"Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call
my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. 
It is, as Ruskin says, "not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear 
sense of the word, unseen...."
"But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. 
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied... But I can't 
go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do 
is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless 
interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a 
lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints 
and monks of every order East and West… The world's spiritual 
geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, 
this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash cannot be dammed, and 
that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. 
Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the 
dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look 
along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and 
gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects 
act and rest purely, without utterance. "Launch into the deep," says 
Jacques Ellul, "and you shall see."

Annie Dillard ~ Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

"In the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. But to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm conviction of God, or an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow. And among the doctrinaire religious, I find I trust those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees. It is just those uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs and practices, or who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filled conversion performers, who are the professional religious I trust. The faithful who read Scripture in the way Coleridge defined the act of reading poetry or fiction, i.e., with a "willing suspension of disbelief...."

Suppose then that in the context of a hallowed secularism, the idea of God could be recognized as Something Evolving, as civilization has evolved - that God can be redefined, and recast, as the human race trains itself to a greater degree of metaphysical and scientific sophistication. With the understanding, in other words, that human history does show a pattern at least of progressively sophisticated metaphors. So that we pursue a teleology thus far that, in the universe as vast as the perceivable cosmos, and as infinitesimal as a subatomic particle, has given us only the one substantive indication of itself - that we, as human beings, live in moral consequence.

In this view the supreme authority is not God, who is sacramentalized, prayed to, pleaded with, portrayed, textualized or given voice, choir, or temple walls, but God who is imperceptible, ineffable, except ... for our evolved moral sense of ourselves.  ~ Sarah Blumenthal's Address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion, Washington, D.C. -  City of God, E.L. Doctorow.

"No, you subject the tradition to your irreverence to get back to where it began, only that, back down to the ground of simple ... unmediated awe. It is there, which is necessarily the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God's presence in the fact of our consciousness ... and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything - it is that constancy of awe we hope for, a pre-Scriptural state as alive to us as the contemporary moment, and which, of course, comes with absolutely no guarantees. That is where we begin ..."  E.L. Doctorow, City of God.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were life other people's songs.
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their head and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.
Ah, that was just what had united them and had made them so akin! Never, never, even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, were they unaware of a sublime joy in the total design of the universe, a feeling that they themselves were a part of the whole, an element in the beauty of the cosmos.
This unity with the whole earth was the breath of life to them. And the elevation of man above the rest of nature, the modern coddling and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. A social system based on such a false premise, as well as its political application, struck them as pathetically amateurish and made no sense to them. - Larisa Feodorovna. Dr. Zhivago

“Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn’t big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They’d be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for animal life.
But, all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and didn’t notice it.”
“Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t stumble. It’s like the headlights on a locomotive – turn them inward and you’d crash.”
“And now listen carefully. You in others – this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life – your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you – the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.”

— Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

"So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task that can be achieved by physical effort and that brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn't a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies are not put down on paper, but forgotten. The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn't know the strongest drug of all - good health and real necessity."

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn't bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.” Yurii Andreievich. Dr. Zhivago.

"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death-then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself."  Nikolai Nikolaevich, Dr. Zhivago.

prairie path

walking along the prairie path,
gentle September breeze,
pale blue sun lit sky,
fake sunflowers, hyacinth, goldenrod
strolling past
when realizing I wasn't alone,
footsteps gently crushing limestone,
not a word was said
as I tried to recall the many questions,
not  a one came to mind
only raspy singing of grasshoppers
and occasional twitters of goldfinch passing bye.
nothing seemed to matter
once realizing I was not walking alone.