Student. Always.

[rootsofinquiry]

WHERE LOVE HAS LIVED

A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one's soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds the warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (US) / Divine Beauty (Europe)

[rootsofinquiry]

Fata Morgana

You’re walking alone in the forest

The moon is directly overhead

Eating her supper of astronomy

And wedding-gifts

There’s a thousand miles of trees

In every direction

Which means there’s just

Enough blood to go around

So you musn’t spill a drop

Of course every second tree

Is the Tree of Death

Every third one

The Tree of Life

While all the others

Are doors to atonement

But you mustn’t knock

You’re like me

And want a straight line

Through everything

But there aren’t any here

No path from A to B

No A or B

You’re just lost

This is the earth

You’re not human

But a fox or a rabbit

Your life behind a desk

Was an illusion

The shining city a madness

Brought on by fatigue

There aren’t any cars or telephones

There never were

Not a single clothesline or shoelace

In all the world

Your heartbeats are so many

Peapods being cracked open

Your footprints swallow themselves

As you walk along

What I said about the moon was a lie

There were never any weddings

Or any gifts

Not an astronomer to be found

The moon is devouring you

Just you tonight

With your long ears pricked up

In their sad salute to fear

This hour is called Abandonment

This night Bottomless

I would call you Insignificant

If you weren’t already named Essential

If you weren’t the very centre of the world

Don Domanski

[savouringtheish]

That “I don’t know” is the “proof.” Not because it refuses to be accountable, but because it is its own account. Inside of an inquiry, like inside a good conversation, like in the midst of the fertilities of Berry’s well-cared-for farm, it is the measure of itself (this is the old Greek experience of beauty, by the way).

David Jardine  (via savouringtheish)

[aseaofquotes]

[savouringtheish]

Charles Bukowski, “So You Want to be a Writer”

[rootsofinquiry]

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor, in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing a comeback, and can I help it? And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me, and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. ‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan. When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’ I told them, ‘He’s dead.’ And when they told me ‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’ When they asked me would I like to contribute I said no, and when they had collected more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had. When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t, and then went off by myself and did more than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said ‘go and organize the International Brotherhood of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing everybody who was against peace?’ So be it. Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.

Wendell Berry

[rootsofinquiry]

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,

For hope must not depend on feeling good And there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality Of the future, which surely will surprise us, And hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction

Any more than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded, The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge Of what it is that no other place is, and by Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this Place that you belong to though it is not yours, For it was from the beginning and will be to the end

Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are Your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor, Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek, And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing In the trees in the silence of the fisherman And the heron, and the trees that keep the land They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. Answer with knowledge of the others who are here And how to be here with them. By this knowledge Make the sense you need to make. By it stand In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow. Speak to your fellow humans as your place Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you. Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it Before they had heard a radio. Speak Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up From the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, By which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights And the darkness of our ignorance and madness. Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you, Which is the light of imagination. By it you see The likeness of people in other places to yourself In your place. It lights invariably the need for care Toward other people, other creatures, in other places As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

No place at last is better than the world. The world Is no better than its places. Its places at last Are no better than their people while their people Continue in them. When the people make Dark the light within them, the world darkens.

Wendell Berry

[savouringtheish]

“Things reveal themselves passing away.”

W.B. Yeats (via savouringtheish)

[savouringtheish]

[savouringtheish]

[savouringtheish]

A Warning to My Readers

[rootsofinquiry]

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I  may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is. 

Wendell Berry

[explore-blog]

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living (via explore-blog)

[rootsofinquiry]

In my craft or sullen art   

Exercised in the still night   

When only the moon rages   

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light   

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms   

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages   

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart   

From the raging moon I write   

On these spindrift pages   

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms   

But for the lovers, their arms   

Round the griefs of the ages,   

Who pay no praise or wages   

Nor heed my craft or art.

Dylan Thomas

[mothernaturenetwork]

Photo of the day: A spider web catches water droplets from a rain storm in Petzow, Germany. As the weather gets colder, watery webs like this will freeze into delicate frost sculptures, as seen in the second image.

[savouringtheish]

The storytelling quality in Mozart’s music. How certain bars, certain notes in the Piano Concerto 27 hint at a story that goes something like this: ‘One day, when I was happy, a nightingale flew past my window, and the love of my life left me for another.’

Ben Okri (via savouringtheish)

[savouringtheish]

You can’t be both grand—superlative, beautiful, highly accomplished, or deeply virtuous—and comfortable.

J. M. Barrie via Doug Aoki (via savouringtheish)

[explore-blog]

The matter of defining what is real … is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

Philip K. Dick on reality, media manipulation, and what it means to be human (via explore-blog)

[savouringtheish]

One more from #longbeach #pacific #tofino #greenpoint #ocean #sand #sunset #canada (at Long Beach)