From a Poet

  Nature Within And Without In an old chronicle a Shawnee Indian was recorded as saying the landscape that was overtaking his native land was artificial.  For the longest time I believed he meant that nothing was instilled with mystery; the unknown had became lost.  I always thought that this was the way to look at things, trying to find what was ancient or unremembered in the ever changing present.  Sometimes we look no further when a piece of advice is clear and endearing, and so I deplored what this man had deplored only because I respected what he said.  The starting point of someone else's unhappiness is usually the beginning of our own.  We suffer in unison and feel attached because we have taken up another's opinion, reinforcing it with our own distinctions.  After searching for so long and believing everything around me was artificial, that no true landscape existed, I looked back upon that Shawnee from long ago and found that he was not speaking of the outside world. 

  Hearing With The Eyes, Seeing With The Ears The more eloquently we are able to describe an idea, the more truthful our feelings become; the more truthfully we convey this to someone else, the more we find meaning in it.  There is the story of two people walking in the mountains, and as one of them was taken up with the amazing scenery, commenting on all the views that he saw, and the sensations these views inspired in him, he noticed his friend ever silent, walking along with head down, only furtively looking up from time to time.  Exasperated, the friend finally says to him, 'But you haven't even looked at any of these beautiful sights!  Are you not touched by these mountains?'  Whereon the friend replied, 'Yes I am, but it is a shame to try and speak about them.'  The truth lies behind the thing we think most evident; it makes it as far as the eyes and vanishes with an echo in the ears; half a sentence is sometimes too much or a whole page not enough.  In the en

Transformative Light Today, Tuesday, sun all day; feel the days getting longer.  The slightest variation in light is perceptible only by the way in which it hits certain objects.  With the eye, we may notice morning, evening, and noon, by taking into account the incline of the sun, but as for our earth moving in its orbit and the light growing longer or brighter on the hills or the walls of our homes, that feeling and that change is lost unless we take minute observation of our daily surroundings.  Light, by contrast, is a transformation of the understanding of the inexplicable; it enlightens but does not clarify our perceptions, and even though it is to make the day longer, it is not a privilege granted for our comfort.  Though the object may help us see, it makes us turn our backs to that which we really want to know, and so the languor and discomfort of these ever-widening days is a burden and something careful to be shrugged off. Douglas Thornton

  The Cycle Of Being Focus to lassitude; Lassitude to indifference; Indifference to disassociation; Disassociation to unfulfillment. When we arrive at the end of this cycle, regeneration begins. Unfulfillment must turn into something; it cannot, according to present thinking, remain stable.  When there is a difficulty, we look at the details, and these give off a feeling of knowing something greater, and so the intention to go forward, but they also keep us from knowing that something greater, and so our intention to fall back into comfort.  It is often through this that the idea of conquering comes forth; every activity, feeling, attachment, must be overcome.  There is always the idea to solve something, to become better, but these are the details that lead us through the above cycle.  There is no end to anything except what can be stabilized in the mind, and without this it is just going through the motions, awaiting the highs and the lows, excitement and boredom, the foolish and the