All night I could not sleep
because of the moonlight on my bed
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered ‘yes.’
….Zi Yi
there aren’t any battles here…..where moon meets heart meets those sweet hours before dawn….purity, reverence, disremembering…….where the ground of meaning becomes the dusty light……
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain, the river, its channel in the soil, the animal, its bones in the stratum, the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the person inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent………Ralph Waldo Emerson
the exotic & symbolic pleasure of being
Who am I? There are moments when I glimpse another self swimming as if in a great watery world beneath all the definitions I have been given. It may be in movement, or meditation, wakefulness, or near sleep, and suddenly a door has opened as if into a vast room. I discover dimensions in myself I had not known before and yet recognize with some sorrow as if I had been separated from an old friend for too long. The sense that I have at these moments is that I have broken through a wall into another world than the one I was raised to believe existed. In this world sensual experience has a significance beyond the narrow boundaries I learned as a child. I feel no division between what I call self and world. At these times I have felt everything in my own life and all of existence to be brilliant with a kind of lucidity. Because the clarity is inseparable from experience itself, it does not reveal a meaning that can be formulated through any logical system of words or numbers. Yet the experience can be evoked. Thoreau speaks of the spring thaw at Walden pond- ‘It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as if it were all one active fish….’……Susan Griffin
