Far, Near — No Matter

[Image: “november twenty two,” by farrahsanjari on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons License.)]

From whiskey river:

If you think of this idea of nothingness as mere blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness, you haven’t understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the suns, moons and stars, and the mountains and rivers, and the good men and bad men, and the animals and the insects, the whole bit — all are contained in the void. So out of this void comes everything and you are it. What else could you be?

(Alan Watts [source])

…and (also used previously at RAMH, here):

The search of reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.

We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

In This Season of Waiting

Under certain conditions,
when the moon in the western sky
seems frozen there, for instance

even as the sun is rising in the east,
so that soon two sides of the coin
will be facing each other;

or when the snow
which is a stranger here
fills our trees with its cold flowers;

when the single
bluejay at the feeder
is so still

it could be enameled there,
then the earth becomes an emblem
for whatever we believe.

(Linda Pastan [source])

Not from whiskey river:

You cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe. You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. Here’s a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples; and we call it an apple tree because the tree “apples” — that is what it does. Here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that, at least on the planet earth, it “peoples” in just the same way that an apple tree “apples.” Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, “Just a bunch of rocks,” and they went away. Later on, two million years later, they came around again, and they looked at it and they said, “Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it is peopling, and it is alive after all; it has done something intelligent.” We grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree, and if evolution means anything, it means that. But curiously, we twist it. We say, “Well, first of all, in the beginning, there was nothing but gas and rock. Then intelligence happened to arise in it like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.” However, we are thinking in a way that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive, and they are going to have people crawling over them. It is only a matter of time, just in the same way the acorn is eventually going to turn into the oak because it has the potentiality of that within it. Watch out, because rocks are not dead.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Country Music

God bless the midnight bus depot,
the busted guitar case.
God bless diazepam,
its dilatory grace.

God keep Carl Perkins warm
and Jesus Christ erase
my name from all the files in
the county’s database.

The dog that bit my leg
the night I left the state,
Lord won’t you let his
vaccines be up to date.

West Point to the south of me,
Memphis to the north.
In between is planted with
pinwheels for the Fourth.

Smokestack Lightning, Jesus Christ —
whatever your name is —
bless my fingers on these strings,
I’ll make us both famous.

How about that, the new moon,
same as it ever was.
You must’ve been high as a kite
when you created us.

So hurry, hurry, step right up,
there’s something you should see.
The sun shines on the bus depot
like a coat of Creole pink.

God keep the world this clean and bright
and easy to believe in
and let me catch my bus all right,
and then we’ll call it even.

(Michael Robbins [source])

…and:

This Is My Song

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

(Lloyd Stone [source])