It was perhaps four years ago that I visited the Edisto Beach Interpretive Center. As I entered the front door, my eye was led to this quote high upon the wall; it is the first visual presented to visitors. The words went straight to my heart. I entered the quote into the notebook full of nature quotes that I was building at the time. I was illustrating the quotes in the notebook with watercolors.

That notebook is now full, and two other assignments are completed (“Things Are Alive” and “Art in the Making: Entering the Void with the Eyes Open”). As I formulate the third assignment since I began the blog, I once again arrive underneath this quote.

I appreciate the guidance I am receiving as I prepare for the next step of my journey as one who enters the void with the eyes open.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

— Paulo Coelho

Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work, work that matters to the whole community.
This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood.

― Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

 We are only a brush in the hand of the Master Painter.

–Rumi

The beauty of the world becomes my own when I live in continuous, unbroken awareness.

When in the state of continuous, unbroken awareness, every breath becomes even– this breath then becomes the point of unflinching focus.

Each movement that I make can constellate and extend conscious awareness– when it is done mindfully.

I have achieved the goal of my assignment. I understand what it is to enter the Void with the eyes open. It is to invoke continuous, unbroken awareness– the Witness state– where the breath is even and where I see myself as well as the “external” world. I am then capable of conscious action– otherwise not.

The prescribed medium of ballpoint pen led me to focus on details; this enabled me to “enshrine the ordinary world.”  The assignment title led me to experiencing the Witness state. I was given the assignment so that I can come to live in the Witness state in the ongoing moments of daily life. This has been a deep wish of mine, and it has been granted.

All phenomena emerge from the Great Void. Everything is being created in every moment. Nothing is fixed. Only the mind is fixed, and it is only the fixed mind that blocks me from knowing the Truth.

In a practical sense, as I go on to the next assignment, I must require of myself that I enter the Witness state and strive to remain there.

Becoming one with everything, a person should perceive the highest truth.

—Shree Guru Gita

Being all-pervasive, Kundalini is the witness of everything, the knower of all that can be known.

— Baba Muktananda

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of

mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

~George Santayana

Follow the course of nature day by day.

— Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

Begin with the knowledge of the ineffable, and allow That to express itself through you.

I can belong now to myself

And shining spread my inner light

Into the dark of space and time.

Toward sleep is urging all creation,

But inmost soul must stay awake

And carry wakefully sun’s glowing

Into the winter’s icy flowing.

— Rudolph Steiner

All memorable events, I should say, transpire in the morning time and in  a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, ‘All intelligences awake with the morning.’ Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual awakening. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is an effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. They millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive…

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When grace strikes, earth turns into gold,

The common stone is charged with alchemy.

Look, the bliss I sought for years and years,

Now flashes upon my sight.

There in a temple wombed in earth,

I’ve seen a gem, and cast my past behind me forever.

Unimaginable, the the light in the eye.

Indescribable, the ring in the ear.

Incomparable, the taste on the tongue.

Immeasurable, the peace of the inconceivable sushumna nadi.

Everywhere you’ll find him in the tiniest particles of dust,

In the hard wood or a tender blade of grass.

He is everywhere,

The subtle, the imperishable,

The unchanging Lord.

— Allama Prabhu

…Stand alone like a lion, and live your life according to your own light.

–Osho

I can belong now to myself

And shining spread my inner light

Into the dark of space and time.

Toward sleep is urging all creation,

But inmost soul must stay awake

And carry wakefully sun’s glowing

Into the winter’s icy flowing.

–Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, Twenty-fifth Week (September 22-28)

Dawn, 22nd September 2012, the chamber within Cairn T on Slíabh na Callaighe, Loughcrew, Co. Meath, Ireland.Today is the Autumnal Equinox – the half way point between the solstices and the time of year when the position of the sun at sunset and sunrise changes as its most rapid pace. This morning, well before dawn, a crowd gathered on the top of the central hill at the Loughcrew megalithic complex, a passage tomb cemetery built in late stone age. At dawn on the equinox the rays of the rising sun shine directly into the very back chamber of the largest passage tomb, illuminating some extraordinary megalithic art carved roughly 5,000 thousand years ago by Ireland’s first farming communities, people possessing only stone and organic tools. These passage tombs are among Ireland’s earliest surviving buildings.

— “Shadows and Stone” on Facebook

Any drop of water inside my body could have been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

– Deepak Chopra (Thanks to Kendra Kinsey for this quote.)