At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

Yesterday...that's an unusual word when you look at it, but our yesterday can yield to us a moment in today.

I spent my yesterday with great friends. Sharing good food, fond memories, a laugh or two and yes a yesterday moment for today.

It was a cool damp night looking across the calm water of the lake...when she said, "it's so quiet you can feel the silence." Exactly was my thought. Well said and well shared my friend.

“There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout,” Henry David Thoreau observed in contemplating how silence ennobles speech. A year earlier, he had written in his journal: “I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard.” It’s a sentiment of almost unbearable bittersweetness today, a century and a half later, as we find ourselves immersed in a culture that increasingly mistakes loudness for authority, vociferousness for voice, screaming for substance. We seem to have forgotten— that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” that it has its own aesthetic, and that learning to wield it is among the great arts of living.

The fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul... we seem to have most hastily forsaken this pursuit — and yet it is also the one we most urgently need if we are to reclaim the aesthetic of silence in the art of living.

Thanks my friends for sharing your yesterday...Doc

From The Study...a conservation of possibilities

As I am sitting at my desk on this eve of another new year, I am reminded of a quote from
a young writer in Melbourne, Australia by the name of Beau Tarplin...Beau, please
forgive me if I do not get it exact...it goes something like this...

"Don't stress so much about settling on a path for your new year.
The division of time into years is a human invention,
And the fact is, every moment of every day is an opportunity for resolution and growth.
So, when the fireworks fly, relax and enjoy the moment.
The rest will come to you."

So...as we honor the passing of 2016, I leave you with my prayer from last year

For those I may have wronged, I ask for your forgiveness.
For those I may have helped, I wish I could have done more.
For those I could have helped, I ask for understanding.
For those who have helped me, I am grateful.

Resolved to sense more beauty, express more gratitude, and experience more
forgiveness...Doc.

Scribblings From Inside The Sane Asylum...sensing the season

Sitting on my porch this cool evening, just pondering  this thinking concept, when I interrupted my thought with another thought..".what the hell am I thinking? You don't know crap about that  stuff." See I interrupted my thinking. There must be a dozen ways to interrupt your thoughts. What I've noticed, they always involve another thought, an endless stream of words that describe our world. Language. It's amazing how busy it keeps that part of our consciousness we call mind.

I recall a time walking with my grandfather. It was late one evening as we were making our way from the barn toward the dog trot house. I always wanted to carry the milk bucket but he was a wise man...just said the pale didn't fit my hand. Well back to my thought...see how easy you can get off thought? Now what was I thinking? Damn, now back to the story. 

About half way to the house, his broad hand pushed on my chest. "Quiet," he said. He paused and turned his ear to the sky and stood there in silence, just listening. I remember the silhouette of his face in the fading sky, and the sound of his voice as he answered my obvious question..."I'm listening for the farthest sound."

Interrupted his thought with sound. Now that was clever as it seems today, but it was and still is a good method.  Silence thought and think no thing from time to time. Listen for the farthest sound.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like...I assume that would be the case with you?

May you be filled with the joys and delights of this season...Doc

The Human Conservancy...field office

Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to shake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming. Teilhard de Chardin, “Mass on the World

Wishing you peace and joy...Doc