People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
photo neil ward
Beautiful warm and Summer weather here in Ireland, the UK and in Europe at the moment. I know that I have posted this before, but a walk along country roads and in the woods brought it to mind:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
photo of Mullaghreelan Woods Co. Kildare
When the eyes and the ears are open,
even the leaves on the trees
teach like pages from the scriptures.
Kabir
photo borealis55
Photo borealis55
On the day of the Summer Solstice and the longest day of the year…
If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are,
and where we come from,
we will have failed
Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996 U.S. Astronomer and Cosmologist
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
photo kevin higgins
Why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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