“When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.”
― N. Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land
Remember who you were before the world told you who to be.
– Charles Bukowski
Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care
Iris Murdoch, on beauty as an occasion of ‘unselfing,’ The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2013)
“When will hate be exhausted? Or is it hate that’s the issue in all this? When will the practice cease of entrusting the destiny of nations to people who see humanity as a way of furthering their careers?”
~ Claude Debussy
Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.
-Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe
Continue reading “A walking tour of Accomac: Around the Courthouse”
There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta
Continue reading “A Monday meander: Imagining what’s possible”
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.
~ Thomas Carlyle
Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.
The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.
….
… the imagination is a faculty that is oblique and indirect. It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. Imagination attends to the great flow of life, and in this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.
text excerpted from © The Four Elements, John O’Donohue (2010, Transworld Ireland, pp 45-46)
breezes at dawn 