[Video: Another Cloud Reel, by Vimeo user “Delrious” (whose real name, I think, is Ben Wiggins; you can see some more examples of his handiwork, available for licensing, at Pond5). This genre of video must have a real name — they’re not that uncommon, and something like “time-lapse of the world over an electronic soundtrack” doesn’t exactly trip lightly off the tongue — but I don’t know what it is. Rather Koyaanisqatsi-esque, no? (Not that that exactly rolls off the tongue either!)]
From whiskey river:
It’s a good practice in a way, to be, as they say, in the world, but not of the world. You can go to the Himalayas and miss it completely. Yet you can be stuck in the middle of New York and be very spiritual. I mean, I noticed some places like New York bring out a certain thing in myself while I found in some place like Switzerland, there were a lot of uptight people because they’re living in so much beauty there’s no urgency in trying to find the beauty in themselves. If you’re stuck in somewhere like New York you have to somehow look within yourself; otherwise you go crackers. So, in a way, it’s good to be able to go in and out of both situations. Most people think when the world gets itself together we’ll all be okay. I don’t see that situation arriving. I think one by one, we all free ourselves from the chains we have chained ourselves to. But I don’t think that suddenly some magic happens and the whole lot of us will all be liberated in one throw.
(George Harrison [source: first few sentences here; remainder generally included, with other slight rewording, as here; otherwise, uncertain])
…and (in slightly different words):
But all of us are struggling to be here. One of the great theological questions is around incarnation, which simply means being here in your body — not anywhere else, just here with life’s fierce need to change you — the fact that the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being and that you’ll pass from this place. And will you actually turn up? Will you actually have the conversation? Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?
(David Whyte [source])
…and:
The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)But because being here means so much, and because all that’s here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once — that’s irrevocable.And so we keep on going and try to realize it,
try to hold it in our simple hands, in
our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
(Lisel Mueller [source])
…and:
The quality of presence determines the quality of life.
(Jack Kornfeld [source: quoted by numerous sources (e.g., here), but nothing canonical])
…and:
With all due respect for the wondrous ways people amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like or that trees breathe out what we breathe in. I think of the astonished neighbor children who huddled around my husband in his tiny backyard garden, in the city where he lived years ago, clapping their hands to their mouths in pure dismay as he pulled carrots from the ground. (Ever the thoughtful teacher, he explained about fruits and roots and asked, “What other food do you think might be grown in the ground?” They knit their brows, conferred, offered brightly: “Spaghetti?”) I wonder what it will mean for us to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process. I wonder how we will imagine the infinite when we have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky. I wonder how I can explain why a woodthrush song makes my chest hurt, to a populace for whom “wood” is a construction material and “thrush” is a tongue disease.
Oh, how can I say this: People will need wild places. Whether or not they think they do, they do. They need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and ice ages. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of whom love their lives as much as you do, and none of whom could possibly care less about your economic status or your day-running calendar. Wilderness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet Earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.
(Barbara Kingsolver [source])
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