Thursday’s news

Leaning into the morning.

Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.

~ Huston Smith

A Monday meander: Finding routine

Red, red roses on a Sunday in May.

Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation… We must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

Understanding is not inherited, nor can it be laboriously acquired. It is something which, when circumstances are favorable, comes to us, so to say, of its own accord. All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we understand the mystery of given reality.

~ Aldous Huxley

Circling back around

Little hands.  Artwork gift for Mother’s Day.

… holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

~ Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

A Monday meander: May flowers and showers

Reflections in the manor house window. (Quail Hollow Park)

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past or bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. Memory is not about what went on in the past. It is about what is going on inside of us right this moment. It is never idle. It never lets us alone.

~ Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

A Monday meander: Attention

Peach blossoms.

This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

~ Mary Oliver

Awe and wonder are the same emotion, but with a slightly different twist, because wonder is only connected to positive emotion and awe is the same emotion, but with negative — or not “negative”, but scarier thoughts associated with it. So to describe what wonder and awe and astonishment are, they are the emotion that arises in one in the face of something so vast and so powerful and so transcendent and so unexpected that it makes one rethink what you’re looking at, because you can’t comprehend it. You can’t quite take it in on one side.

~ Fabiana Fondevila

A Monday meander from the Bogs

A Wednesday morning moon. An hour or so before sunrise.

Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that ‘nothing hangs on it,’ it sounds like blasphemy. There’s never any knowing – (how am I to put it?) – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.

~ E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

A Monday meander: A Saturday hike

Saturday sunrise.

Learning about the languages of trees, their social networks, and our own human microbiome forces us to rethink our relationship with “things.” If trees have memories, respond to stress, and communicate, then what can they tell us? Will we listen? Where does one species end and another begin? What happens when we know plants can talk?

~ Katie Holten, Deciphering Words in the Woods (Emergence Magazine)