This everything dance

I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me:  this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I’m part of it.  Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still — this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere.  This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.  This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ William Stafford

Small enlightenment

Enlightenment is always there.  Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment.  If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive — that you can touch the miracle of being alive — then that is a kind of enlightenment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

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

To see a mountain

It does not require a large eye to see a large mountain.  The reason is that, though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives.  In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself.  For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.

~ Meher Baba

One living organism

(Mushrooms found early one morning in Rocky Mountain National Park.)

Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul.

~ Marcus Aurelius

An interesting little clip to go with the post can be found here.

The absolute and marvelous

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal.  He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.

~ Edward Abbey

green earth

The miracle is not to walk on water.  The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Prospective, retrospective

Morning prospective:  imagination.
Evening retrospective: memory.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things flow

No single thing abides; but all things flow.

~ Lucretius (c. 99-55 B.C.E., Roman Poet)

The love of wilderness

… the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see.  Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us — if only we were worthy of it…  No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.  A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

~ Edward Abbey (1927-1929), American writer