated by silence,
when I am no longer involved in the measurement
of life, but in the living of it,
I can discover a form of prayer in which
there is effectively, no distraction.
My whole life becomes a prayer.
My whole silence is full of prayer.
The world of silence in which I am immersed
contributes to my prayer."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Qualitative Forms

"We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution - vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in a less familiar situation, and one for which we cannot yet experiment, we try to solve the equations in a primitive, halting, and confused way to try to determine what new qualitative features may come out, or what new qualitative forms are a consequence of the equations. Our equations for the sun, for example, as a ball of hydrogen gas, describe a sun without sunspots, without the rice-grain structure of the surface, without prominences, without coronas. Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven't found the way to get them out.

...

The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality - or whether it does not.

...

If water - which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth - can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?"

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Patience

"Nature does not hurry,
yet everything is accomplished"

- Lao Tzu (6th century – 4th century BCE)

Earth's Dreaming

"In the beginning was the dream...

In the eternal night where no dawn broke,
the dream deepened.
Before anything ever was,
it had to be dreamed.

...

If we take Nature as the great artist, then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth's dreaming. It's almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

...

There is no definitive dividing line
between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often
precariously dream-like.
Our grip on reality is tenuous..."

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

Subtle and Evanescent

"Greatness' exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes."

- Leonard Koren (1948 - )
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Place of Purification

"Solitude is the place of purification."

- Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

The Visible Invisible

"We are all constantly in the midst of light. We are surrounded, bathed, and nourished by it. This miracle we call light can transform. It can teach, reveal, evoke, and heal. It speaks in many voices. We tend to see light as something that makes form visible, but light reveals much more. It reveals us.

...

Light makes visible the invisible. It can show us love where there seems to be only a rotting log or a solitary rock perched on a ledge. Sometimes the subject is illuminated by light, sometimes the subject is illumination itself. Then the subject itself glows; there are no shadows.

...

Light has the ability to reveal the many layers, the myriad faces contained in each form. Most often, we tend to see just the surface of a subject. We name it, identify it, and forget about it. And we stop seeing. Yet when the light changes, the subject changes, and what the subject has to show us changes.

...

If we are patient, letting go of thoughts and letting the mind settle down, then the hidden faces rise to the surface, and subtlety and richness return. A shift takes place, resonance appears. This allows for real intimacy with the subject.

...

The boulder that was once very soft under diffuse lighting now becomes hard and heavier looking. When the subject reflects the light, the reflections add another dimension; patterns begin to appear. Before sunrise the world is essentially black and white ... Things are almost translucent. Unless we are really 'seeing' and not just looking, it is easy to miss the richness of these subtleties.

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
Light