bring the jewel back

The purpose of the journey is compassion.

When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. 

The goal is to bring the jewel back to the world, 

to join the two things together.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen,

 but experienced, unity and identity in us all. 

~ Joseph Campbell

from The Hero’s Journey (On Living in the World)

Christianity and Unknowing

~ Richard Rohr

the dark night

In the delicious night,

In privacy, where no one saw me,

Nor did I see one thing,

I had no light or guide

But the fire that burned inside my chest.

That fire showed me

The way more clearly than the blaze of noon

To where, waiting for me,

Was the One I knew so well,

In that place where no one ever is.

Oh night, sweet guider,

Oh night more marvelous than dawn!

Oh night which joins

The lover and the beloved

So that the lover and beloved change bodies!

In my chest full of flowers,

Flowering wholly and only for Him,

There He remained sleeping;

I cared for Him there,

And the fan of the high cedars cooled Him.

The wind played with

His hair, and that wind from the high

Towers struck me on the neck

With its sober hand;

Sight, taste, touch, hearing stopped.

I stood still, I forgot who I was,

My face leaning against Him,

Everything stopped, abandoned me,

My worldliness was gone, forgotten

Among the white lilies.

~ St. John of the Cross

from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross 

version by Robert Bly

photo by imogene cunningham

wei wu wei: "action without action" or "effortless doing"

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness.
If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think.

~ Thomas Merton
with thanks to whiskey river

a vast similitude

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes 

and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

.

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

~ Walt Whitman

photo by chertkova svetlana