trees

"I begin to sigh too, for I feel that people are like trees that move, trees that have lost their roots and are always in search of the soil. I have a hazy idea that humans have come from trees that broke off in a wild whirlwind eons ago..."

"I have my bedtime book in my hand and my pocket light and walk toward the mountain over the edges of the moorland in rubber boots. The book is a relative of mine, I feel; it is made out of trees and human thought, and thus the relationship becomes twofold. These are ancient poems that I am taking to the mountains..."

from "The Book Collection" and "Night", by Gyrdir Eliasson

Nothing

I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on a rock
And it tumbled down.

Now when I build, I shall begin
With the smoke from the chimney.

-Leopold Staff

I often wonder, whether it might be better to pray to a false god who hears me, rather than to a true god who does not.

want

Obscenely expensive; I can't imagine ever feeling free to spend so much on cutlery when there are people in the world who have nothing to eat. But it is heart-breakingly beautiful to look at...

You can see the original link here

cats

One of the greatest pleasures of being human is enjoying the company of a domesticated cat.

Issa

Here,
I'm here-
the snow falling.

Kobayashi Issa, 1805

Autumn

"In his autumn before the winter, comes man's last mad surge of youth." -vintage film line, quoted in "don't fall" by the Chameleons (U.K.).

Feeling a bit old of late. Looking, feeling, and thinking. Wondering what my life has been, and how the story of it will read when all the stories are told one day. This time of year is always sort of a sweet heartache for me. It has long been a favorite season, second only to winter in my estimation. The gray skies feel softer than the harsh light of summer, the damp air soothing, caressing the skin like the faint kisses of some quiet, unseen, but forgiving god.

Metaphorically of course, it is the season for looking backward; always the favored direction of my gaze. So I am sitting at home alone tonight, browsing iTunes for digital versions of the music of my youth.

Hence the quote.

Annie Dillard quotes

Some favorites:

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. "

"Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull."

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

She looked through the branches and she could see a million stars

"That night, when she went to bed, she was very tired. But she looked through the branches and she could see a million stars. The wind blew gently and rocked the tree like a cradle. It was very peaceful, and Miss Suzy was very happy once more."

-from Miss Suzy, by Miriam Young

snow

I love the sound of falling snow. The accumulated sound of each individual snowflake, imperceptible by themselves, together combine into a gentle, sibilant, shimmering murmur.

the beast

"THERE was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself -- only for knowing it." - George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl

I used to have a recurring nightmare. In every variation of it, I am being chased by a vicious yet strangely intelligent wild animal. In the last version of it that I remember having - which was many years ago - I was in my grandmother's house. It had originally belonged to my mother's mother, and is now the home of my sister.

In the dream, I was being pursued through the house by what was essentially an enormous werewolf. He was a supernaturally large human/lupus hybrid with powerfully muscled broad shoulders and the body, strength and nature of a wolf; but he stood on two legs and possessed the height and intellect of a man. As I ran for my life up the attic stairs, I felt the hot, moist exhalation of his breath through bared teeth on the nape of my neck. He held nothing back as he stayed on my heels, and at the extremity of my ability I was just barely ahead of him. He roared in fury his intent to kill me. But more disturbingly I could sense his thoughts, as I felt that he could read mine. We almost seemed to share one mind. And I sensed no pause, no relenting, in his irrational, single-minded intent to devour me.

I took the top of the stairs a hairs breadth out of his reach, and as he bellowed with hatred and rage at me I managed to fling the last door closed in his face, enclosing myself in a small upper bathroom with no other exit.

Barricaded inside and with no other way out, I turned to watch the door shudder and rattle, almost leaving it's frame as he hurled his body heedlessly against it, refusing to accept that it could come between him and his prey. I was struck by how unlikely it was that the thin, antique wooden door should be able to withstand such a supernatural onslaught. But it was built, indirectly at least, by the loving hands of my grandmother, eventually coming to us through our mother. And for the moment, it seemed to be just enough to stand between me and my enemy.

The seed beneath the snow

Kafka had this word written over his desk: "Warten" (wait).

“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”

-Ben Okri

Such words and sentiments have become my hope and comfort over the last few years of my life. The confidence that there is indeed some guiding force that is not indifferent to our dreams; that the inarticulate hopes we find embedded in our hearts are not put there as a cruel joke or a meaningless taunt. I remember, both as a child and as a young man, conceiving of the kind of person I wanted to be, and what the life I would wish to live might look like. I recall with anguish the person I have been at times, and the bewildering turns taken along the way. I sometimes now see glimpses of the person I will end up becoming, and it is not so very far off from what I had hoped.

I read recently about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. A maze has many possible outcomes, some of which are dead-ends. In a labyrinth, no matter how convoluted and complex the path, the walker always ends up at the appointed destination.
It is not that I would choose the way things went, or the route that I have come. But it is heartening to see the beginnings of a kind of over-arching order and meaning to life. One that has asserted itself despite both my resistance to, and my attempts at assisting it. Whatever my life may be in the end, it is comforting that it is not something I could not recognize as my own.

Of course I am not sure exactly what Kafka meant by "Wait". I suspect though it is something akin to my own long resisted lesson that sometimes, the real work of making art is inward; still, invisible, and maddeningly inactive. That sitting and looking - seeing until I understand - is the essence of art, more so than the drawing or cutting or shaping or writing. The hardest part of a good drawing, for me, is the discipline to look at a subject more than I look at my line; to wait, to see the truth of it, before I record it with a mark. Perhaps good art, like all living things, requires a gestation period after conception. A time when the seed must lie buried in the ground.

I wonder if our lives are like that too. That we are the art of some higher being, one who waits patiently to see us unfold organically, rather than calling us into existence fully formed. That we are the planting of a patient gardener, who does not forget what the seed he has buried looks like.

up into the silence the green

up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me,(will go

-e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings

silence

.is
a
looking

bird:the

turn
ing;edge,of

life

(inquiry before snow

-e.e. cummings

Churchianity

"Men never do evil so thoroughly and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. " - Blaise Pascal
The only consistently harsh words Jesus had were for the religious conservatives of his day. It was they, the strict, pious and brutal - who believed in the inspiration and authority of the scriptures - who had him crucified.

I am persuaded that it is not political liberals who are the enemies of the spirit of christ. It is those on the right, social conservatives who claim his name while misrepresenting his character; who believe they do him a service when they exert political power in order to control their neighbor's small vices; who are certain they can and should create a society that enforces their selective understanding of the morality of the bible.

They assert that we are a "christian nation". But is that not precisely the U(dys)topian spirit that motivated the architects of Babel?

Genesis 11:4 "...Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches (attains) to the heavens..."

George MacDonald

"...Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, and heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me! "How did I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question was immediately answered. "You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice. I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape... The same instant I knew it was the raven that had spoken, for he stood looking up at me with an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed to cast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself. "

George MacDonald, from Lilith

the only thing left

"Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."

-Antoine de Sainte Exupery