(1) The sunflower has no intention of being popular, and
yet it is loved and admired everywhere—on the wild prairie,
the roof-top garden, in a child's drawing. At the end of the day,
perhaps what is most dear to us is beauty unaware of itself,
humble and persistent in growth, rooted were it stands.
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| go to the Picture/Poem Poster of the above Miniatures: The Sunflower shown at the right (prints 81/2 x 11" (A4)) Also available as .pdf download (40 k) | |
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(2) The same thought which marvels at the flower
disassembled
may be slow to realize that the pasture is overrun by weeds.
(3) A potential danger of the power of abstraction
is its tendency
towards the isolation of fragmentation. What begins as a unifying
sweep of mind, seeing orders of similarity where at first only incoherent
differences prevailed, frequently ends with systems of thought which
are at best only consistent within themselves, having grown
dangerously estranged from the worlds they purport to describe.
(4) The profound contradiction in the use of
violence to achieve
outward order is that, like a drug that makes a sick body feel good,
but only adds to the illness, violence is indeed highly successful
on the short-term. But because violence is blind to the root
causes of the conflict it would address, violence on the long-
term only greatly exacerbates disorder.
The tragedy of the contradiction is that the use of violence
generates the powerful illusion that peace and well-being
are at the end of some long and arduous road—always just out
of reach—whereas in actual fact what awaits us when we follow the
way of violence is most assuredly simply more violence and,
perhaps ultimately in the current era, our own self-destruction.
(5) We shape the world and the world shapes
us. The more
spiritual and in harmony with the natural world a culture becomes,
the fewer and fewer words will be needed to say ever-more
important things.
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| go to the Picture/Poem Poster of the above Miniatures: Water Drops on Gray shown at the right (prints 81/2 x 11" (A4)) Also available as .pdf download (40 k) | |
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