To quicken: to give life, to vivify. The anthropologist Margaret Murray at the age of ninety-nine declared in her "The Genesis of Religion" that the origin of the religious feeling occurred long, long ago when a woman first felt the mysterious quickening and attributed it to an unseen Power.
I never cried during my mother's illness, nor at her death. Nor later at my daughter Kathie's funeral. I had come to understand that tears are for unfulfilled fantasy: what I had imagined the rest of
The essence of the Japanese tea ceremony is the acceptance of the As Is: to attain a state of detachment transcending judgement, when things, people, all events, all of existence, are accepted just as they are.
Let me tell you of the room where I do nearly all my painting. There are many physical influences there, but I'll now just mention the Chinese because they seem to be the more powerful.
I speak of each of us having a Soul, as if each Soul were individual. But perhaps there's only one Soul, with myriad manifestations.
We can photograph the “ordered woods and gardens” – as most do. I much prefer the apparently disordered – the rust, the “junk.” And, hopefully, through it the Higher Order.
The purpose of meditation, Zen master Dogen taught, was not to become the Buddha-Nature but to realize that we already are, that we always are.
The aura, the etheric body, is an external manifestation of the Soul, the God within.
It is love that banishes all the negative emotions. It is love that invokes the spirit and activates the life energy. It is love that balances our brains and makes us creative. And it is love
Without a deep, full, sense of personal identity, we are lost, and at the mercy of all those, equally lost, who choose to steal whatever there is of us so as to fashion a false identity
