Endistanced

[Video: zooming in from a Milky Way-wide view all the way to galactic cluster NGC 3324, dubbed the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for its resemblance to the profile of the Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet. Music by John Dyson; original video at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) site.]

From whiskey river:

And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

(Stephen Graham [source])

…and:

Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble eminent statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies, corroborates, explains each separate piece.

(Arthur Machen [source])

…and:

The World Loved by Moonlight

You must try,
the voice said, to become colder.
I understood at once.
It is like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,
braced in stone. Only something heartless
could bear the full weight.

[The above poem’s] source was a sentence written by Chekhov in a letter to a young writer: “If you want to move your reader, write more coldly.” The advice is chilling, true, and rich, I think, and leads in many different directions of thought. This poem follows one of those directions: that if one were to imagine a world in which there were mythic, conscious deities, then those beings would have to be very cold, very detached, in order to bear seeing what they must see in the course of any given day. So much suffering, so much foolishness, so much anger. To be able to watch that at all — and even more, to play some active role in its continuance — would demand total heartlessness. It’s the same lack of pity that Virgil demands of Dante as they tour the regions of Hell. Pity, the ghost-guide tells the poet, is forbidden. It is true for the contemporary writer as well, and for any seeker after truth. A certain detachment is needed to look the fullness of life eye to eye; yet that very detachment is what permits the viewer to feel things fully, to know them without blinking.

(Jane Hirshfield [sources: poem and commentary])

Not from whiskey river:

I first heard the kyudo maxim, “Do not let the target steal your heart” given by Uozumi Sensei to a group of students at a Renmei kyudo program almost two years ago. The maxim seemed to me to have poignant yet vast meaning for application in mato practice. How is it to be understood and applied?

First, I wrote Michael Rich, a friend and translator of kyudo texts and asked him the source of the maxim. He kindly wrote back:

Teki ni torowarenai shingan:
“Become the mind eye that is not captured by the target.”

Said by the late Nakano Keikichi, a revered master archer in Japan.

What does “become” mean? Who or what becomes?

One dictionary definition of “become” is “…to come into existence.” Is it possible that “becoming,” means “to activate”?

What is the meaning of “mind eye”?

One of the brief definitions in Japanese of mind eye that Michael translated is: “mind eye… gain an insight (into).”

What is it that is held back not to be captured by the target as you look face to face into it?

(Zen Kyudo Writings [source])

…and:

Business in D.C.

At thirty-three thousand feet
I think of my ancestors: the one
who yearned for his wife as he tended
the sick the first winter in Plymouth;
the one whipped at the post in 1645
for fornication; the ones who gathered
in the longhouse, wove bulrush mats
for floors of their wetuash, and taught
the Pilgrims how to plant maize.

What would they think of this view
of wrinkled hills, quilted farms
and glittering cities? Of cell phones,
e-mail, fax machines and DVDs?
Would they be awed by ice-blue peaks
that rise from twisting river valleys?
Have fun Googling? Be shocked
by the war in Iraq, the Pacific
trash vortex and global warming?

I’d take my great-grandfather
who joined the Union Army in 1863
at seventeen to Ford’s Theater to see
the single-shot pistol used to kill Lincoln,
the ones who fought the redcoats
to see the Star-Spangled Banner
at the Smithsonian, its tattered wool
and cotton spread on a table where
conservators work behind glass.

At the Museum of the American Indian
I’d show all of them the baskets
whose designs mean people emerge
from previous worlds to enter this one.
I wish my forebears could gather in DC
for a stomp dance, then visit the National
Museum of Dentistry to contemplate ivory,
gold and asses’ molars, all bound together,
in George Washington’s false teeth.

(Lucille Lang Day [source])

…and:

I was up early and brought the box in which the little hawk was imprisoned out onto the grass where I was building a cage. A wind as cool as a mountain spring ran over the grass and stirred my hair. It was a fine day to be alive. I looked up and all around and at the hole in the cabin roof out of which the other little hawk had fled. There was no sign of her anywhere that I could see.

“Probably in the next county by now,” I thought cynically, but before beginning work I decided I’d have a look at my last night’s capture.

Secretively, I looked again all around the camp and up and down and opened the box. I got him right out in my hand with his wings folded properly and I was careful not to startle him. He lay limp in my grasp and I could feel his heart pound under the feathers but he only looked beyond me and up.

I saw him look that last look away beyond me into a sky so full of light that I could not follow his gaze. The little breeze flowed over me again, and nearby a mountain aspen shook all its tiny leaves. I suppose I must have had an idea then of what I was going to do, but I never let it come up into consciousness. I just reached over and laid the hawk on the grass.

He lay there a long minute without hope, unmoving, his eyes still fixed on that blue vault above him. It must have been that he was already so far away in heart that he never felt the release from my hand. He never even stood. He just lay with his breast against the grass.

In the next second after that long minute he was gone. Like a flicker of light, he had vanished with my eyes full on him, but without actually seeing even a premonitory wing beat. He was gone straight into that towering emptiness of light and crystal that my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate. For another long moment there was silence. I could not see him. The light was too intense. Then from far up somewhere a cry came ringing down.

(Loren Eiseley [source])