Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Meditation Enables Us to Watch - Spellbound - as All Things are Birthed Out of the Seamless Expanse of God's Spaciousness


"I experience God as Source, the Emptiness that gives rise to Form.  This is my experience.  In periods of intensive meditation practice, at times when I have been very, very, still, I've seen the world I know and recognize as myself and my story dissolve and become the vibrancy of infinite space.  The place from which the sentient, discriminating awareness of life begins, is revealed.  It feels to me like the edge of creation.  Looking at emptiness, I feel I see God.  Form is the manifest side of emptiness.  Creation keeps on happening.  My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born. Buddhists say, 'Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.'  Everything derives from and returns to its undifferentiated source.  The Jewish Kabbalists call God "Eyn-Sof, the Infinite, that which has no beginning or end." When I pray, I think of how the Jewish phrase "God is One" and Buddhist "Emptiness" feel the same to me.  When I give thanks, daily, for my life, I think about creation as the amazing process by which non-differentiated emptiness continually is reborn as form."

Sylvia Boorstein, a "Bu-Jew" or Buddhist Jew

On my birthday, I am grateful for the continual process by which each and every moment is born - magically - out of the seamless space of infinite divine awareness.

Photo: A glacier lily pops up through the snow, Mount Rainier National Park, WA, August 5, 2011

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