Friday, March 22, 2024

how unique are humans really?

 



Photo from Air and Science Magazine


Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his lifetime 
studying the lives of animals, especially our closest cousins, 
the chimpanzees. de Waal has observed their shifting alliances
 and the structure of their political ranks. He has seen bitter conflicts
 break out, only to be mended by peaceful, respected mediators.
 And he has witnessed chimpanzees grieve for, 
and attempt to comfort, their dead and dying.

But one of the most touching reflections in his new book, 
Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
is the story he tells of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk
 to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle
 instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude
: holding both of de Waal’s hands and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave.

The book explores many stories of animal emotions from across
 the animal kingdom, and it might leave you wondering 
how unique humans really are.

Mama, the matriarch and oldest of the chimpanzee colony
 of the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands, 
expressed affection towards behavioral biologist Jan van Hooff
 as she gave him her last hug before she died in 2016.
 Credit: Jan A R A M van Hooff



~ Frans de Waal
from Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions 
and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
with thanks to Science Friday





there is a grace approaching









There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.
 
 
 
~ Stephen Levine 
from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace
 
 
 

the naked awareness of your self


.





... imagination and reason have taught you all they can 
and now you must learn to be wholly given 
to the simple spiritual awareness of your self and God....

he told his disciples, who were loath to give up his physical presence
 (just as you are loath to give up the speculative reflections of your subtle, clever faculties),
 that for their own good he would withdraw his physical presence from them, 
 He said to them, "It is necessary for you that I go,"
 meaning, "It is necessary  for you 
that I depart physically from you."  

St. Augustine, commenting on these words, says:
 "Were not the form of  his humanity withdrawn from our bodily eyes,
 love for him in his Godhead would never cleave to our spiritual eyes."  
And thus I say to you, at a certain point it is necessary
 to give up discursive meditation and learn to taste something of that deep,
 spiritual experience of God's love.

...  always and ever strive toward the naked awareness of your self, 
and continually offer your being to God as your most precious gift. 
 
 Inasmuch as this awareness really is naked, 
you will at first find it terribly painful to rest in it for any length of time
 because, ... your faculties will find no meat for themselves in it. 
 
 Let them fast awhile from their natural delight in knowing, 
It is well said that man naturally desires to know.  Yet at the same time,
 it is also true that no amount of natural or acquired knowledge 
will bring him to taste the spiritual experience of God,
 for this is a pure gift of grace. 
 
 And so I urge you: go after experience rather than knowledge. 
 On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you,
 but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. 
 
 Knowledge tends to breed conceit,
 but love builds.  
 
Knowledge is full of labor,
but love, full of rest.






~ from The Book of Privy Counseling
written anonymously in the fourteenth century 
art: from Arnhem Land



red brocade







The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he's come from,
where he's headed.
That way, he'll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you'll be
such good friends
you don't care.

Let's go back to that.
Rice?  Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That's the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.




~ Naomi Shihab Nye
from 19 Varieties of Gazelle



lute music

 





The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—


Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.




~ Kenneth Rexroth
from Sacramental Acts
NASA photo



Wednesday, March 20, 2024

it's whisper can be heard

 




Grace is always present. You imagine it is somewhere high in the sky,
far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart.
Grace is the Self. . . .You are never out of its operation.


-~ Sri Ramana Maharshi


 Grace is a manifestation of the cosmic free will in operation. 
It can alter the course of events in a mysterious manner
 through its own unknown laws, which are superior to
 all natural laws, and can modify the latter by interaction.

It is the most powerful force in the universe.

It descends and acts only when it is invoked 
by total self- surrender. 

It acts from within, because God resides in the Heart
 of all beings. Its whisper can be heard only in a mind
 purified by self-surrender and prayer.

Rationalists laugh at it, and atheists scorn it, but it exists.
 It is a descent of God into the soul’s zone of awareness. 
It is a visitation of force unexpected and unpredictable.
 It is a voice spoken out of cosmic silence - 
It is ‘Cosmic Will which can perform 
authentic miracles under its own laws’.




~ D.C. Desai
 from Divine Grace Through Total Self-Surrender
art:  from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
with thanks to love is a place


till you yourself are a sail








The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally
that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash,
cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort
that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river
to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness;
you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging
its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into
the realm of the real where subjects and objects act
and rest purely, without utterance.
 
.
The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail,
whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.






~ Annie Dillard
excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
art by Olivia Maria Chevallier

 
 
 
 

Monday, March 18, 2024

prayer happens

 







Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), 
much more than anything you privately do.

 It is an allowing of the Big Self 
more than an assertion of the small self.

 Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say,
 “Prayer happened, and I was there”
 more than “I prayed today.” 

All you know is that you are being led, 
being guided, being loved, being used,
 being prayed through—
and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention
 like any other object in the world,
 and becomes at some level your own “I am.” 
You start knowing through,
 with, and in Somebody Else.

Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.”

Please trust me on this. 
It might be the most important thing I could tell you.





~ Richard Rohr
from The Naked Now
art by Debra Nangala McDonald
with thanks to love is a place

Sunday, March 17, 2024

great and small








When we look at things in the light of Tao,
Nothing is best, nothing is worst.
Each thing, seen in its own light,
Stands out in its own way.
It can seem to be "better"
Than what is compared with it
On its own terms.
But seen in terms of the whole,
No one thing stands out as "better."
If you measure differences,
What is greater than something else is "great,"
Therefore there is nothing that is not "great";
What is smaller than something else is "small,"
Therefore there is nothing that is not "small,"
So the whole cosmos is a grain of rice,
And the tip of a hair
Is as big as a mountain -
Such is the relative view.

You can break down walls with battering rams,
But you cannot stop holes with them.
All things have different uses.
Fine horses can travel a hundred miles a day,
But they cannot catch mice
Like terriers or weasels:
All creatures have gifts of their own.
The white horned owl can catch fleas at midnight
And distinguish the tip of a hair,
But in bright day it stares, helpless,
And cannot even see a mountain.
All things have varying capacities.

Consequently: he who wants to have right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
Does not understand the principles
Of heaven and earth.
He does not know how
Things hang together.
Can a man cling only to heaven
And know nothing of earth?
They are correlative: to know one
Is to know the other.
To refuse one
Is to refuse both.
Can a man cling to the positive
Without any negative
In contrast to which it is seen
To be positive?
If he claims to do so 
He is a rogue or a madman.

Thrones pass
From dynasty to dynasty,
Now in this way, now in that.
He who forces his way to power
Against the grain
I called tyrant and usurper.
He who moves with the stream of events
Is called a wise statesman.

Kui, the one-legged dragon,
Is jealous of the centipede.
The centipede is jealous of the snake.
The snake is jealous of the wind.
The wind is jealous of the eye.
The eye is jealous of the mind.
Kui said to the centipede:

"I manage my one leg with difficulty:
How can you manage a hundred?"
The centipede replied:
"I do not manage them.
They land all over the place
Like drops of spit."
The centipede said to the snake:
"With all my feet, I cannot move as fast
As you do with no feet at all.
How is this done?"
The snake replied:
"I have a natural glide
That can't be changed.  What do I need
With feet?"
The snake spoke to the wind:
"I ripple my backbone and move along
In a bodily way.  You, without bones,
Without muscles, without method,
Blow from the North Sea to the Southern Ocean.
How do you get there
With nothing?'
The wind replied:
"True, I rise up in the North Sea
And take myself without obstacle to the Southern Ocean.
But every eye that remarks me,
Every wing that uses me,
Is superior to me, even though 
I can uproot the biggest trees, or overturn
Big buildings.
The true conqueror is he
Who is not conquered
By the multitude of the small.
The mind is this conqueror -
But only the mind
 Of a wise man."




~ Chuang Tzu
translation by Thomas Merton


gratitude







The sounds of engines leave the air.
The Sunday morning silence comes
at last.  At last I know the presence
of the world made without hands,
the creatures that have come to be 
out of their absence.  Calls
of flicker and jay fill the clear
air.  Titmice and chickadees feed
among the green and the dying leaves.
Gratitude for the gifts of all the living 
and the unliving, gratitude which is
the greatest gift, quietest of all,
passes to me through the trees.


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings



Alex & Me

 



A new study shows the African grey can perform some cognitive tasks
 at levels beyond that of 5-year-old humans. 

The results not only suggest that humans aren’t the only species 
capable of making complex inferences, but also point to flaws
 in a widely used test of animal intelligence. 

The study is described in a November paper published online in Behaviour.



African Grey Parrots



Irene Maxine Pepperberg is an American scientist 
noted for her studies in animal cognition,
 particularly in relation to parrots. 

She has been a professor, researcher and/or lecturer at multiple universities,
 and she is currently an Adjunct Research Professor at Boston University.

Movies: Life with Alex
Education: Harvard University (1976), Massachusetts Institute of Technology



Saturday, March 16, 2024

the haunted room






In Ireland there are many stories of haunted houses.  
There may be a room in which one senses a presence 
or hears footsteps or a strange voice.  Such haunted places 
remain uninhabited.  People are afraid to go there. 
 The place is forsaken and left to deepen ever further 
into the shadow of itself.  
 
The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. 
 You are afraid to risk going in there anymore.  Your fantasy
 peoples this room of the heart with sad presences, 
 which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. 
 
 The haunted room in the mind installs lonesomeness at the heart of your life.
  It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back
 and recognize that you had created a series of haunted rooms
 in your heart.  
 
Fear and negativity are immense forces,
 which constantly tussle with us.  They long to turn the mansions
 of the soul into a totally haunted house.  These are the living conditions
 for which fear and negativity long, and in which they thrive. 
 
 We were sent here to live life to the full.  When you manage to be generous
 in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to bless you.
  Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room,
 turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. 
 
 You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished 
during a time of pain or difficulty.  Sometimes, when life squeezes you
 into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival or breaking apart.
 At such times, you can be harsh with yourself and settle to be someone
 other than who you really long to be.  At such a time, 
you can do nothing else; you have to survive. 
 
 But your soul always remains faithful to your longing
 to become who you really are.  The banished self from an earlier 
time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. 
 The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment.
 
  Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special blessings 
and healing are locked away. 
 
 Your thinking can also freeze and falsify
 the flow of your life’s continuity to make you a prisoner
 of routine and judgement.




~  John O’Donohue, 
from  'Eternal Echoes

clinging







I imagine one of the reasons
 people cling to their hates so stubbornly
is because they sense, once hate is gone, 
they will be forced to deal with pain. 

*

Love takes off the masks
 that we fear we cannot live without 
and know we cannot live within. 

I use the word “love”
 here not merely in the personal sense
 but as a state of being,
 or a state of grace –




  ~ James Baldwin
from The Fire Next Time
art by Jumbo Prior 
from the Museum of  Tropical Queensland


 

Friday, March 15, 2024

some friends in the sea

 






A white whale called NOC began, spontaneously, to make unusual sounds. 
We interpreted the whale’s vocalizations as an attempt to mimic humans. 
Whale vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing
 in the distance just out of range for our understanding. 

These ‘conversations’ were heard several times before the whale was identified
 as the source. The whale lived among a group of dolphins and socialized
 with two female white whales. The whale was exposed to speech 
not only from humans at the surface — it was present at times when divers
 used surface-to-diver communication equipment. The whale was recognized
 as the source of the speech-like sounds when a diver surfaced outside
 this whale’s enclosure and asked “Who told me to get out?” 

Our observations led us to conclude the “out” which was repeated 
several times came from NOC.

As soon as NOC was identified as the source of these sounds, 
we recorded his speech-like episodes both in air and underwater.
 Recordings revealed an amplitude rhythm similar to human speech.
 Although there was variation, vocal bursts averaged about three per second .
 The rhythm of vocal bursts also reminded us of human speech.





~ from Current Biology Vol 22 No 20


Belugas are well adapted to life in northern waters. 
They have a thick skin and a deep layer of blubber to keep them warm
 and act as an energy store. This can account for 40% of their weight.

Their stark white colouring also helps camouflage them against the ice.
 Although beluga whales are predators, feeding on fish, crustaceans,
 and molluscs, they are also hunted by polar bears and orcas.

Belugas lack the dorsal fin that stands up from the back of many whales –
 think of orcas' tall, upright fin. These fins help to keep whales upright
 while swimming. But for belugas, which swim close under ice, 
a dorsal fin might have been more of a hindrance. Instead, a dorsal ridge
 down their spine and a rotund body may help them to move through
 the water more easily. Lacking a dorsal fin may also help them keep warm,
 as fins have a large surface areas that can lose heat fast.

When looking at belugas you can't miss their bulbous heads.
 The large fatty sack between their blowhole and upper jaw is known as a melon.
 It helps them focus and project sound, making belugas especially good
 at echolocation - using sound to detect prey and communicate.



Thursday, March 14, 2024

the mystery









I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am the salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a world of knowledge,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who created the fire in the head.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain? 
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun?
(if not I)



~ Amairgen 
(chief poet of the Milesians,)
from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue

This poem is ascribed to Amergin,
 a Milesian prince or druid who settled in Ireland
 hundreds of years before Christ 
and is from the Leabhar Gabhala, 
or Book of Invasions.

"The three short pieces of verse ascribed to Amergin are certainly very ancient
 and very strange. But as the whole story of the Milesian Invasion
 is wrapped in mystery and is quite possibly a rationalized account
 of early Irish mythology no faith can be placed in the alleged date
 or genuineness of Amergin's verses. They are of interest, because
 as Irish tradition has them as being the first verses made in Ireland, 
so it may very well be they actually do present the oldest surviving
 lines of any vernacular tongue in Europe except Greece."

 by Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature
 © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes