Scientists are now affirming what many indigenous peoples and mystics have known for a long time: the world is made of sound. Everything around and within us is comprised of vibrating stuff. As a songwriter, I am always listening for the songs that are already here. My job is to catch these whispered suggestions and bring them into form.
~ Barbara McAfee
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
~ Haruki Murakami
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.
~ George Eliot, Middlemarch
Category: Dreams
A Monday meander: More from Centennial Olympic Park
We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Continue reading “A Monday meander: More from Centennial Olympic Park”
We are the algorithm
This is the time
For you to deeply compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.
Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.~ Hafiz
Your tears keep alive a desire for change… Guess who doesn’t want you to feel that grief? Guess who wants you to accept your new reality and surrender to it forever? Guess who wants you to put on a happy face in public? Guess who wants to defeat you into emotional numbness rather than emotional aliveness? Your oppressors, those who profit from your compliance, those who want you to be happy and well-adjusted drones in their system. They don’t want you to feel your own pain.
Think of the prophets of recent decades: Rachel Carson warning of a silent spring, Dr. King warning of America’s unpaid promissory note coming due, César Chávez calling us to stop oppressing and exploiting farmworkers, Pope Francis warning us to hear the cries of the earth and the cries of the poor, Bishop Gene Robinson calling us to see every LGBTQ+ person as God’s beloved child, Dr. William Barber warning us that our national heart needs a moral defibrillator to shock us out of our coma, and Greta Thunberg warning us that the earth is on fire. The prophets warn us, and too few listen; when the inevitable consequences come, the prophets invite us not to let our opportunity pass by without being named, mourned, and lamented.
Father Richard often defines contemplation as meeting all the reality we can bear. To help us meet and bear reality, the prophets say, mourn privately and lament publicly.… Feel the surge of divine grief, the groaning of the Holy Spirit deep within you, and let those groans of loss become the groans of labor so a better world can be born from our failure, beginning with a better you who is still capable of seeing, and feeling, and meeting all the reality we can bear.
~ from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
Everything is practice
I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.
~ George Morrison, Grand Portage Ojibwe
Silent Sunday
The moon’s breath
The morning sings.
The egg-shaped moon
is exhaling clouds.
I breathe in and
exhale a song of my own.
I listen
as the symphony of birds
respond with hymns
of spring.
A few thoughts on a chilly and blustery spring day
Searching for spring all day, I never saw it,
straw sandals treading everywhere
among the clouds, along the banks.
Coming home, I laughed, catching
the plum blossom’s scent:
spring at each branch tip, already perfect.~ unknown zen nun from the Song Dynasty (trans. by Sam Hammill and J.P. Seaton, The Poetry of Zen)
Continue reading “A few thoughts on a chilly and blustery spring day”