From Sam Keen's book Hymns To An Unknown God (found yesterday at a library sale), quoting Ray Bradbury in the chapter Consecrating Our Days: A Samper of Rituals for Living:
Notwithstanding those outcries for help and hope that are wrung from us in dark times, our first priority for developing a spiritual practice is the cultivation of a sense of gratittude and thanksgiving.
Ray Bradbury captures the raw experience in the account of a conversation in an Irish pub with an old man: "It's an awesome responsibilty when the world runs to hand you things. For an instance: sunsets. Everthing pink and gold, looking like those melons they ship up from Spain. That's a gift, ain't it?...Well, who do you thank for sunsets? And don't drag the Lord in the bar, now. Any remarks to Him are too quiet. I mean someone to grab and slap thier backs and say thanks for the fine early light this morn, boyo, or much obliged for the look of them damn wee flowers by the road this day, and grass lying about in the wind. Those are gifts too, who'll deny it?...What befalls chaps like us, I ask, who coin up all their gratitude for a lifetime and spend none of it, misers that we be? One day, don't we crack down the beam and show the dry rot?...But for the lack of humbly thanking someone somewhere somehow, you're getting round in the shoulder and short in the breath. Act, man, before you're the walking dead." [from Green Shadows, White Whale]This message has been edited. Last edited by: Linnl,
"Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out." - Joseph Campbell
This sends silent laughter radiating and coruscating through me until it seems like my blood will become effervescent every time I read it:
She had yet to be outside, properly outside, two-figures-in-a-Mars-scape outside, shiver-in-your-psuit outside. She had transited from plastic bubble by plastic tube to plastic bubble connected by its grip on the scoopline to home. This was what Tash Gelem-Opunyo saw from the transparent bubble of the diggler. Sand sand sand sand sand, a rock there, sand sand sand sand rock, oh, some pebbles! Sand grit sand more grit something between pebble and grit, something between grit and sand, a bit of old-fashioned machinery, wow wow wow! Dust drifted up around it. Sand. Sand. Sand.
"Digging" by Ian McDonald in Life On Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan
Posts: 152 | Location: Formerly SacraDemento, California | Registered: 23 February 2006
