There is no path

For the discovery of truth there is no path…

~ J. Krishnamurti

Wonder

(The storage room.  Washington, D.C.)

Wonder begins with the element of surprise.  The now almost obsolete word ‘wonderstruck’ suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment.  Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence.  We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home.  The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded.  We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which being revealed.

~ Sam Keen

Altruism

(Making yourself a(t) home.  Washington, D.C.)

All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person’s place.

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Arriving

A mind that is passionate is inquiring, searching, looking, asking, demanding, not merely trying to find for its discontent some object in which it can fulfill itself and go to sleep.  A passionate mind is groping, seeking, breaking through, not accepting any tradition; it is not a decided mind, not a mind that has arrived, but it is a young mind that is ever arriving.

~ J. Krishnamurti

The eternal hush of silence

Listen closely.
The eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on.  This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.

~ Jack Kerouac

The time is now

It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again.  That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Looking and seeing

(Atop Bald Mountain.  Boulder, Colorado.)

Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it.

~ Frederick Frank

The markets

The markets of the world are flowing with goods and services produced by the interplay of sun and earth, air and water, and the inexhaustible imagination and energy of human beings.  Whenever you touch an object made or conveyed by humans, you are touched by all the people who have reached their hands to make this possible for you.  Daily use is daily communion.

~ Arthur P. Moor

Born upon thy bank

I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Rivers

Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined.  Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.

~ Harry Middleton