The Way (1)

Dear Friends

First, on Thursday, January 19, we'll start to meet in person again after 3 years of online-only! 

It will be just one Thursday each month, from 5pm to 6pm, at the Southern Berkshire Friends Meeting in Great Barrington, MA, at 280 State Road.  This is in addition to our online Tuesday meetings, which will continue as is.

Second, we are going to spend some time in this new year on the idea and practice of the Way.  We have already begun, in our consideration of Keats's "magic hand of chance" and the Tao Te Ching.  The Way presumes a collaboration between heaven and earth, or between human and non-human beings and processes.

For today, let's look at the following short poem by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843):

The lines of life are various
as pathways are, and as the mountains edges.
What we are here, there a god can complete
with harmonies, eternal recompense, and peace.

Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden,
wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Grenzen.
Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen,
mit Harmonien, und mit ewigem Lohn und Frieden.

The image, as in the photo above, is of mountains' upper edges that are completed by the sky.  Where the mountains reach up higher, there needs to be less sky above them.  Where they reach up less, the sky generously reaches further down to meet them.  In meditation, we want to feel the rightness of different kinds of life, different stages of life, and the sense that there we are accompanied and completed by the totality of worlds around us at all times.

And again: we meet as usual on-line today and Tuesdays in general.  The in-person meetings resume, not this Thursday, but the following Thursday, the 19th of January, at 5pm at the Friends Meeting in GB.  Please contact me with any questions.

with love,

Michael