The door to the invisible must be visible. Rene Daumal in Mount Analogue
(John Duncan – Sleeping Princess)
~~
Saturday:
The sun is shining, the dog is asleep on the porch, and the house empty again from visitors.
I sit listening to music and writing away on the Turf as Mary flutters in and out of the room. I look out the window, and the sun plays across the bamboo.
Let me know if you can think of something better than those moments when the earth is yawning awake, vibrating with life up and down the spheres. Our local wren has returned to the back yard; she does her beautiful dance upon the sod, as she twitches to and fro with excitement. The squirrels chase each other, or should I say a pack of males pursue the female one across the fence, up on the roof, over to the tree, around the tree three times, back to the fence…
Life is renewed, again and again. It is a fountain of joy, of love, of beingness. We are all within this beautiful moment called now.
(There is a vibrancy in these mid spring moments. Life spirals along, within that old wind of eternal change!)
Lots in this entry. Good music, beautiful art, wonderful poetry. Sit back, relax and hopefully enjoy!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
Earth Rites!
~~
On The Menu:
The Links
Solar Fields – Sol (Remix)
René Daumal Quotes
Leonard Cohen Poems
Charon
Tripswitch – Stereogram (Solar Fields Remix)
Art: John Duncan & John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope
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The Links:
Darkness
Rare animal-shaped mounds discovered in Peru
From foraging to farming: the 10,000-year revolution
Light
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Solar Fields – Sol (Remix)
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René Daumal Quotes:
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”
“Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.”
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content…it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion.”
“A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.”
― Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures
“I am dead because I have no desire,
I have no desire because I think I possess,
I think I possess because I do not try to give;
Trying to give, I see that I have nothing,
Seeing that I have nothing, I try to give myself,
Trying to give myself, I see that I am nothing,
Seeing that I am nothing, I desire to become,
Desiring to become, I live.”
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Leonard Cohen Poems
Poem 17 (“I perceived the outline of your breasts …”) from “The Energy of Slaves”
I perceived the outline of your breasts
through your Hallowe’en costume
I knew you were falling in love with me
because no other man could perceive
the advance of your bosom into his imagination
It was a rupture of your unusual modesty
for me and me alone
through which you impressed upon my shapeless hunger
the incomparable and final outline of your breasts
like two deep fossil shells
which remained all night long and probably forever
~~
The Next One (“Things are better in Milan …)” from “Death of a Lady’s Man”
Things are better in Milan.
Things are a lot better in Milan.
My adventure has sweetened.
I met a girl and a poet.
One of them was dead
and one of them was alive.
The poet was from Peru
and the girl was a doctor.
She was taking antibiotics.
I will never forget her.
She took me into a dark church
consecrated to Mary.
Long live the horses and the sandles.
The poet gave me back my spirit
which I had lost in prayer.
He was a great man out of the civil war.
He said his death was in my hands
because I was the next one
to explain the weakness of love.
The poet was Cesar Vallejo
who lies at the floor of his forehead.
Be with me now great warrior
whose strength depends solely
on the favours of a woman.
~~
Song (“I almost went to bed …”) from “The Spice-Box of Earth”
I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover
~~
I Long to Hold Some Lady from “The Spice Box of Earth”
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.
There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady’s bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:
As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.
Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.
But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Charon
Author: Lord Dunsany
(Charon & Psyche – John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope)
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon’s duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.
Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.
And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon’s arms.
Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.
“I am the last,” he said.
No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.
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Tripswitch – Stereogram (Solar Fields Remix)
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(John Duncan – Happiness)
