O Nature, your maternal life
I bear within the essence of my will.
And my will’s fiery energy
Shall steel my spirit striving,
That sense of self springs forth from it
To hold me in myself.
— Rudolf Steiner
It is within your power to make your life more magical. Let yourself think magically. Symbolically. Metaphorically. Loosen up and let the boundaries between mundane and magical living become thinner. Invite yourself to see like an artist, to think like a poet.
—excerpted from The Power of Magic ¤ Robin Rose Bennett 2012, from We’Moon 2014 p. 151
“Say I Am You
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is, and what isn’t.
You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,
say who I am. Say I am You.”
― Rumi
Original Text |
Modern Text |
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Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTA, and PHILOSTRATE, with other attendant lords
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THESEUS, HIPPOLYTA, and PHILOSTRATE enter, with a number of lords and servants.
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‘Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.
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HIPPOLYTA
These lovers are saying some strange things, Theseus.
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THESEUS
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
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THESEUS
Yes, strange—and totally made up too. I’ll never believe any of these old legends or fairy tales. Lovers and madmen hallucinate about things that sane people just can’t understand. Lunatics, lovers, and poets all are ruled by their overactive imaginations. some people think they see devils and monsters everywhere—and they’re lunatics. Lovers are just as crazy, and think a dark-skinned gypsy is the most gorgeous woman in the world. Poets are always looking around like they’re having a fit, confusing the mundane with the otherworldly, and describing things in their writing that simply don’t exist. All these people have such strong imaginations that, when they feel happy, they assume a god or some other supernatural being is bringing that happiness to them. Or if they’re afraid of something at night, they look at the shrubbery and imagine it’s a wild bear!
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But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy,
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
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HIPPOLYTA
But the story that these lovers are telling, and the fact that they all saw and heard exactly the same things, make me think there’s more going on here than imaginary fantasies. Their story is bizarre and astounding, but it’s solid and consistent.
: http://nfs.sparknotes.com/msnd/page_146.html
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WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING
In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible,
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance…
Excerpt from ‘What to Remember When Waking’
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press. ©David Whyte
This morning the subject of my nature meditation was the clear sky at sunrise time. As I watched my breath flow in and out of my body and beheld the sky, I felt its presence was a blanket comforting me. My breath relaxed and deepened, and I imbibed that comfort.
I know, of course, that the sky is a sea of air in which I am immersed and without which I would not exist. Yet I am not always palpably aware of that reality. This morning I experienced this reality for myself and it was so comforting. What a great antidote to the thought that I must bullnose my way through life, struggling to accomplish all the things I have set for myself– an antidote to looking at life as one continuous challenge (that happens in linear time).
This morning I cleared my mind and took a long look at the sunflower on the porch. This photo was taken before a trip we took during which watering was neglected. When we returned, I noticed the sunflower was dying. I watered it, and lo and behold, it revived, flower and all.
This morning my attention went to the leaves, how they turn outward to receive the light. This sunflower reminded me of the power of expecting beneficence. Even though it had been neglected, it responded to the watering and it kept reaching toward the light.
Today I will aim to hold this attitude of expecting beneficence and see what unfolds.
“Earth may become on an instant all faery . . . and earth and air resound with the music of its invisible people… You may see the palace chambers of nature where the wise ones dwell in secret . . . and know an eternal love is within and around you, pressing upon you and sustaining with infinite tenderness your body, soul and spirit.” – A.E.***
(from Mara Freeman’s blog)
***AE, pseudonym of George William Russell (born April 10, 1867, Lurgan, County Armagh, Ire.—died July 17, 1935, Bournemouth, Hampshire, Eng.), poet, artist, and mystic, a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russell took his pseudonym from a proofreader’s query about his earlier pseudonym, “AEon.”
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9.27.14– In the early morning hours, I woke up to an awareness of the fairies in my being, as if they were playing a song within me. I heard/felt a tune. It didn’t sound quite human. I forget it now. I wish I had gotten up and played it on the piano– but I guess this wasn’t meant to be. This has never happened to me before.
“Mother Trees” Use Fungal Communication Systems to Preserve Forests
Suzanne Simard, forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues have made the major discovery that trees and plants really do communicate and interact with each other. She discovered an underground web of fungi connecting the trees and plants of an ecosystem. This symbiosis enables the purposeful sharing of resources, consequently helping the whole system of trees and plants to flourish.
Simard was lead to the discovery by the observation of webs of bright white and yellow fungal threads in the forest floor. Many of these fungi were mycorrhizal, meaning they have a beneficial, symbiotic relationship with a a host plant, in this case tree roots. Microscopic experimentation revealed that the fungi actually moves carbon, water and nutrients between trees, depending upon their needs.
http://www.ecology.com/2012/10/08/trees-communicate/
REST
is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange…
Excerpted from ‘REST’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. ©2014 David Whyte
To be Published in late November 2014