From the distance

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers.  Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life.  Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent.  Now your life is unimaginable without them.  Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you.  To lose them now would be to lose yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

Going to the next level

(Approaching the abyss)

We have no where to go (really) but down — eventually we must all let go and jump — it is supposedly that act which propels us to the next level — to enlightenment.  What would bring us to this point — where are we willing to give up the self?  Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment?  How would we know?  What do we have to give up to make such a leap?

~ Hakuin Ekaku

I don’t know how we know.  I do know one of the things we have to give up to make a leap, any leap, is fear.  I’ve had to give it up a few times, to carry on with the commitment I made to get outside every day.  I think it was the commitment that gave me the courage to give up the fear so I could make those leaps.

Or maybe I’m just plain crazy, like The Fool in the Tarot, a card I have long identified with.  Sometimes it takes a little crazy to move on or move up, or even just to carry on.

The one contained within

(A hole in the brambles.)

There is no reality except the one contained within us.  That is why so many people live such an unreal life.  They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

~ Hermann Hesse

Rest like a giant tree

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.  To be happy, rest like a giant tree, in the midst of them all.

~ The Buddha

Lodgepole Pines

The growth of the soul may be compared to the growth of a plant.  In both cases, no new properties are imparted by the operation of external causes, but only the inward tendencies are called into action and clothed with strength.

~ George Ripley, 1802-1880

Photography

(Symbol in the trees.  Photo © 2009 by Robin)

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

~ Edward Weston