In Thy light do we see light. (Psalm 36:10)

  If— Rudyard Kipling - 1865-1936 If you can keep your head when all about you    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,    But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,    Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise; If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with triumph and disaster    And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,    And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start agai...

 Excerpt from, The Tower Beyond Tragedy: I entered the life of the brown forest And the great life of the ancient peaks, The patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins In the throat of the mountain, and I was the streams Draining the mountain woods; and I the stag drinking, and I was the stars boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit, and I was the darkness outside the stars I included them. They were part of me … How can I express the excellence I have found That has no color but clearness; No honey but ecstasy. Robinson Jeffers To see a World in a Grain of Sand  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And Eternity in an hour Turn away no more;  Why wilt thou turn away?  The starry floor,  The wat’ry shore,  Is giv’n thee till the break of day. Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;  Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.  You throw the sand against the wind,  And t...

    All Nature Has a Feeling  by John Clare  (1845) All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks Are life eternal: and in silence they Speak happiness beyond the reach of books; There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay Is the green life of change; to pass away And come again in blooms revivified. Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay, And with the sun and moon shall still abide Beneath their day and night and heaven wide. ........... Alexis de Tocqueville: “The soil is punctured in a thousand places by primitive rocks sticking out here and there like the bones of a skeleton, like a fertile field covered by the ruins of some vast structure... Here, as in the forest tamed by man, death was striking constantly, but it was no man’s duty to remove the resulting debris, which piled up faster than time could reduce it to powder and make room for new growth. New growth, however, was constantly forcing its way through this debris, with creepers and plants of every s...

    https://youtu.be/C0p7blu44C0 Dance Of The Octopus - Red Norvo, xylophone Artie Shaw, bass clarinet (1933) Cephalopods were the smartest creatures on earth for millions of years....On the other tentacle ...https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/03/26/on-the-other-tentacle/ “The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the mode of understanding in physics since Newton, namely differential equations, initial and boundary conditions, then integration which constitutes deduction, which in turn constitutes “entailment”, fails fundamentally for the evolution of life. No law in the physical sense, we will argue, entails the evolution of life. If we are correct, this spells the end of “strong reductionism”, the long held belief that a set of laws “down there” entails all that happens in the universe. More, if no law entails the evolution of life, yet the biosphere is the most complex system we know of in the universe, it has managed to come into existence without an entailing law. Then...

  The John Donne Memorial is a bronze bust of John Donne by Nigel Boonham, installed in the garden to the south of St Paul's Cathedral in London, United Kingdom. Image below:  John Donne by Isaac Oliver (ca. 1622), National Portrait Gallery  Meditation XVII Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (Now this bell, tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.) Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one vol...

  Apostle Paul, Rembrandt Rabbi Akiba “There is a famous story of how Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of all time, went on praying the Shema, declaring his loyalty to the One God and his determination to stand for his kingdom, as the Roman torturers, catching up with Jewish rebels after the Bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, ran steel combs through his flesh until he died a horrible and lingering death. He continued to pray: “Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might . . .” (“soul” here means “life”). His disciples, standing by like Socrates’s friends as he drank the hemlock, asked him in awe and horror how he could go on praying that prayer even now. His answer, recorded much later but reflecting what we know of the man, is a model of wise, humble Jewish thought. All his life long, he explained, he had been troubled by the words in the prayer “an...

  Faith is not a leap into the dark but a step into the light. "When I consider the brief span of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now, rather than then.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées #205 Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night; thine eye diffused a quickening ray; I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee. (Charles Wesley) NUIT DE FEU  (“For he is like a refiner's fire" - Malachi 3:2) from an essay by Nayeli Riano on Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): Based on Pascal’s writings about his faith we might think that his reasons for being a believer were deduced from reasoned arguments and careful studies in theolo...