the tip of an iceberg of
irrationality that we've managed
to drag ourselves up onto for
a few panting moments before
we slip back into the sea
of the unreal."
- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."
- Richard Bach (1936 - )
- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)
- Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)
Waiting for Godot
- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
To Bless the Space Between Us
- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
The Art of Just Sitting
- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe
- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Translation in Teachings of the Tao by Eva Wong
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Translation by Stephen Mitchell (The Enlightened Heart)
- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
- Taigu Ryokan (1758 - 1831)
The Kanshi Poem of Taigu Ryokan
- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation
- Wade Davis (1953 - )
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂
- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage