It is the same everywhere ...

1. 

Take me back
before the Picts
to the Pre-Celtic Dreamtime
before "mine" and "yours"
or the forging of swords
when there was no boundary
between life and death.

2.

Then came the Celtic warriors
thirty thousand tribesmen down from the hills
bloodied but unbowed
standing up to the might
of the whole Roman Empire.

In Swordwielder's words:
"the most distant dwellers upon the earth
the last of the free".

3.

And bear in mind
that Columba
was not trying
to get to the
edge of somewhere.

But crossing from
Donegal to Dalriada
he stopped halfway
at dead centre
making Iona
the very heart
of the Celtic Church.

4.

At the Hill of the Angels

Yes indeed, Colum Cille
stood here too, arms outstretched
and bathed in golden light.

Now I sit here
fingers downstretched
feeling the warm support
of Mother Earth
embracing the bright space
of Father Sky
and know it is the same
everywhere.

... no theories ...

... the Tathagata had no theories, beause he had seen the nature of things ...

From Walpola Sri Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, (Bedford, 1959).

(Tathagata is the main title the Buddha used to describe himself in the Pali canon: from the Sankrit for one who has transcended all coming and going.)

As though he did not have it

Delectable indeed is this state.
But he who has it, said the Master with a subtle smile, would do well to have it as though he did not have it.
Only unbroken equanimity can accept it in such a way that it is not afraid to come back.

Japanese master archer Awa Kenzo, as reported in Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery (London, 1953).

Become parables

When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labour were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least ...

... Concerning this a man once said: "Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares."
Another said: "I bet that is also a parable."
The first said: "You have won."
The second said: "But unfortunately only in parable."
The first said: "No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

From Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes. In German and English (New York, 1946).

The town in the country: autumn

Climbing across

Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples,  was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted.

William Henry Channing, quoted in P. Miller (ed.), The American Trancendentalists. Their Prose and Poetry (New York, 1957).

(Definition of to transcend: from the Latin transcendere, to climb across, thus to journey beyond the limits of everyday habits.)

Mastery of a new game

Today, we consider psychogeography and the derive to be provisional disciplines, methodically defined, with which to experiment on some aspects of the construction of ambiance and new situationist comportments. We think that the transmission of the results, even those apparently derisory, is the capital problem of psychogeography and that, through this transmission alone, it will be in relation with the architecture that we must invent. I believe that, at the moment in which we have begun to experiment with the derive, this activity has for many of us a meaning that is more directly moving. Perhaps there exists a more irrational tendency, a tendency to expect the discovery of a kind of psychogeographical Great Passage, beyond which we will attain mastery of a new game: the adventures of our lives themselves.

From Guy Debord's preface to Ralph Rumney, Psychogeographical Venice (Paris, 1957).