Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath enlarges all of space. Let your presence ring out like a bell into the night. What feeds upon your face grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. Move through transformation, out and in. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. In this immeasurable darkness, be the power that rounds your sense in their magic ring, the sense of their mysterious encounter. And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing. To the flashing water say: I am. — Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)      The Sonnets to Orpheus, II.29      (Translated by Stephen Mitchell) ********************************** life is not holy because it is beautiful it is beautiful because it is holy — Robert Lax (1915-2000)      A Thing That Is      Poem 27 (1997) ********************************** The rainbow never tells me That gust and storm are by, Yet is she more convincing Than Philosophy. My flowers turn from Forums— Yet eloquent declare What Cato couldn't prove me Except the birds were here! — Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)      Poem 97 (circa 1859) **********************************

Goodness is something     so simple: always to live for others, never to seek one's own advantage. — Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961)      Markings (1953) ********************************** To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn't it something that actually exists? — Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)      Letter to Theo van Gogh      Arles, France, Sept. 3, 1888 ********************************** Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful. — Plotinus (204-270 A.D.)      The Enneads, I.6.9 ********************************** Heaven is the Way. The mind is the Way, and the Way is Heaven. If one knows the mind, one knows both the Way & Heaven. — Wang Yang Ming (1472-1529)      Ch'uan-hsi lu, I.66 ********************************** Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. — Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)      Walden, Chapter 11 **********************************

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