Miracles

Why! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the
water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love–or sleep in the bed at night with
any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds–or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down–or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring;
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best–
mechanics, boatmen, farmers,
Or among the savans–or to the soiree–or to the opera,
Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,
Or behold children at their sports,
Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old
woman,
Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass;
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring–yet each distinct, and in its place.

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the
same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass–the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

To me the sea is a continual miracle;
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships,
with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there? Walt Whitman

Buddhism And Miracles

“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things as a meaningful unity.”  Albert Einstein

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein

My Hero: Vincent van Gogh

By Margaret Drabble

 The Guardian, 5 December 2009

Detail of Self-Portrait, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh. Photograph: Corbis/© Gianni Dagli Orti

When I was a child, I knew that Van Gogh was the greatest painter who had ever lived. For years he blinded me to other artists. I have learned to admire Botticelli and Caravaggio and Ivon Hitchens, but in old age I am faithful to my earliest love. What Van Gogh did is, for me, what painting is. The eye sees, the hand obeys, the spirit flows into brush strokes, the world is recreated and revealed. As a child, I knew nothing of his long apprenticeship or his madness or his failures in the market place. Nobody told me. I saw nothing mad or tragic in his vision of the natural world. I saw intensity and a world of glory.

We had prints of his work at home, one of them of the drawbridge at Langlois, which enthralled me. As a schoolgirl I bought postcards and posters, of irises and cypresses and starry nights and a yellow chair. They brought me immeasurable joy. I believed he looked into the heart of creation, with the eye of God, and what the Hubble telescope has seen confirms my belief. The glory exalted and blinded him. That is enough to make him heroic. He knew the mysteries of the cosmos.

But he was, I discovered, more than a visionary. He was a hard-working, good-hearted man, who endured illness and public neglect with stoic patience, and showed a tender gratitude to those who cared for him. I have been reading the handsomely illustrated six-volume edition of his letters, which displays his wide reading, his warm and generous admiration for his fellow artists, his forlorn but unquestioning dedication to his work. The bravery with which he attempted to handle his mania in the asylum of St-Paul-de-Mausole is infinitely touching. He took pleasure in copying the work of Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Rembrandt, and writes to his brother Theo that copying “teaches, and above all, consoles”. This is the humility of greatness. The paintings of this period are astounding in their originality, but the copies are also wonderful. He is, with Shakespeare, beyond praise.

Remarkable Cargoes

“The chairmaker makes his chairs from whatever wood is available, and so do I, only my wood is ideas, feelings, people, landscapes – particularly the astonishing assembly of shapes that make up Edinburgh, my home town, and to me the most seductive part of Scotland, that lies in the North-West, around the village of Lochinver. But if course one is influenced by, simply, everything. For the senses, the ‘five ports of knowledge’, are hospitable to everything, and into them sail, with any luck, the most remarkable cargoes.” Norman MacCaig

Choice

“I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of the [gold] diggings still before me, I asked myself, why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,—why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine…  At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two.” Henry David Thoreau

 

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

Revelation

“The problem with God is that we want Him to reveal Himself, and He doesn’t. We will never understand God.” Vincent Nichols, the new Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster

Stained glass in the Walkers' Church, Walesby, Lincolnshire

Psalms Of The Kisses Of Love

Daffyd ap Gwilym was the greatest poet of medieval Wales. The story goes that he fell for a nun and tried to get her to break out of her cloister. He cajoled: ‘God is not so cruel as the old men say … better a woodland than a nun’s calling. Thy religion, lovely maid, is treason to love.’ And he wrote this poem:

“I shall make if I am met/psalms of the kisses of love/seven kisses from a girl/seven birch trees over the grave/seven vespers seven masses/seven sermons of the thrush/seven litanies under the leaves/seven nightingales seven rods/seven accents of free delight/seven diadems seven odes/seven odes to slim Morfudd/sprightly of body and seventy more/thus she’ll no more lock up/the rent that’s due to love.”

(Quoted in John Hillaby’s book Journey Through Britain.)

The Soul Of A Journey

“The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing place to muse on indifferent matters … that I absent myself from the town for a while… Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and three hours’ march to dinner – and then to thinking… I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.” William Hazlitt

(Quoted by Morris Marples in his book Shanks’s Pony and by John Hillaby in his book Journey Through Britain.)

Night Walking

Like his contemporaries William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author and intellectual Thomas de Quincey was also a keen walker. He didn’t walk some of the phenomenal distances of the other 3; it suited him to cover between 70 and 100 miles a week. Wandering  this way he found “… upon actual experiment, and for week after week… the most delightful of lives… Happier life I cannot imagine than this vagrancy if the weather were but tolerable, through endless successions of changing beauty…”

According to Morris Marples in his book Shanks’s Pony, much of De Quincey’s walking was done after dark – a habit his neighbours thought most peculiar. “‘I took the very greatest delight in these nocturnal walks through the silent valleys of Cumberland and Westmorland,’ he wrote. It was his habit, as he walked, to follow the passage of time in the incidents of the night – first, in the early evening, blazing fires seen through windows and the sounds of household mirth; then, later, people going to bed; finally, silence, ‘the drowsy reign of cricket,’ broken only by the chiming of the church clocks and the ringing of the little chapel bell. ‘Such,’ he goes on, ‘was the sort of pleasure which I reaped in my nightly walks – of which, however, considering the suspicions of lunacy which it has sometimes awoken, the less I say, perhaps, the better.’”

The “Yes” Moment

“… knowledge of the beautiful is an affirmation. Something in the soul suddenly rises up and ejaculates “Yes” to some outside phenomenon, and then he is aware that he is looking at Beauty. As he gazes he knows himself in communion with what he sees – and sometimes that communion is a great joy and sometimes a great sadness. Thus, looking at the opening of dawn he is filled with gladness, his spirits rising with the sun; he wishes to shout and sing. He is one with the birds that have begun singing and with all the wild Nature waking refreshed after the night. But looking out at evening of the same day over the grey sea he is filled with unutterable sorrow.” From A Tramp’s Sketches by Stephen Graham