 Merry Christmas to all.
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul." Goethe But more than this: when hearing, reading and seeing, a person must pay attention to what is heard, read, and seen. And the ground of this paying attention is silence: "Silence can hold impossibilities together in a quiet, tantric embrace. Silence . . . is always non-dual . . . It stays with mystery, holds tensions, absorbs contradictions, and smiles at paradoxes--leaving them unsolved, and happily so. Any good poet knows this, as do many masters of musical chords." Richard Rohr And "in Silence everything displays its depths, and we find that we are a part of the depth of everything around us." Robert Sardello I have been reading about Paul Strand, an American photographer. He wrote: "Above, all, look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningfulness." Last night I was at the Botanical Gardens in Largo; they decorate for Christmas every year. These are some of the things I saw around me: "The world is such a complex of marvelous things, and if you can find a way of using that complexity in your work, then it's endless." Paul Strand In contrast to my last entry, two mornings we have had fog here. Here are images of that. Quoted by James Finley from Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander : "Beauty of sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and while carnations and green leaves [ . . .] The light and the dark. The darkness of the fresh, crinkled flower: light, warm and red, all around the darkness. The flower is the same color as blood, but it is in no sense whatever "as red as blood." Not at all! It is as red as a carnation. Only that. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence: Dominus est. Eternity." Here all I find is the second in a long sequence of grey days: aluminum grey sky, dulled colors, light mist as I walk . . .  But this too is "only this": this here, this now, right here, right now . . .
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