Orpheus excerpt
Nature taught him in his earliest days, with sounds he alone seemed to hear. To his child’s ears, everything was amplified. A drop of water, trickling in a grotto, made a note shriller and sharper than a drop falling to the earth. The stream beneath the banks, half-caught in overhanging stems, sang more noisily than the open water. He described the nymphs swimming, ‘oblique’ and ‘swift-soaring’ in the chanting current, with light cascading through their bodies: light he could not catch, although he tried to. More nymphs haunted the grass, where a small child could find them, or flickered in damp openings in the rocks, ‘visible and invisible’. He saw the dew that clothed them and heard their high, faint song before they vanished, ‘travellers of the winding roads’, white limbs into white air. Above him the firs of the forest sent out high, sighing plaints, while the broad oaks sang leafier and low. Rain and thunder made colossal battle-music, grey doves the sound of sleep, the owl of the night-shades one keen, swooping interval that pierced his heart. It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth. In summer the invisible cicadas sang their two-note dirge, surviving from the time before music came into the world. He could also hear the spider spinning notes higher and further as its web stretched out between the thistle stalks, pulled from its own innermost heart, diamonded with dew. At the edge of the grasslands, music passed from tasselled reed to reed as the wind sighed through them. He heard fruits rounding on the branch, flower-stems unsheathing from the soil; the creak and tinkle of ice feathering across a pool, and the fall, note by hushed note, of the snow. Beneath it all hummed the tone of the mountains in their jagged majesty, the bass-line of his life.
Wroe, Ann. Orpheus: The Song of Life (pp. 14-15). ABRAMS, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
A Book Of Life Peter Kingsley p. 58
Right at the start of his (Empedochles) most important teaching he introduces the four elements that were later to become so famous in western science: water and fire, earth and air. And he explains that they are the roots of all existence.
But for him they weren't simple substances stripped of any mystery. Every single one of them was a lilving riddle; was divine. And when it came time for me to sink deep inside the darkness of myself at the hospital I was introduced to each of them in turn-not as concepts or theories but as realities infinitely more real than I am, as the actual building blocks of which my own body and mind and awareness are composed.
I was given the chance to touch and taste and feel the pulsing divinity of these elements just as Empedocles had described them. I had the direct experience of seeing how the whole of creation grows out of them and that, aside from each of them, nothing else exists
And there he was- the invisible being who years earlier lleft his fragrance when he came to visit-showing me his universe, taking care of me, perfectly free to move at will
between the pretty world of the senses and the vast spaces hidden inside your body or mine.
In a split second which could also have been an eternity, I realized the shattering truth that this man was the master not only of my conscious life but of my unconscious existence as well. He was there at the beginning, there at the end; inside, outside. And that was that.
And there I stayed with him, just he and I alone together.