Springtime musings

Beauty and grace.

So many beings in the universe love us unconditionally.  A bird song can express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. The trees, the water, and the air don’t ask anything of us; they just love us. Even though we need this kind of love, we continue to destroy these things. We should try our best to do the least harm to all living creatures.

We humans think we’re intelligent, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce symmetrical flowers; a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us to recognize and cultivate the noblest nature in ourselves.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have

Because

Me and my solar eclipse shadows.

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
― Coco Chanel

Another month rolls by

From the past (and a glimpse of the future).

“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

Still here

Sunrise clouds this morning.

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)

A walking tour of Accomac: Around the Courthouse

Accomac Courthouse, built in 1899 as a replacement for the original built in 1756.

“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

A Monday meander: Imagining what’s possible

Imagining what spring will bring.

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