I've been dwelling on mollusk shells and their beauty. On how their form flairs (flares) out in surreal ways but every part of the structure still stays connected to the unity (source).

Is anything truly static in a Universe where everything flows?

How do we even define something as static? Being assigned a fixed position in space and time is relative.

Everything flows. Flow is the usual state of matter and energy. And this flow is what creates potential and cause & effect. This is Dao.

The individual should become transparent to [themselves] and the different elements should need a fundamental integration for spontaneous or creative activity to be possible.

– Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita

Liberation is a return to inward being, to subjectivity; bondage is enslavement to the object world, to necessity, to dependence.

– Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita

The distinguishing characteristic of human personality is a certain creative unity, an inner purposiveness, a plan which has gradually shaped itself into an organic unity. As our purpose is, so is our life.

– Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita

I have found that Centering, like clay, wears well! It bears the future within it. For it contains a space for ongoing development and differentiation. In other words, it proves to be an open image, a vessel, holding a content that is life itself.

– Mary Caroline Richards, Centering

The Color of Distance and Desire

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

We are transformed, not by adopting attitudes toward ourselves but by bringing into center all the elements of our sensations and our thinking and our emotions and our will: all the realities of our bodies and our souls. All the dark void in us of our undiscovered selves, all the small light of our discovered being. All the drive of our hungers, and our fairest and blackest dreams. All, all the elements come into center, into union with all other elements. And in such a state they become quite different in function than when they are separated and segregated and discriminated between or against. When we act out of an inner unity, when all of our selves is present in what we do, then we can be said to be "on center."

- Mary Caroline Richards, Centering

It is our task to make ourselves permeable to light by yielding ourselves up to it. ... A capacity to yield is strengthened in the potter who does not merely use his material to certain ends, but who yields up his soul as well as his hands and his intelligence to his love of the clay. Once his soul is yielded up, the transformations of the clay will speak to him as his own. The inner laws of life will seem to be simultaneously unique centers spinning in continuous relation to each other.

- Mary Caroline Richards, Centering

Centering as an archetype comes through the potter's wheel and the spinning clay taking shape. But archetypes are Beings of special subtlety and paradox. So Centering is not a model, but a way of balancing, a spiritual resource in times of conflict, an imagination. It seems in certain lights to be an alchemical vessel, a retort, which bears an integration of purposes, an integration of levels of consciousness. It can be called to, like a divine ear.

- Mary Caroline Richards, Centering

But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left. ... Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

First attempt at cyanotype! 💙

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

— First Law of Mentat

– Frank Herbert, Dune

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

— Litany Against Fear

– Frank Herbert, Dune