[Image: “The Ties That Bind,” by user “wetsun” (found at Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!). When I first saw this photo, I liked the look of it — composition, lighting and contrast, that sort of thing. I had to look at it two or three times more before the surprise set in.]
From whiskey river:
When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold.
(C. S. Lewis [source])
…and:
I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
…and:
Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective. We have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.
(José Saramago [source])
…and:
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
(Seamus Heaney [source])
…and:
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
Not from whiskey river (I believe the poem refers to this event — not to the naturalist):
Thinking of Darwin
Were it not for that photograph,
disaster in its final stages,
matchbox houses coming down,
rubble of streets, uprooted trees,
lives we somehow could not envision,
removed from us and not our own,
on distant coasts the fall of night,we might never have thought of Darwin,
remembered what we had forgotten,
nothing but desert at our backs,
somewhere the light gone grey, gone green,
the very texture of the air
evoking strangeness in us, distance,
deepwater harbor on the rim
of an island whose aspirations,
despite itself, assume proportions
hemispheric, continental,
set adrift in uncharted waters
where a wind from the Timor Sea
smacks of Celebes, of Java,
celebrates archipelagoes
for which no names have been devised,where rain runs green, and rocks dream gold,
where every morning, on our tongues,
we taste the raging of the dust
gathering at abandoned stations
and know, or come to know, the life,
the littoral on which we wait,
though not yet clearly its true name,
not precisely its purpose with us;where, naked, night to night, inventing
names for our nakedness, we lie
suspended under the Equator
between the wastes of self and weather,
trying to learn ourselves, our names,
what to make of this emptiness,
this sense of absence which afflicts us,
forgetting what we must remember,the great Australian coast spun out
beyond our scrutiny in shales,
corals, limestones, salt scrub, sand,
discovery at every turn
and, this far south, no turning back,
latitudes of impossible
dimensions bleaching the horizon,
mapping what will not quite stay mapped,
nothing but desert at our backs,
nothing but darkness to advance on,
night on the routes that enter strangeness
more dangerously, in the evening,
than we can bring ourselves to say,
darkness and an interior
for which, of course, there is no name
except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.
(Herbert Morris [source])
…and:
…the Buddha said that once you do manage to get rid of your sense of self, the truth of the universe is yours. You are no longer living from a single vantage point. Since you are not a separate self, your compassion is limitless; you are all compassion, all empathy, because not being you entails being everything else: since we are not at all separate, we must be all. A related and equally important concept is that everything in the world we know is constantly coming into being or disappearing, and it is all basically made of the same stuff. There are no true nouns, then, only verbs. As a billion various ocean waves are all in fact water, wave-ing, so the water is just the universe ocean-ing—holding in the form of water. The part of the universe that is you, is really just “you-ing” right now. There is no reason to fear anything, or to take pride only in those things particular to you, because there is no you, there is just a momentarily you-ing universe from which you could not be separated any more than an ocean wave can be separated from the water. The terrible separation of death and the alienation of individuals within communities and within the vast universe—these ruptures don’t exist in reality. We are tricked by the default time frame of our minds, so we do not see the flow of a oneness. With a lot of work, we can reconfigure our default settings so that we see things as they really are: flowing, timeless, interconnected. It leaves one bemused, gentle, and unflappable.
(Jennifer Hecht [source])
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