If you would understand that “God’s Word is in all creation” (Hildegard of Bingen) “study nature not books;” (Louise Agassiz) “entreat the trees and rocks to preach the Dharma... ask rice fields and gardens for the truth.” (Eithei Dogen)When you “steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters,” (Teilhard de Chardin) you will discover that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9) Then you can “listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” (Mel Brooks)
“Peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees,” (Cedric Wright) so let yourself “feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.” (Rainer Maria Rilke) Then you, too, will say, “I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, / In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass; / I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name.” (Walt Whitman)
Understand that “people say, ‘that doesn’t interest me’ [when] they should say, ‘I have not interested myself in that.’” (Esther Dendel) For “wonder resides...in many ordinary things...in bubble and drop and clod.” (J. Robert Oppenheimer) Even “cities... aren’t unnatural, any more than beaver dams or anthills are unnatural.” (James Trefil) For “buildings are made out of matter, earth is part of their fabric,” (Mohsen Motafavi) and “everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness.” (Hildegard of Bingen)Yet “this looking business is risky” (Annie Dillard) because “what you see is what you get.” (Annie Dillard) And “the more I find out about things, the more mysterious they become” (Julie A. Dumoulin) because “the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.” (Humphry Davy) But since “even the poorest thing shines,” (Layman P’ang) with Frank O’Hara you may decide, “it is my job to be attentive. I am needed by things.”
We start “like a pitcher of clay floating in the water, water inside, water outside.” (Kabir) “What [we] are waiting for has already come, but [we] don’t recognize it.” (The Gospel of Thomas) For “this very place is the Lotus Land / this very body the Buddha,” (Hakuin) and “self is everywhere, shining forth out of all beings, vaster than vast… yet nearer than breath.” (Upanishads)
So, practice the attentiveness from which naturally flows “the day of my spiritual awakening… the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.” (Mechtild of Magdeburg)Once we discover that “divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity,” (Nicholas of Cusa), we absolutely know that “the kingdom of God is within us.” (alternate translation of Luke 17:21) Then, “suddenly... the pitcher is broken. Inside, outside, O friends, all one.” (Kabir)
© sewn by R. Elena Tabachnick 2007
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