Mind cut off from matter

Credit: Noell S. Oszvald

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives.

Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exigencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil.

And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own view of reality has sunk us into an unbearable solipsism, an agony of separateness -- from loved ones, from other creatures, from rich but unruly emotions, in short, from our ability to connect, through senses and feeling and imagination, with the world that is our home.

~ Priscilla Stuckey

Quote on creativity

Image: Sign making by Ariana Sanjar

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or  poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.
He must create, must pour out his creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

~ Pearl S. Buck

Quote on creativity

Image: Sign making by Ariana Sanjar

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or  poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.
He must create, must pour out his creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

~ Pearl S. Buck

RipRap

Credit: Bruna Fernandes

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
      placed solid, by hands  
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
 in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,
These poems, people,

lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
             and rocky sure-foot trails.  
The worlds like an endless

four-dimensional
Game of Go.

ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word

a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained

with torment of fire and weight  
Crystal and sediment linked hot

all change, in thoughts,   

As well as things.

~ Gary Snyder

RipRap

Credit: Bruna Fernandes

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
      placed solid, by hands  
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
 in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,
These poems, people,

lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
             and rocky sure-foot trails.  
The worlds like an endless

four-dimensional
Game of Go.

ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word

a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained

with torment of fire and weight  
Crystal and sediment linked hot

all change, in thoughts,   

As well as things.

~ Gary Snyder

Quote on books

Photo credit: d3designs from morguefile.com

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote on books

Photo credit: d3designs from morguefile.com

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote on willpower

Helen Keller from Wikimedia

If the mind's not strong, the body acts weak, even if it's not. If the mind says it's too cold or too rainy or too windy to run, the body will be more than happy to agree. If the mind says it would be better to rest or recover or cut practice, the body will be glad to oblige.

~ Wendelin Van Draanen

Quote on willpower

Helen Keller from Wikimedia

If the mind's not strong, the body acts weak, even if it's not. If the mind says it's too cold or too rainy or too windy to run, the body will be more than happy to agree. If the mind says it would be better to rest or recover or cut practice, the body will be glad to oblige.

~ Wendelin Van Draanen