from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Thursday 20 October 2011

everything is relationship

Default preoccupation: the cosmos
Default preoccupation: place/the wild/sustainability
Default preoccupation: my joy at the natural world
Default preoccupation: the people I love
Default preoccupation: inspiration, poetry, books, art, music, creating workshops to inspire others
Default preoccupation: psychology/philosophy/ecopoetics/ecopsychology
Default preoccupation: family, and family health issues
Default preoccupation: getting enough water down dog's throat on a daily basis
Default preoccupation: the many many shades of love...

Those are not in order. But in thinking about the fact that everything – everything – is relationship, in its widest and deepest possible meanings, I am thinking as always about what it means to love. And here are three of my favourite quotes, all from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.


'Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.'

'For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the greatest, the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation...'

'Loving does not necessarily mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person – it is rather a high incentive for an individual to ripen... to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.'



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