[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])

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