Three for the Mystic Road...

Hermes Trismegistus: The Third Hermetic Principle

"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates"
The Kybalion

Wm Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it

Mohandas Ghandi:

The divine music is incessantly going on within ourselves, but the loud senses drown the delicate music, which is unlike and infinitely superior to anything we can perceive with our senses.

The faces change... the mystery stays the same.

Struck by the Nature...

"there's a special

providence in the fall of a sparrow"

Or indeed - in the feeding of them...

I did little I had planned this weekend. Somehow I became totally immersed in watching the very ripe persimmons disappear from my tree.

It began with three Waxwings; the first beyond help, the second apparently fine, and the third - just needing safe haven for an hour or so - after all had collided with my neighbor's bay window.

Once back in the air, the third joined other Waxwings in the stripping of the persimmon tree. In watching, I began to notice all the different species that had come to feast. The Robins are back, Woodpeckers, Yellow Throats, assorted Wrens, Sparrows & Finches. Cedar Waxwings come only in winter - lucky me - to encounter up close a seasonal visitor.

"If it be now,

'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now;

if it be not now, yet it will come: the

readiness is all:"

Hamlet V:II

Oh.. what wisdom might come if I had naught to care but to watch Nature...

Reflection 5...

from a 4 yr old & skeeball

"If you compare yourself with others,

you may become vain and bitter;

for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."
From Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

I found a blog recently that made me think, once again, about the comparisons and labels we give ourselves or allow others to foist upon us. I have a friend who refers to herself as a giraffe among a herd of cows (I love her giraffeness!). Some that I know of me are:

...the smart one - not the cute one ...schizo ...sweet but weeeiiiird! ...not altogether human

...normal-ish ...a coyote among dearly domesticated hearth dogs

...Bethlehem Steel ... marshmallow

...uncivilized ...English Major ... font of useless knowledge

... f*n genius ... mixed bag ...local color

...selfish ...loyal ...the anti-hip ...black sheep ...true friend ...icy ...big bear-hearted

...talented ...lost to Heaven ...bodhisattva ...original

How many of those came from me do you s'pose?

No matter. They've all obviously stuck with me - happily or not. And it really doesn't matter - they're only the words someone used to describe what they see from where they are... a reflection if you will.

"...there is but One Existence, and that One Existance seen through different constitutions appears either as the earth, or heaven, or hell, or gods, or ghosts, or men, or demons, or world, or all these things."

Swami Vivekananda

Thanks Phin!

So...

my younger niece turned 4 years old yesterday. The party was held at a pizza carnival pavilion the likes of which put Chuck E. Cheese's to abysmal shame; which is to say the food wasn't too bad. And games and county fair rides ad nauseum to boot. After the kiddie cars, my darlin' gal didn't get past the skeeball. Had never played - was totally hooked! The absolute GLEE when she made the ball go into even the lowest scoring hole, was positively infectious. At the end of the round, when she had earned 1 ticket... OOOOooooooooooooHHHhhhhh the joyous squeeling! You would have thought she'd won the Lotto!

See, never mind that her, sister, friends, Dad and myself, had REAMS of tickets. She wasn't lookin'. It was all about her game and her achievements and the fun she was having with them.

Ever wish you were four again?

Crossing 2007...

for laughs while trying not to get splattered...

Heraclitus: Because it couldn't cross the same road twice.
Socrates: Tell me, why did the chicken cross the road?
Plato: For the greater good.
Aristotle: All chicken actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Epicurus: For permanent intellectual pleasure.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

Heidegger: It sought without presupposition and thus crossed the road to find Nothing.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Spinoza: Because it was time.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Schroedinger: He was looking for his cat.
Niels Bohr: The task is not to find out why the chicken crossed the road. The task concerns what we say about the chicken.
Jean Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Steven Hawking: To get to another Universe

J. Krishnamurti: The chicken acted without thought; it saw the other side and so there was no road to cross. Sir, we have said that "seeing" is action and action is truth. The road may be understood to be the separation between thought and action. The chicken did not think; what I am saying then is that the chicken saw the truth.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken
Confucious: To get back to the other side.
Lao-Tzu: Am I the Chicken dreaming I crossed the road or am I the Road dreaming of being crossed by a chicken?
Krishna: To save thousands of chickens the suffering they would have to endure if had it refused to fulfill it's Kharmic Duty.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Shakespeare: For a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.
Voltaire: Finding nothing pleasant, it was looking for something new.
Samuel Beckett: What do I know of a chickens destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.

Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

MadMonk: OOOOoo look - it's a twistie!