I am especially drawn to situations where the people seem to be protrusions of the local landscape. Ireland is certainly this way. My step grandfather was born and raised in southeast Missouri. I could feel the landscape oozing from his pores. This is what I am hoping to find with this assignment. Will I be able to explore this in urban Alaska? What will transpire?

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
~ John O’Donohue

I love the way John Haines, in his writing, embraces the particular detail while also recognizing how these details are caressed and held in the larger, mythic, reality. This is what I am aiming for.

I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found. It is in Alaska, it is in Montana with its landscape of mountain and cloud, plain and water; it is there in the arid foothills of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties in California, in the brooding tableland of New Mexico, and in other places I have seen. And each of these landscapes adds something to the sum of what we know and what we are.

The place is also within us, corresponding to some dreamscape which is in essence everywhere; a gathering of all the places we have seen and lived in, and some we haven’t. The forms to be found there, various and unique, yield their meaning to one who lives by the ocean, among the mountains, or beside a river. We are penetrated by these things, intruded upon, and made into what we are or can be. Much of the best of what I have written has been saturated with landscape. I have been led by this and other realizations to feel that there are always two places, dream and actual life. When the two are brought together by an act of imagination there occur those sometimes brief moments of compelling clarity and completeness. And these moments are, or ought to be, part of the real life of humankind: place and image, reality and dream made one.

— John Haines, Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place

Into our inner being

The riches of the senses pour.

The Cosmic Spirit finds itself

Reflected in the human eye,

Which ever must renew its strength

From out that spirit source.

— Rudolf Steiner

I came to understand that everything outside me is  my teacher. I also became aware that my eternal soul travel, from the birth of my soul to the infinite future, is nothing but the path of spiritual evolution. Its final destination is Kenshin-jitsu, the highest spiritual enlightenment.

— Reverand Harutami (Henry) Ajiki,  Soul Evolution

Blessed is the seed that loses its hard shell,
becomes vulnerable, opens its soft heart to the soil
so the soil can work on it, and moves into the unknown;
drops the confinement with the known,
drops the commitment with the known,
and becomes committed with the unknown.
All growth is towards the unknown, towards the
soft, towards the fragile, towards the indefinable….

…..Osho

“On this day, the Vernal Equinox, we are in perfect balance between light and dark. Let us pray loving attention to the fragile sprouts of inner beauty which have survived the long dark of hibernation, despite all odds, to push up through the soil into the light. Let us honour the faith it has taken to believe in the invisible, upper world, where soon we will blossom into sprawling gardens overflowing with fruit. Let us hold our painful hearts with gentle hands today. Let us express our gratitude to the light that can only be found in the dark. Let us ask our vulnerability to shine radiantly with knowing that we are unfolding right on time.”    Toko-pa

The world is a tapestry. What we think and do– and particularly the level of consciousness with which we do it– influences the entire tapestry.

One way to do raise the consciousness of the tapestry: in each moment, find the joy.

“Experience richer detail in the fabric of each situation.”*

*This sentence is quoted from an anonymous source.

“You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.”
~ John O’Donohue

All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond  and turned the water to light.

— Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child