A New Year: returning to the origin of things

And stepping into the new year, a pause beckons to us from the shadows. "Slow down!" it whispers, inviting us to sit quietly, our focus shifted inward, reaching into the center and returning us to what is real, to what is original. "Original has two meanings," writes John Berger in Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. "It means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before."

In this new silence, the world (for but a moment and forever) still, may we learn to hold these tensions -tensions between the first things and that which has never occurred before, between the past and the present, the distance from and longing for - side by side, in a way that is no longer contradictory.

A piece of inspiration I caught recently on Studio 360- Origin Lessons by Amy Bender. Have a listen:

Now I feel the tenderness to which the season rots

"Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust...

...Today the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come. Now I feel the tenderness to which the season rots. Its defenselessness can no0 longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud..."

- Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

posted for Deb.

The Seer

"The boundlessly visible includes but also excludes man. He sees, and he sees that he is being continually abandoned. Appearances belong to the boundless space of the visible. With his inner eye man experiences the space of his own imagination and reflection. Normally it is within the protection of this inner space that he places, retains, cultivates, lets run wild or constructs meaning.

At the moment of revelation when appearance and meaning become identical, the space of physics and the seer's inner space coincide: momentarily and exceptionally the seer achieves an equality with the visible. To lose all sense of exclusion; to be at the center..."

John Berger

#46

#18

"Hawk Feather"

(He wishes for the cloths of Heaven)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

--W. B. Yeats

#13

"Shadow and light"

#5

"...To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. . . .For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Through we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping