Monday, November 28, 2005

Shaper Of Your Own Being


``We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''

(Oration on the Dignity of Man)




Saturday, November 26, 2005

Conversing With Paradise

Soul Friends 2005


Poetry, painting and music, the three powers
in Man of conversing with Paradise,
which the Flood did not sweep away.

(William Blake)

Art is a half effaced recollection of a higher
state from which we have fallen since the
time of Eden.

(Hildegard of Bingen)

To sea for pearls


For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God,

God hath sent me to sea for pearls.

(Christopher Smart 1722 -1771)

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Beginning


....'the rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms;

It cares not for itself; asks not if it it's seen.'
Madonna 2005

(Angelus Silesius 1624 -1677)