the inner ground

The way to find the real "world" is not merely to measure 

and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground.  

For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self... 

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present 

at once to my own self and to freedoms of all other men,

 is not a visible, objective and determined structure 

with fixed laws and demands.  

It is a living and self-creating mystery 

of which I am myself a part, 

to which I am myself my own unique door.

~Thomas Merton

from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 
 by
James Finley

other nations

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

 Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, 

man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge 

and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. 

 

We patronize them for their incompleteness, 

for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.

 And therein we err, and greatly err. 

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

 In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, 

gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,

 living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, 

they are not underlings; they are other nations, 

caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, 

fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston
from The Outermost House

the still point

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity.
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.




~ T.S. Eliot
from Burnt Norton, #1 of  "Four Quartets"

the mind that frees us or enslaves

It is the mind that frees us or enslaves.

Driven by the senses we become bound;

Master of the senses we become free.

Those who seek freedom must master their senses.

When the mind is detached from the senses

One reaches the summit of consciousness.

Mastery of the mind leads to wisdom.

Practice meditation.  Stop all vain talk.

The highest state is beyond reach of thought,

For it lies beyond all duality.

~ The Amritabindu Upanishad

kind

I hadn't noticed

till a death took me outside

and left me there

that grass lifts so quietly

to catch everything

we drop and we drop 

everything.

~ Leonard Nathan

wild rose

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,


suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only a shade,


and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.




~ Wendell Berry
photo by Bryan Griffith