Sunday, April 18, 2010

Spring is here


I haven't been able to write anything for the past two or three weeks. The reason is the season: spring has once again arrived. Spring, with its life-giving energy and penetrating beauty, possesses such an attractive force that I just simply cannot stay inside. I get up at the dawn, watching the sun rises from behind the tree top, revealing all the hidden beauty that was behind the veil of darkness.

Pink dogwood is now blooming, its color is so vibrating and shining that I can almost see/feel its spirit dancing between branches.



And its tender leaves just emerge, collecting dew drops at the tip of every leaf:



The pure and white flowers have brightened the earth for a short time by their evanescent beauty and purity just as some beloved and devoted souls did to the world.





Hostas seem to respond to the call of spring most readily, making the spring garden green, full and refreshing.


While in the yard at the dusk, sitting in the garden all by myself, the vitality of life and the freshness of spring air always make me wonder the miracle of life and the source of all beings.




I remember reading Guy Murchie's book talking about the last and the ultimate mystery of universe: the mystery of divinity.

"Who or What runs the Universe?
    Is there a plan behind the daisy, the hummingbird,
        The whale and the world?
Who conceived the eye back in the primeval darkness
    Of early evolution?
        Who designed the fish's air bladder in the ancient deep
            As if foreseeing its future as a breath lung upon the dry land?
And out of what beginning evolved the mind?
    By any stretch could mind have been mindlessly created?
        Does science have answer
            To the Voice out of the Whirlwind which asked Job
                'Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts?'
Is the world really drifting along without pilot,
    Steering itself automatically,
        Running its own affairs at random?
            Could the Universe, just conceivably,
                Have created Itself?

 
Surely there is Mystery in this Universe,
    Not only somewhere and somewhen, but everywhere everywhen
        And far, far beyond the scope of man's feeble
            Capacity to comprehend.
For man, puny, mortal and finite,
    As he is in this nether phase,
        Is permitted to visualize neither an end to space
            Nor space without end;
                Nor can he even grasp a start or a finish of time,
                    Nor any sort of beginning that has no beginning
                        Nor any end that has no end.
Hence the Mystery,
    The abiding, pervasive, universal Unknowability
        That many call by the name of God.
But what matters it what you call It?
    It is abstruse, bewilderingly abstruse, and remains so
        Whether or not we accept that somehow by Its agency
            Out of utter nothingness that has arisen
                Everything in the Universe.

 
Its station plainly implies intelligence,
    Indeed Intelligence so far beyond the human
        As to justify the adjective 'Divine',
And this seems to be relative.
    If a human adult represents divinity to a baby or an animal,
        So must the animal be divine to a vegetable,
            The vegetable to a mineral…
Likewise, as wrote Paul to the Corinthians,
    'The foolishness of God is wiser than men',
        And there is presumably a hierarchy in Divinity above
            As well as below us ---
                Even as the doings and thoughts of humanity and of Earth
                    Are but a negligible jot
                        In the eternal consciousness of God,
Even as the horizon of knowledge expands outward from our planet
    Accompanied by the inexorable horizon of Mystery
        Which expands even faster and farther than knowledge,
            Leading man's consciousness
                To new dimensions.

 
Thus doth Divinity
    Embrace all the other six mysteries of life
        Even though callow man comprehendeth it not,
            Even though the Mystery remainsth
                So far beyond earthly finitude
That no eye but God's own Eye
    Hath the capacity to see
        GOD."