paganism

It__ stranger than every strangenessAnd the dreams of all the poetsAnd the thoughts of all the philosophers,That things are really what they seem to beAnd there__ nothing to understand.

Live, you say, in the present;Live only in the present.But I don__ want the present, I want reality;I want things that exist, not time that measures them.What is the present?It__ something relative to the past and the future.It__ a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.I only want reality, things without the present.I don__ want to include time in my scheme.I don__ want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.I don__ want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.I shouldn__ even treat them as real.I should treat them as nothing.I should see them, only see them;See them till I can__ think about them.See them without time, without space,To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.And this is the science of seeing, which isn__ a science.

Accept the universeAs the gods gave it to you.If the gods wanted to give you something elseThey__ have done it.If there are other matters and other worldsThere are.

And since today__ all there is for now, that__ everything.Who knows if I__l be dead the day after tomorrow?If I__ dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrowWill be another thunderstorm than if I hadn__ died.Of course I know thunderstorms don__ fall because I see them,But if I weren__ in the world,The world would be different __here would be me the less __nd the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.No matter what happens, what__ falling is what__l be falling when it falls.(7/10/1930)

I'm one of my sensations.

Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don__ you think?

I__ glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I__e read.

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,And Spring came the day after tomorrow,I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.If that__ its time, when else should it come?I like it that everything is real and everything is right;And I like that it would be like this even if I didn__ like it.And so, if I die now, I die peacefullyBecause everything is real and everything is right.

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.

She__ a manner of speaking.Even the flowers don__ come back, or the green leaves.There are new flowers, new green leaves.There are other beautiful days.Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

I sing to you of the deities of the Dictyostelidal slime molds, sexless and strange, at once a thousand voices and one song united. I sing to you of hard times when the wood has rotted away and the sun bakes the earth, and while as individuals we die, together we thrive. The divinities ask for sacrifice, the thousand voices demand it. Those who die to give life to the others, who raise up the new generation so that they may spread far and wide__hese become a part of that sacred host, their voices immortalized not in cells but in spirit." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

the resurgence of the elder gods breaks down the wall of separation between religion and science that has partitioned Western thought since the Enlightenment. The rise of science has taught us things about the Earth, Sun, and Storm that the ancients would have marveled to know. We are in the enviable, irresistible, position of being able to learn, through science, about the very gods themselves." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User__ Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism

The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close. Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh__ holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it; I can only look for it, entranced.This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding. I sing to you of the god of the dust that flies off the ice-burned comet, and the god of the spaces in between. I sing to you of the god that twists like a serpent at the center of every sun and is found again coiled within every electron, shared by both and worshiped by each in its own way. I sing to you of the god that collects asteroids together in mockeries of his sister__ solar systems, jealous of his elder sibling__ power. I sing to you of all these, and many, many more." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

It__ the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child__ mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro__ work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It__ an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.

I don__ know what understanding myself is. I don__ look inside.I don__ believe I exist behind myself.