The Blue Pond, Hokkaido, Japan, by Kent Shiraishi. Beautiful. Thank you, kateoplis.
What does reading do, You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I’m not so sure, You’ll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn’t work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don’t have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching.
Jose Saramago, “The Cave.” Speaking of rivers and reading.
“…simply close your eyes and allow your ears to resonate with whatever sounds may be happening spontaneously, making no attempt to name or identify them, just as when one listens to formal music. After a while one hears the sounds emerging, without cause or origin, from the emptiness of silence, and so becomes witness to the beginning of the universe.”
—from Alan Watts’ biography “In My Own Way” describing the relationship between the practice of meditation and John Cage’s piece 4’33”, also commonly referred to as the “silent concert.”
IMAGE: Thank you, nevver: This is it !
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
—William Blake
PHOTO: Ansel Adams: Door. Thank you, birikforever.
Let’s listen with our eyes, not just our ears. That would be the ideal.
Christine Sun Kim (Yes. Thank you, silencesounds)
Karl Blossfeldt: Plant Study, Astrantia major, 1920. Thank you, birikforever.
Opening Scenes from Werckmeister Harmonies directed by Béla Tarr (2000)
too simple for words
truth is too simple for words
before thought gets tangled up in nouns and
verbs
there is a wordless sound
a deep breathless sigh
of overwhelming relief
to find the end of fiction
in this ordinary
yet extraordinary moment
when words are recognized
as words
and truth is recognized
as everything else
—Nirmala
With thanks to The Beauty We Love & Poetry Chaikhana. Nirmala is a contemporary spiritual teacher in the nondualist Advaita tradition. He traces his spiritual lineage through Neelam and H.W.L. Poonja to Ramana Maharshi.
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to forsee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Penguin, 1983), 270.
Leopold Hugo, “Gates of Night,” before 1906, San Diego Historical Society, La Jolla. With thanks to The Blue Lantern.
