"I have a dream . . . Let freedom ring from the snow-capped mountains of Colorado . . ."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Photo: 13,000-foot peaks reflected in Lower Blue Lake, San Juan Mountains, CO, July 3, 2011
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
The Spiritual Understanding - Rather Than Grasping - is Itself Grasped by Wisdom
"By the natural understanding the soul grasps the object which it penetrates; but by the spiritual understanding, instead of grasping, it is itself grasped."
William of St. Thierry, 12th century Cistercian monk
Photo: Last light penetrates a hillside in the Medicine Bow Mountains, CO, January 6, 2012
To Know God is Actually to Know Ourselves Penetrated with His Knowledge of Us
"To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him, a perception of our being perceived. The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated by it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us."
Rabbi Abraham Heschel
"We know God insofar as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We 'possess' him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being. The aim of meditation is not to arrive at an objective and apparently 'scientific' knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us."
Thomas Merton
Photo: Nokhu Crags in last light, Never Summer Range, January 6, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
You Can't Have Both Joy and Power
"You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: Sunset just outside my door, Fort Collins, CO, January 5, 2012. If joy and power do occur together, the transformed person really doesn't care about the power, or care to make an identity out of it. Instead, they focus on spreading joy.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
We are Just One Strand in the Web of Life
"All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
Chief Seattle
Suquamish Tribe
Photo: Tonight's full moon viewed through a web of Cottonwood branches, January 9, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Universal Vastness Becomes Particular in Us, and We in Turn Dissolve into the Universal
"There is truly but one miracle, the perpetual fact of Being and Becoming, the ceaseless saliency, the transit from the Vast to the particular, which miracle . . . has for its most universal name the word God."
"I believe I shall some time cease to be an individual, that the eternal tendency of the soul is to become Universal."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: Ponderosa Pine in a snowstorm, Lory State Park, CO January 7, 2012. Saliency means the state of projecting or jutting beyond a surface.
The Silence of Snow is a Support We Can Lean Against
"I love the deep silence of the midwinter woods. It is a stillness you can rest your whole weight against . . . This stillness is so profound you are sure it will hold and last."
Florence Page Jaques
Photo: Aspens and wind patterns in the snow, Rawah Range, CO, December 16, 2011
Friday, January 6, 2012
Politics Can't Compare to Natural Beauty
“ 'Republicans and Democrats' – what names to write after considering the lilies!"
John Muir, 1890
Photo: Avalanche Lilies, Mount Rainier National Park, WA, August 5, 2011. The reference here is to Jesus’ statement about “considering the lilies” in Matthew 6:28.
It is not wise to belong to any religious party.
"I suppose it is not wise, not being natural, to belong to any religious party . . . Now if a person is wise, . . . he will say to himself, 'I am not a member of that or of any party. I am God's child, . . . a fellow disciple with Christ' . . . A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a person from the vexation of thinking . . . The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all, and this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so much integrity and, of course, of so much power."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: Twin Sisters Peak with a solitary ponderosa pine lit up in the day's last light, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 2, 2011
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Eucharistic Air
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot, . . .
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye . . .
I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
R.S. Thomas
Photo: Sunrise from my front yard, Fort Collins, CO, January 3, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Wringing Out the Light
Wring Out My Clothes
Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,
I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.
St. Francis of Assisi
Photo: Sunrise outside my house, Fort Collins, CO, January 3, 2012
Glowing with Wild Joy
"I glowed with wild joy."
John Muir
Sierra Nevada
Photo: This morning's alpenglow, just outside my door, Fort Collins, CO, January 3, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Make Your Own Bible
"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: A patchwork of aspen "scriptures," near Cottonwood Lake, Collegiate Peaks, CO, October 2, 2011
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Quietly Bloom Without Fanfare
"The most fragrant of purest fragrances
comes from the ones who are spiritual but
not flaunting it.
Why flaunt your practices?
Why flaunt your good deeds?
Your flowers will attract the cosmic bees
that spread the Greatest Nectar
through humanity
as you just
quietly bloom
without fanfare."
Belle Heywood
"When you give . . . do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret."
Jesus
Photo: Mountain Avens and bee, Denali National Park, AK, June 25, 2010
New Ideas Expand into a Distant and Dazzling Infinity
"There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the universe; that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar and unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being. I a lead a new life. I occupy new ground in the worlds of spirits, untenanted before. I commence a career of thought and action which is expanding before me into a distant and dazzling infinity. Strange thoughts start up like angels in my way and beckon me onward. I doubt not that I tread on the highway that leads to the Divinity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo: Sunrise in the Snowy Range (WY) with meadows of Western Yellow Paintbrush and Elephanthead, August 27, 2011
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