can you find your true identity?

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How arbitrary, the ways in which we identify ourselves.

This fan chart used in genealogy helps demonstrate this fact.

10 generations here, taking us back only to the mid-1600's, 

and in that 10th generation, 512 equal contributors to 

my genetic inheritance.  I derive my identity, and even think of myself

as being related to maybe 2 of those.

That's about 2 tenths of one percent of the total genetic influence.

511 other surnames that could equally well apply.

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How seriously we sometimes take ourselves.

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Prayers for the Earth

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For once on the face of the earth let's not speak in any language

Let's stop for one second and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines.

We would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm whales

...And the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire,

Victory with no survivors

Would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity,

Life is what it is about.

I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single minded about keeping our lives moving,

And for once could do nothing,

Perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves

And of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.

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~ Pablo Neruda

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snug harbor

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To achieve more perfect

harmony with the river

and at the same time 

live close to the earth

... I became a shantyboater

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~ Harlan Hubbard

from Harlan Hubbard and the River - A Visionary Life

by Don Wallis

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a man and a horse

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There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. 
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The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, 'Where are you going?" and the first man replies, I don't know! Ask the horse!" This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don't know where we are going, and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. 
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We are always running, and it has become a habit. 
We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. 
We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others.

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~ Thich Nhat Hanh

from "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching"

art: "Summer" by Harlan Hubbard 

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longing for your giant self

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In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: 

and that longing is in all of you.

But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, 

carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.

And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends 

and lingers before it reaches the shore.

But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, 

"Wherefore are you slow and halting?"

For the truly good ask not the naked, 

"Where is your garment?" 

nor the houseless, 

"What has befallen your house?" 

~ Kahlil Gibran

from "The Prophet"

art: "Shantyboats at Sunrise"

by Harlan Hubbard

the art

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When I paint a landscape,

I try to paint heaven,

and my joy at being there.

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There is no artist,

living or dead,

whose work would satisfy me

as an expression of my life.

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Nothing was ever painted 

that I would like to have done.

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No one ever expressed me.

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My painting could not have been done by anyone else,

nor in the past.

It is growing more and more unique and personal.

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The beauty of the snow, 

the pleasure of seeing it

and being out in it.

To express that is the end of art.

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I would like my paintings to be as real as the rain and stones,

yet transcend reality into sublimity.

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My pictures follow their own course.

I draw the geographic form, but as the painting goes on,

there springs up a design which is unpredictable,

unconscious, and as perfect as my sense of harmony makes it.

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~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journals, taken here from

"Harlan Hubbard and the River - A Visionary Life"

by Don Wallis
art: "Crossing the River"
 by Harland Hubbard
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seeing reality? true ideas?

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There's no state in which one is seeing reality. 

WHO is seeing WHAT? 

You can only BE real. 

(And that you are always.) 

The problem exists only in thinking.

Let all false ideas go, 

that's all. 

There's no need for true ideas. 

(Since there are none.)

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 Nisargadatta Maharaj

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a more direct revelation

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Much as I admire the Christian principles and teaching, 
and the people ... who follow them,

...for myself I require a more direct revelation, 

not one that must come through so many minds before it reaches mine.  

I must have a faith that I can see and hear, 

one that I can feel without thinking or even trying to put it into words.  

It is not for anyone else, it is a personal faith.

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~ Harlan Hubbard

.from his journal, 1959


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Go deeper

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Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths

out of sight, in the deep living heart.

D.H. Lawrence
photo: Kilauea lava lake

After Anna's death

He was not lonely because he had no desire to return to the past: 

"I am not one of those who enjoy thinking of their past life.  

For me, it is gone, and I have no desire to resurrect it even in thought."  

He saw the pain and imperfection of the past, and he did not want it back. 

The present was enough; it was all he asked.  

And the present provided him sufficient company.  

He was newly and generously mindful of the creatures who lived with him in Payne Hollow:  

"This hillside is common ground for me and the little wild animals who live here."  

He was attentive as perhaps never before to the presence of possum and chipmunk, 

cricket and katydid, bullfrog and dove.  

When he woke long before dawn, the night song of the katydids 

would be dwindling toward silence: 

"Each squawk you think is the last; but no, some diehard starts afresh.  

Sometimes I lie awake listening.  

Surely now the night is over, but no, not yet.

~ Wendell Berry

quoting Harlan Hubbard in

Harlan Hubbard - Life and Work

art by Harlan Hubbard

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so near and real

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"This continued fair, warm weather, and the ripening of the earth...
 affords a glimpse of life on a higher level than we know. 
 It is marvelous that our daily lives go on amid this splendor. 
No heaven could be more fair."

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To see the earth and its creatures in this way is not to see them merely
 as they would appear to the eye of a naturalist, for he said,
 "I have little sympathy with the viewpoint of the naturalist."  

It is rather, to see into their life, to be aware of the informing spirit 
which they manifest: "The sound of the crickets is one voice, one manifestation,
 one of the myriads of the spirit which hovers over the earth." 

This seems sometimes to be a "distant contemplative spirit, yet so near and real, 
that watches the writhings of men."  At other times it seems to be immanent,
 at one with the creatures it informs, and this leads him to dispute the scientific 
reduction to fact: "I watched the fireflies as I looked down into the bottom land,
 like a basin in its wall of dark trees, all filled with the flashing, moving light...
 Their wild dance suggests the supernatural.  The scientist would explain it
 probably as the mating of insects, but how would he account for the joy
 it raises in the beholder?  That is the supernatural part and it can't be 
explained away.  
It is more real than the scientific fact."

~ Wendell Berry

quoting Harlan Hubbard's journal from 1963
art by HH "The Hawthorne Tree," 1985

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I discovered a truth

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I discovered a truth that seemed to me a revelation... 

There seemed to be two universes which I termed the world and the earth, 

in either of which I could choose to live.  

Then I saw there was but one, 

and that I was living on the earth looking directly into infinity.

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~ Harlan Hubbard
from the afterword of "Payne Hollow - Life on the fringe of Society"
afterword by Don Wallis

art by the author, River Hills, 1935

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The painter Harlan Hubbard

The painter Harlan Hubbard said

that he was painting Heaven when

the places he painted merely were

the Campbell or Trimble County

banks of the Ohio, or farms

and hills where he had worked or roamed:

a house's gable and roofline

rising from a fold in the hills, 

trees bearing snow, two shanty boats

at dawn, immortal light upon 

the flowing river in its bends.

And these were Heavenly because

he never saw them clear enough to satisfy his love, his need

to see them all again, again.

~ Wendell Berry

art by Harlan Hubbard

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What is usual is not what is always

What is usual is not what is always.

As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.

Footsteps resume their clipped edges,

birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.

Where were they? By what route did they return?

A woman mute for years

forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

The bitter young man tires;

the aged one sitting now in his body is tender,

his face carries no regret for his choices.

What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.

It is all it can offer.

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.

Only the reminder that there is exception.

~ Jane Hirshfield

photo by Eliot Porter

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Meet your own self

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Meet your own self. Be with your own self, 

listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly. 
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You need no other guide. 

As long as your urge for truth affects your daily life, 

all is well with you. 

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Live your life without hurting anybody. 

Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. 

This is what I call nisarga yoga, the Natural yoga. 

It is the art of living in peace and harmony, 

in friendliness and love. 

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The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.

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~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

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