Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high…
beyond the ordinary, you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

…..David Whyte

our head-spinning diatribes about our center, our source, and our divinity enable our equilibrium to descend a little deeper, a little more like an eclipse….shadowed and nuanced, the ancestral debate of civilization and sacred consciousness re-imagine our depths again and again….

The world stands displayed in such a manner that, in contemplating it, religious man discovers the many modalities of the sacred, and hence of being. Above all, the world exists, it is there, and it has a structure; it is not a chaos but a cosmos, hence it presents itself as creation, as work of the gods. This divine world always preserves its quality of transparency, that is, it spontaneously reveals the many aspects of the sacred. The sky directly, naturally, reveals the infinite distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth too is transparent; it presents itself as universal mother and nurse. The cosmic rhythms manifest order, harmony, permanence, fecundity. The cosmos as a whole is an organism at once, real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality…….Mircea Eliade

post-modern divinity

From the beginning, the successful
have focused on understanding
wisdom, wonder, and mystery.
They were deep, but didn’t know it.

Because they really didn’t know,
they were obliged to act in a way
that fit every situation perfectly.

Oh, how carefree!
To experience winter as a river
or a meadow would, respecting everything.

How marvelous!
To know that fixed appearances can dissolve—
like ice, ready to be freed into water.

How kind!
Life as plain and simple and ample,
life as a channeling valley.

And, ah, how wholly
natural! Life as deep
and dense and muddled.

How can you be clouded, yet quiet?
By slowly clearing things up.
How can you be safe, yet aroused?
By gently bringing things forth.

Maintain this art. Don’t wish for more.
It’s true—forget about filling yourself full full full;
instead find shelter in every fresh success.
….trans. Tao Te Ching  Diane Duchin Reed