it's about listening deeply enough.

... one of the assertions of science is that we don't know everything and that, in order to increase our knowledge, we have to be in dialogue with nature and it has to be a constant dialogue. And it's not sufficient to end that dialogue because, as we increase our ability to measure nature, we can ask questions that are [on a] finer and finer level. And so we keep finding new things not because nature is changing, but because we are increasing our capacity to ask the questions of nature.

- Dr. S. James Gates, Jr.
excerpted from the transcripts of "Uncovering the Codes for Reality"

a broadcast of "On Being" with Krista Tippet

Gates is Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland in College Park. He serves on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

zeroing in.

'I am a landscape,' he said.
'a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
And plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths.'
'I know,' she said. 'When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud.'
'We had an old dog,' he told her, 'when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him.'
'No one knows where it is,' she said,
'and even by accident no one touches it.
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself —'
' — or flinch back
just in time.'

'Yes, we learn that.
It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never.'

- denise levertov

the vigil.

Don’t go to sleep one night.
What you most want will come to you then.
Warmed by a sun inside, you’ll see wonders.
Tonight, don’t put your head down.

Be tough, and strength will come.
That which adoration adores
appears at night. Those asleep
may miss it. One night Moses stayed awake
and asked, and saw a light in a tree.

Then he walked at night for ten years,
until finally he saw the whole tree
illuminated. Muhammad rode his horse
through the night sky. The day is for work.
The night for love. Don’t let someone
bewitch you. Some people sleep at night.

But not lovers. They sit in the dark
and talk to God, who told David,
“Those who sleep all night every night
and claim to be connected to us, they lie.”

Lovers can’t sleep when they feel the privacy
of the beloved all around them. Someone
who’s thirsty may sleep for a little while,
but he or she will dream of water, a full jar
beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get
from another person. All night, listen
to the conversation. Stay up.
This moment is all there is.

Death will take it away soon enough.
You’ll be gone, and this earth will be left
without a sweetheart, nothing but weeds
growing inside thorns.

I’m through. Read the rest of this poem
in the dark tonight.
Do I have a head? And feet?

Shams, so loved by Tabrizians, I close my lips.
I wait for you to come and open them


- rumi
from the essential rumi,
translations by coleman barks


photo provided for artistic consideration by: dave wilson

s h a d o w l a n d.

"holier is the saint who has known the abyss."

- gerard de nerval
in chimeras

bless this.

fertile void.


- photo provided for artistic consideration by ozyman

that's the way it is.

heart. it breaks.


- photo provided for artistic consideration by tw collins