landscape

saturday morning with James Hillman

There is more in human life than our theories of it allow.  Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path…This what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have.  This is who I am…

…the call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly…you sense that fate had a hand in it.*

cited: James Hillman, The Soul’s Code  In Search of Character and Calling.

a day of rest

“… because work implies a stage of change–of war–between man and the world around him, it follows that rest designates peace between him and Nature. One day a week–a day which, by virtue of the analogy between time and cosmic space, corresponds to the idea of the centre implicit in the position of the sun among the planets or the location of the earth according to the geocentric system–must be set aside for experiencing the spontaneous, perfect harmony of man in Nature. By not working, the human being can break away from the order of change which gives rise to history, and thereby free himself from time and space to return to the state of paradise, This symbolism provides the explanation … [of] ‘the fiery restlessness of the rebel’: the instinctive hatred of all forms of rest characteristic of the man of warlike spirit who challenges all Nature and the world as it appears to the senses.”*

*cited: Trans: Jack Sage. JE Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols

dawn 42423

The sun rose while I slept. I had not yet risen

When I heard an early oriole above the roof of my house.

Suddenly it was like the Royal Park at dawn,

With birds calling from the branches of the ten-thousand-year trees.

I thought of my time as a Court Official

When I was meticulous with my pencil in the Audience Hall.

At the height of Spring, in occasional moments of leisure,

I would look at the grass and growing things,

And at dawn and at dusk I would hear this sound.

Where do I hear it now?

In the lonely solitude of the City of Hsün Yang.

The bird’s song is certainly the same,

The change is in the emotions of the man.

If I could only stop thinking that I am at the ends of the earth,

I wonder, would it be so different from the Palace after all? ~Po Chü-I *

*cited: Trans: F Ayscough & A Lowell, Project Gutenberg eBook of Fir-Flower Tablets: Po Chü-I, “Hearing the Early Oriole” (written in exile).