cougarox the geophotocacher
“It is possible to open in a new way. We can venture into unmappable regions without relying on the usual essential cognitive hardware and categories, because everything and everywhere ‘is’ Knowledge. ‘Knowingness’ can handle all knowledge, continually finding more of itself and ever-greater life and fullness.”
– Tarthang Tulku, “Time, Space, and Knowledge, a New Vision of Reality” p.231 1977, Dharma Publishing
“If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaur’s Mountain. You’ll know the woods when you are still a long way off by virtue of a fragrance you can never quite forget and never quite remember. And there’ll be a distant bell that causes boys to run and girls to stand and tremble. If you pluck one of the ten thousand toadstools that grow in the emerald grass at the edge of the wonderful woods, it will feel as heavy as a hammer in your hand, but if you let it go it will sail away over the trees like a tiny parachute, trailing black and purple stars.”
So begins James Thurber’s “The White Deer”, a fable of, as the cover states, “enchanted deer and seven-headed dragons, of wizards and witches, of riddles and spells, of false love and true”. It has been on my desk for several days now crying out for me to transcribe and post a bit; it is the product of my last trip to the bookshelf to share what pops out. This tale of the white deer princess, King Clode and his sons Thag, Gallow, and Jorn, and the enchanted forest itself with all of its denizens, is one of my all-time favorites and I highly recommend it. :-))
“Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on,
Under cloud and under star.
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen,
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green,
And trees and hills they long have known.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone.
Let others follow, if they can!
Let them a journey new begin.
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
Still ’round the corner there may wait
A new road or secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
– J.R.R Tolkien
h/t to Jaye
their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob
our country of half its charm by their reckless
extermination of all useful and beautiful wild
things sometimes seek to champion them by saying
‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and
not merely to the people now alive, but to the
unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest
number’ applies to the number within the womb of
time, compared to which those now alive form but
an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole,
including the unborn generations, bids us restrain
an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting
the heritage of these unborn generations.”
– President Theodore Roosevelt,
‘Bird Reserves at the Mouth of the Mississippi’
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1920)
“I think what it comes down to is that one must depend on chance. The brain gets a lot of opportunities to think outside its usual patterns, but only in brief flashes. These brief flashes occur, it seems to me, after our thought patterns have been dissolved for some reason, and at the precise moment when they reform. There can be a moment every morning when you wake from sleep when the things you were working on yesterday reform themselves. Better still, when you are on vacation, and your work is temporarily forgotten, odd and unusual aspects of it may suddenly present themselves. This is the sort of way in which new ideas are born. And sometimes an idea may occur to you due to a remark from someone else, providing the remark throws your thoughts into momentary confusion. These are the brief fleeting occasions on which you might hit something entirely new.”
Hoyle, Fred. Man in the Universe . Columbia University Press 1966 pp. 10-11
* only inasmuch as I walk in, grab a book, and open it to see what I come to, and transcribe it. Hopefully, I don’t blindly pick James Joyce…
——-
“Many true hearts will be the happier for knowing that one who sends a thought of intense affection to another actually gives something of himself — that a certain portion of astral matter passes from him to the loved one, charged so strongly with his own special rate of vibration that unless some determined preoccupation exists, it cannot but reproduce itself, it cannot fail to set the astral body of the recipient swinging in harmony with it; and that means that love tends to kindle love, and therefore that to love a person is definitely to make him a better man than he would otherwise be.”
C.W. Leadbetter, Man Visible and Invisible p.87
Quest/Theosophical Classics, Wheaton/Madras/London, 1971
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
— Sir Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
–Alan Watts
The Silence of the Stars
“When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn’t hear the stars
Singing, they didn’t believe him. They looked at him,
half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear night
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.”
Brian Christian 