Today I’m flying low and I’m

not saying a word,

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

~Mary Oliver

what can we wish for that is beyond our knowing? what can we offer that is beyond our understanding? and what can we live for that is beyond our boundary of self?

What a mystery is the air, what an enigma to these human senses!

I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea. Yet the air, n the other hand, is the most outrageous absence known to this body. I know very well that there is something there- I can feel it moving against my face and can taste it and smell it, can even heart it as it swirls within my ears and along the bark of trees, but still, I cannot see it. I can see the steady movement it induces in the shapeshifting clouds the way it bends the branches of the cottonwoods, and sends ripples along the surface of a stream. The fluttering wing feathers of a condor soaring overhead; the spiraling trajectory of a leaf as it falls; a spider web billowing like a sail; the slow drift of a seed through space- all make evident, to my eyes, the sensuous presence of the air. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, and thus a key to the forgotten presence of the earth. ~David Abram

eternal rain

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.  ~John Muir