β
Before you echo 'Amen' in your home or place of worship, think and remember...a child is listening.
β
β
Mary Griffith
β
By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane.
If she were to drink it, she'd drown.
β
β
Leslye Walton (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender)
β
I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.
β
β
D.W. Griffith
β
God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were 'baby substitutes'. 'No,' Ruth had answered, straight-faced. 'They're kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1))
β
Dogs own space and cats own time.
β
β
Nicola Griffith (Hild (The Hild Sequence, #1))
β
The Griffith House was like nothing Viviane remembered, reminding her of how fast the world changed and of how insignificant she was in the grand scheme of things. She thought it unfair that her life should be both irrelevant and difficult. One or the other seemed quite enough.
β
β
Leslye Walton (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender)
β
Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.'
She turns slowly to look at me. 'Who, Victor? Who? Andy who?' She coughs, blowing her nose. 'Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?'
'Warhol,' I say softly, hurt. 'Baby...
β
β
Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama)
β
I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child's conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, & self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth.
β
β
Mary Griffith
β
This is the first letter I have ever written. That a few marks on this piece of paper can bring you my heart in my absence is a great magic. Life is a constant source of wonder.
β
β
Clay Griffith
β
There are springs in the mind from which others cannot drink.
β
β
Clay Griffith (The Greyfriar (Vampire Empire, #1))
β
What's needed on Earth is love of the dark side of ourselves
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
You know how thick I am. I don't even eat yoghurt because it's got culture in it.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Janus Stone (Ruth Galloway, #2))
β
Well, do a good day's work and act like somebody.
β
β
Andy Griffith
β
If no one had ever challenged religious authority, thereβd be no democracy, no public schools, womenβs rights, improvements to science and medicine, evolution of slavery and no laws against child abuse or spousal abuse. I was afraid to challenge my religious beliefs because that was the basis of creationβmine anyway. I was afraid to question the Bible or anything in it, and when I did, thatβs when I became involved with PFLAG and realized that my son was a perfectly normal human being and there was nothing for God to heal because Bobby was perfect just the way he was.
β
β
Mary Griffith
β
The increasingly thoughtful child can see the whole horribly upset world and would be understandably totally bewildered and deeply troubled by it
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
She liked time at the edges of things -- the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood -- where all must pass but none quite belonged.
β
β
Nicola Griffith (Hild (The Hild Sequence, #1))
β
Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
Sometimes you just gotta let some tears out or you'll burst. -Miz Allemond
β
β
Kimberley Griffiths Little (The Healing Spell)
β
Maybe humans need animals to help them understand the world. Certainly itβs hard to see what else cats do for humans, aside from looking cute and killing the odd mouse.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (A Dying Fall (Ruth Galloway, #5))
β
Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and
setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all,
story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*."
--Nicola Griffith,
www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...
β
β
Nicola Griffith
β
It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
Libraries are the cathedrals of the modern age. All that knowledge, available for anyone to use. Itβs quite a subversive thought.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Chalk Pit (Ruth Galloway, #9))
β
Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
The truth is, the hypocrisy of humans is everywhere
β
β
Jeremy Griffith
β
Gareth's eyes slipped open. βYou make me nervous when you do that.β
βDo what?β
βBrood. Your brooding is rather loud.β
βOh please. I was hardlyββ
His eyebrow rose.
βFine. I was brooding. It's not like you don't.β
βMine is inherent to my romantic nature. Cloaks and castles.β
Adele threw up her hands. βThat's it. You are forbidden to look at any more cheap books about yourself.
β
β
Clay Griffith (The Rift Walker (Vampire Empire, #2))
β
The seeds of greatness are sown in ordinary soil.
β
β
Leah Griffith
β
God is in no hurry, so why should I be?β), Griffith
β
β
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
β
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
β
β
Jay Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey)
β
Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a sick-house, and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or a craving for liquor. At this moment he could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance. He could pardon Griffiths for his treachery and Mildred for the pain she had caused him. They could not help themselves. The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. The words of the dying God crossed his memory:
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
β
β
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
β
I'm in this relationship for the capes and castles.
β
β
Susan Griffith (The Rift Walker (Vampire Empire, #2))
β
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Stranger Diaries (Harbinder Kaur, #1))
β
The greater the uncertainty, the bigger the gap between what you can measure and what matters, the more you should watch out for overfitting - that is, the more you should prefer simplicity
β
β
Tom Griffiths (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
β
...if it's cool you're after, then you're knock-knock-knocking on the wrong door. My maximum ambition is to make it to normal.
β
β
Harry Bingham (Talking to the Dead (Fiona Griffiths, #1))
β
A fresh approach is needed β an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
Thereβs a time to live and a time to die.
The only trouble is, when would you know?
When would your mind let you freely sacrifice your life?
Life is as long or as short as you want it to be.
Or so they say.
β
β
Paul Leslie Griffiths (Stream Liner of the Lost Souls (Stream Liner, #1))
β
We all intuitively know that a mother's love is crucial to the creation of a well-adjusted human and that we are all born with an instinctive expectation of receiving unconditionally selfless love from our mother.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith
β
All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.
β
β
Jay Griffiths
β
Greyβs OK on a man,β says Mary-Anne. βSilver fox and all that.β Ruth notices that Frank doesnβt seem to mind this description. She also muses that there isnβt a female equivalent to βsilver foxβ. βGrey-haired old batβ doesnβt cover it somehow.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Outcast Dead (Ruth Galloway, #6))
β
And Mamma was still asleep. I called it the sleeping sickness because coma is the ugliest word in the entire universe. If I could, I'd erase it from the dictionary, but Old Webster would probably hunt me down.
β
β
Kimberley Griffiths Little (The Healing Spell)
β
When anyone tells me I can't do anything, I'm just not listening any more.
β
β
Florence Griffith Joyner
β
Since science and religion provide two different perspectives on the human situation, they must ultimately be able to be reconciled.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (Beyond the Human Condition)
β
In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.
β
β
Tom Griffiths (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
β
We can transition from being victims of the human condition to becoming secure, sound, effective managers of our world
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.
β
β
Nicola Griffith (Hild (The Hild Sequence, #1))
β
Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.
β
β
Nicola Griffith (Hild (The Hild Sequence, #1))
β
I liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
There is a beautiful expression of this in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa). Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood.' This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.
β
β
Bede Griffiths (The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God)
β
You need a break, a complete rest, recharge your batteries.' Recharge your batteries. What the hell does that mean? Nelson prides himself on not needing batteries. He's an old-fashioned, wind-up model.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (A Dying Fall (Ruth Galloway, #5))
β
...Nobody know when he is going to die. It is no good simply putting it off all the time, as we tend to do. If you face it, you realize you hold your life in your hands, and you're ready to let go at any moment. I think that is real wisdom.
β
β
Bede Griffiths (A Human Search: Bede Griffiths Reflects on His Life : An Oral History)
β
Would it insult you if I used your alphabet? I don't think I could start from scratch.
β
β
Clay Griffith
β
A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own
β
β
Jay Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey)
β
Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.
β
β
Edward Griffith Begle
β
The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1))
β
As long as we are engaged in this orgy of unnecessary terminology and notationβ¦
β
β
David J. Griffiths (Introduction to Electrodynamics)
β
Mother's love created our awe-inspiring moral sense
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
The Meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away
β
β
Pablo Picasso
β
I donβt belong to anyone! Iβm not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! Iβm a woman.
β
β
Nicola Griffith (Ammonite)
β
While religious assurances such as 'God loves you' could comfort us, we ultimately had to understand why we are loveable
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (A Species in Denial)
β
If your not brave enough to talk to a stranger how do you think they will become anything more then a stranger.
β
β
Eden Griffith
β
Why is her first reaction to invitations always to think of a way of refusing them?
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1))
β
If one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers but the seed remains.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Outcast Dead (Ruth Galloway, #6))
β
We live in a world where we give our pounds to those who have too much and our pennies to those who have too little
β
β
Dean Griffiths
β
The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss a chance to publicly praise the troops and honor those who had lost their lives in service.
Some of the tributes would be sincere and heartfelt, and some less so. But participating in the event, vowing undying support for the U.S. military, was an absolute must to maintain political viability. It was okay to vote to cut funds for veterans' healthcare, but don't dare miss a chance to jump on the Memorial Day bandwagon.
β
β
David Rosenfelt (Unleashed (Andy Carpenter, #11))
β
Nicotine, in fact, is an unusual drug because it does very little except trigger compulsive use. According to researcher Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, βWhen you give people nicotine for the first time, most people donβt like it. Itβs different from many other addictive drugs, for which most people say they enjoy the first experience and would try it again.β Nicotine doesnβt make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. Itβs the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.
β
β
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativityβand Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
β
Forgiveness was sweeter than I'd ever imagined. Hope was turning into faith. In fact, they were so close they could almost be the very same thing. Or they could be, if I let the tiny seed keep growing inside me. I realized that faith could fix a broken heart. Faith was the glue that held it together. That was part of the miracle.
β
β
Kimberley Griffiths Little (The Healing Spell)
β
We all look back at some time or other and wonder why we didn't listen to our instincts. Why did we hestiate? Why did we lose our dreams?
β
β
Diane Griffith (Chasing Dreams in Lefkas)
β
It is time to climb the mountains of our mind
β
β
Tim Macartney-Snape
β
Without a torch, I stumbled along the paths. The night was dismal. A partial moon hovered bitter and white on the horizon. It was the perfect night for murder.
β
β
Kimberley Griffiths Little (Forbidden (Forbidden, #1))
β
When the hypocrisy of life appears we often fail to recognise it or the question it raises
β
β
Jeremy Griffith
β
Praising God is contagious; especially for those of us who like to be affected by Him.
β
β
Shelena Griffiths
β
When you are seen you can no longer disappear.
β
β
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
β
THE 100 PERCENT TOTALLY DANGER-PROOF FUTURE IS AMAZING!β we shout. Terry runs into the wall again. I jump back into the sharkβs mouth.
β
β
Andy Griffiths (The 65-Storey Treehouse)
β
When we approach the Upanishads for an understanding of the Cosmic Mystery, we are coming to the very heart of the Hindu experience of God. This is what we want to try to understand, not with our minds, but with our hearts: to enter into the heart and continually remind ourselves that the Upanishads are intended to lead us to the heart. The Greek fathers of the Church used to say, "Lead the thoughts from the head into the heart and keep them there." This is to open to the Cosmic Mystery.
β
β
Bede Griffiths (The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God)
β
When the human condition is finally demystified, human insecurity and nervousness will be at a maximumβ¦for this ultimate enlightenment to be allowed, society is going to have to adhere scrupulously to the democratic principle of freedom of expression.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith (FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition)
β
I know you've all got it in for me," says Bob. "You fitted me up for one crime, why not pin every child murder in the last twenty years on me?" His voice rises hysterically.
"That seems rather an extreme reaction," says Tim. "I just asked what you were doing yesterday afternoon.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Outcast Dead (Ruth Galloway, #6))
β
That night, I fell into a deep, travel-weary sleep, lulled by the familiar sound of the waterfall beyond the window. I dreamed of the beck fairies, a blur of lavender and rose-pink and buttercup-yellow light, flitting across the glittering stream, beckoning me to follow them toward the woodland cottage. There, the little girl with flame-red hair picked daisies in the garden, threading them together to make a garland for her hair. She picked a posy of wildflowers- harebell, bindweed, campion, and bladderwort- and gave them to me.
β
β
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
β
Why are Georgette Heyer's covers so naff? When you think of all the exciting things that happen - abductions, false identities, wild horseback chases - the front of the book nearly always shows a woman in a ballgown, simpering sweetly up at a man.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Stranger Diaries (Harbinder Kaur, #1))
β
The connoisseur's hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so.
β
β
Paul J. Griffiths (Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures)
β
The wild. I have drunk it, deep and raw, and heard it's primal, unforgettable roar. We know it in our dreams, when our mind is off the leash, running wild. 'Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even further on, as one,' wrote Gary Snyder. 'It is in vain to dream of a wildness distinct from ourselves. There is none such,' wrote Thoreau. 'It is the bog in our brains and bowls, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires the dream.'
And as dreams are essential to the psyche, wildness is to life.
We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quitessence, pure spirit, resolving into no contituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
β
β
Jay Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey)
β
We are the last generation that can experience true wilderness. Already the world has shrunk dramatically. To a Frenchman, the Pyrenees are βwild.β To a kid living in a New York City ghetto, Central Park is βwilderness,β the way Griffith Park in Burbank was to me when I was a kid. Even travelers in Patagonia forget that its giant, wild-looking estancias are really just overgrazed sheep farms. New Zealand and Scotland were once forested and populated with long-forgotten animals. The place in the lower forty-eight states that is farthest away from a road or habitation is at the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming, and itβs still only twenty-five miles. So if you define wilderness as a place that is more than a dayβs walk from civilization, there is no true wilderness left in North America, except in parts of Alaska and Canada. In a true Earth-radical group, concern for wilderness preservation must be the keystone. The idea of wilderness, after all, is the most radical in human thoughtβmore radical than Paine, than Marx, than Mao. Wilderness says: Human beings are not paramount, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession. Yes, wilderness for its own sake, without any need to justify it for human benefit. Wilderness for wilderness. For bears and whales and titmice and rattlesnakes and stink bugs. Andβ¦wilderness for human beingsβ¦. Because it is home. βDave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior We need to protect these areas of unaltered wildness and diversity to have a baseline, so we never forget what the real world is likeβin perfect balance, the way nature intended the earth to be. This is the model we need to keep in mind on our way toward sustainability.
β
β
Yvon Chouinard (Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman)
β
For all the talk about the merging of film and video game, and for all its inevitability, perhaps the secret of true convergence lies not in an external reality , but in an internal truth: What kids seek from video games is what we all seek from our own distractions--be they movies, radio, comic books, literature, or art: an escape from the mundane to the sublime, where our imaginations make of us heroes, lovers, warriors, and gods.
β
β
Devin C. Griffiths (Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality)
β
That was when I saw the first flash of emerald, then another of blue, then yellow, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Not dragonflies. Not butterflies. Something else. Something moving among a cluster of harebells, the delicate white flowers nodding as their petals and leaves were disturbed by the slightest of movements, like a gentle breeze blowing against them and yet there wasn't the slightest breath of wind at the beck that day.
β
β
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
β
I fell into a restless sleep in which my dreams carried me away over misty valleys and moonlit woodlands toward a fairy glen, where I watched their beautiful midnight revels in silent awe as I whispered the words of my favorite poem. " 'You shall hear a sound like thunder, / And a veil shall be withdrawn, / When her eyes grow wide with wonder, / On that hill-top, in that dawn.
β
β
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
β
It is my perception, that a true friend never relies on another's dream. A person with the potential to be my true friend, must be able to find his reason for life without my help. And, he would have to put his heart and soul into protecting his dream. He would never hesitate to fight for his dream, even against me. For me, a true friend is one who stands equal on those terms.
β
β
Griffith (Berserk)
β
Faith affects the whole of manβs nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.
β
β
W.H. Griffith Thomas
β
Nelson nods again. βItβs every parentβs worst nightmare. The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise youβd do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isnβt anything you can do. And thatβs the hardest thing.
β
β
Elly Griffiths (The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1))
β
If changing strategies doesn't help, you can try to change the game. And if that's not possible, you can at least exercise some control about which games you choose to play. The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.
β
β
Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
β
I moved silently across the garden, silvered with moonlight, my feet barely touching the ground. I brushed past fern and tree, following the lights across the stream, toward the cottage in the clearing where I watched a little girl surrounded by light and laughter as the fairies threaded flowers through her hair. I stood out of sight, peering through the tangled blackberry bushes, but the girl saw me, rushing forward, her hand outstretched, a white flower clasped between her fingers. "For Mammy," she said. "For my Mammy.
β
β
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
β
I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery
such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry.
It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first
time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes
with βthe glory and freshness of a dream.β The sight of a wild rose
growing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught
suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like
visitations from another world. But it was not only my senses
that were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion
in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began
to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it
with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that
comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost
unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shape
of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs
of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.
β
β
Bede Griffiths
β
And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature.
β
β
Jay Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey)
β
The resurrection does not consist merely of the appearances of Jesus to his disciples after his death. Many think that these appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem are the resurrection. But they are simply to confirm the faith of the disciples. The real resurrection is the passing beyond the world altogether. It is Jesus' passage from this world to the Father. It was not an event in space and time, but the passage beyond space and time to the eternal, to reality. Jesus passed into reality. That is our starting point.
It is into that world that we are invited to enter by meditation. We do not have to wait for physical death, but we can enter now into that eternal world. We have to go beyond the outer appearances of the senses and beyond the concepts of the mind, and open ourselves to the reality of Christ within, the Christ of the resurrection.
β
β
Bede Griffiths (The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community)
β
To enter deeply into meditation is to enter into the mystery of suffering love. It is to encounter the woundedness of our human nature. We are all deeply wounded from our infancy and bear these wounds in the unconscious. The repetition of the mantra is a way of opening these depths of the unconsciousness and exposing them to light. It is first of all to accept our woundedness and thus to realize that this is part of the wound of humanity. All the weaknesses we find in ourselves and all the things that upset us, we tend to try to push aside and get rid of. But we cannot do this. We have to accept that "this is me" and allow grace to come and heal it all. That is the great secret of suffering, not to push it back but to open the depths of the unconscious and to realize that we are not isolated individuals when we meditate, but are entering into the whole inheritance of the human family.
β
β
Bede Griffiths (The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community)
β
The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition could be explained and the upset state of the human condition compassionately understood and thus defended that debate could not take place.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith
β
Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.
β
β
Jeremy Griffith
β
My brothers and I spent weeks with our grandparents by the sea where we learned so much more than it may have seemed. Not because we saw an actual shipwreck but because we saw the potential for it. Not because we actually found treasure but because we could feel the immanence of treasure at every seashore... We fished for wishes and caught them; we swam to find mermaids and became them; and we dived for pearls and returned with a stick, a bit of litter, a coin or the makings of a joke. Pearls, in other words. We learned about tides and chance, storms and sun, the vicissitudes of what is lost and found, flotsam and jetsam, castaway luck, islands, sea-songs, rings, riddles and pledges. (page 47)
β
β
Jay Griffiths (Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape)
β
I know that the best time to see them is in that perfect hour before sunset when the sun sinks low on the horizon like a ripe peach and sends shafts of gold bursting through the trees. The "in between," I call it. No longer day, not yet night; some other place and time when magic hangs in the air and the light plays tricks on the eye. You might easily miss the flash of violet and emerald, but I- according to my teacher, Mrs. Hogan- am "a curiously observant child." I see their misty forms among the flowers and leaves. I know my patience will be rewarded if I watch and listen, if I believe.
β
β
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
β
Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it.
"The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child.
"'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico GarcΓa Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs.
"The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind.
"That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love.
"In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life....
"The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun.
Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees:
There was a child went forth every day
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became...
The early lilacs became part of this child...
And the song of the phoebe-bird...
In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.
β
β
Jay Griffiths (A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World)