And yet - it is a blood-sucking world, yes, but beautiful, too. The Greeks and neo-Platonists understood that behind temporary form there was a perfect constant, the template of being, something like the archetype of all things behind each thing. The Amazon Indians have a similar view - that behind each species or rock or mountain is its spirit. It is this spirit that they appease before a hunt, for the prototype of the species is what permits its form to be hunted. It is given, not stolen; and if stolen, there is hell to pay.
But these are ideas. There have been times in my life when nature has showed its ugly side, and it was at these times when my interior thoughts were similarly unpleasant. It was this that the Greeks must have realized, seeing behind each thing of beauty its impermanence, death and rot. And yet: is there not a beauty behind it all anyway, were we to quiet our minds? Is there not a kind of solemnity even to the carcass of a rotting dog covered in flies? Doesn't the specialist in each field find beauty in the insides of the human, or the digestion of a python, or the carnal joys of the vulture? Isn't it all capped by the wide blue sky and the infinite stars?
Sitting out last night before the bloodsuckers arrived, I watched as the day came to an end:
Silent it falls,
like fine silken sand,
the silver caress
of the moon on land;
and up from the grass
that sand does arise,
lighting the night
with her fireflies.
The capacity to recognize beauty, some say, is the capacity for love. I think this is so, and that is out ultimate template. Love, they say, is union, and union would form that template. If we could see the whole, we would love; and if we love, we would see the whole. How could it be any simpler, and yet, why is it so hard? Who or what can bring us to the whole? In pure logic it is substance over form, as with the Greeks. In considering the whole human being, his passion as well as his thought, it always comes back to love. It is from this revelation that the greatest spiritual leaders were born. It is something that we of logical mind should never lose sight of. FK
But these are ideas. There have been times in my life when nature has showed its ugly side, and it was at these times when my interior thoughts were similarly unpleasant. It was this that the Greeks must have realized, seeing behind each thing of beauty its impermanence, death and rot. And yet: is there not a beauty behind it all anyway, were we to quiet our minds? Is there not a kind of solemnity even to the carcass of a rotting dog covered in flies? Doesn't the specialist in each field find beauty in the insides of the human, or the digestion of a python, or the carnal joys of the vulture? Isn't it all capped by the wide blue sky and the infinite stars?
Sitting out last night before the bloodsuckers arrived, I watched as the day came to an end:
Silent it falls,
like fine silken sand,
the silver caress
of the moon on land;
and up from the grass
that sand does arise,
lighting the night
with her fireflies.
The capacity to recognize beauty, some say, is the capacity for love. I think this is so, and that is out ultimate template. Love, they say, is union, and union would form that template. If we could see the whole, we would love; and if we love, we would see the whole. How could it be any simpler, and yet, why is it so hard? Who or what can bring us to the whole? In pure logic it is substance over form, as with the Greeks. In considering the whole human being, his passion as well as his thought, it always comes back to love. It is from this revelation that the greatest spiritual leaders were born. It is something that we of logical mind should never lose sight of. FK
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