Dream-vision

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here.
---J. Berger.


W.S. Merwin: I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed. I think I felt that as a very small child. Though how much of it I owe to my father or his family, I can’t say.


The world around me did not seem to me to be satisfactory. There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement—and I did have a very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jer- sey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that, but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it. But that hunger, that tropism, is something that I don’t believe we can live without, even if we aren’t aware of what we’re missing and by now many of us aren’t aware of it. We’re missing it just the same. We’re deprived of something essential.
(courtesy of anton)
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Talking to a distant relative last night:

her: Is your heart settled here now?

me: No! (I can't be bothered to be polite). How can it ever be settled?

her: So, it's a matter of compulsion then?

me: Isn't it always when it comes to such things?

She then talks about how she's lost a lot of her friends. They had to go, it was their time, we all have to go sometime. We all have to go back to the Creator. And then she laughed.

You know, I'd just been reading about this, about how everything moves in circles, how everything in nature must "return" to its source, and it had seemed quite profound-though something nagged away at me even then.

I guess if someone had actually lived those words, those thoughts, it would be fine; but it just seems so fake, such a cliche in these parts..one hears it all the time from 'the religious': this world is temporary, the Real is somewhere else.

And then she said: we are suffering and God is showing us a glimpse of hell now.

Well, I said, wouldn't it be better if He showed us a glimpse of Heaven now instead?

Anyway, there's something not right about that type of equanimity.

Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world.
---Iris Murdoch.