Gratitude for Life

Woods between Greenville, SC, & Ashville, NC

     This day, November 22, 2018, offers a special opportunity for thankfulness, for expressing gratitude for Life. Photos shown here were taken with an “effect” in which the shutter snaps twice, thus allowing the image to reflect movement. Life can be discerned by movement: the vibration from a pounding heart, especially one made more passionate, by breath, particularly when panting for love. Life reflects particles in wave, even those inside leaves, stones, and the human mind. These movements might well remind us of our ultimate progression forward and back to the Source of Life. It’s the steps in the world for greater compassion, caring for all our relations, tending broken hearts, remembering the Divine Reality. One remembrance comes in looking for and loving the balance and beauty of the imaginal world.

     S.H. Nasr writes of this in Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. The human creation is 

“the channel of grace for nature; through his active participation in the spiritual world he casts light into the world of nature. He is the mouth through which nature breathes and lives. Because of the intimate connection between man and nature, the inner state of man is reflected in the eternal order. Were there to be no more contemplatives and saints, nature would be deprived of the light that illuminates it and the air which keeps it alive. It explains why, when man’s inner being has turned to darkness and chaos, nature is also turned from harmony and beauty to disequilibrium and disorder. Man sees in nature what he is himself and penetrates into the inner meaning of nature only on the condition of being able to delve into the inner depths of his own being and to cease to lie merely on the periphery of his being. Men who live only on the surface of their being can study nature as something to be manipulated and dominated. But only he who has turned toward the inward dimension of his being can see nature as a symbol, as a transparent reality and come to know and understand it in the real sense” (p. 96).

Nature provides essential support for our engagement: “nature herself can be an aid in this process provided man can learn to contemplate it, not as an independent domain of reality but as a mirror reflecting a higher reality, a vast panorama of symbols which speak to man and have meaning for him” (p. 95). For this passage, Nasr includes a footnote to Frithjoff Schuon’s Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, from the chapter on “Seeing God Everywhere.” Schuon speaks directly to the gift of trees for those who can see: 

“‘How’ then  do things symbolize God or ‘divine aspects’? One cannot say that God is this tree or that this tree is God, but one can say that in a certain connection the tree is not ‘other than God’, or that it cannot not be God in any way since it is not nonexistent. For the tree has existence, then the life that distinguishes it from minerals, then its particular qualities that distinguish it from other plants, and finally its symbolism, all of which are for the tree so many ways not only of not ‘being nothingness’, but also of affirming God in one or another respect: life, creation, majesty, axial immutability, or generosity” (p. 91).

"The Place of Peace" at Furman University