The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
In the midst of these high honors Kriemhild dreamed a dream, of how she trained a falcon, strong, fair, and wild, which, before her very eyes, two eagles rent to pieces. No greater sorrow might chance to her in all this world.
–Song of the Nibelung
Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom and spread his wings toward the south?
Does the eagle soar at your command and build his nest on high?
He dwells on a cliff and stays there at night; a rocky crag is his stronghold.
From there he seeks out his food; his eyes detect it from afar.
His young ones feast on blood, and where the slain are, there is he.
—Job 39:26-30
Professor Trelawney was staring into the teacup, rotating it counterclockwise. “The falcon … my dear, you have a deadly enemy.”
–Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God’s gunslinger.
–Stephen King, The Gunslinger
’Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last,
A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.
–William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II. Scene IV.
My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
–John Keats, “On Seeing The Elgin Marbles For The First Time”
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
–Hamlet
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.
–Genesis 1:2-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
–John 1:1-5
At the begininning of time, the Egyptians said, chaos reigned and silent waters covered the Earth, until some unknown being picked up a stick and stuck it into the soil of a small island. Immediately, a falcon swooped in out of the darkness and lit on the perch. The world suddenly became bright and the waters fell back to reveal land.
–Candace Savage
God said He created the human being in His own image and likeness. David the Psalmist said, “Ye are all gods, children of the Most High God.” But in today’s slang today, you refer to one another, “This is my dog.” The word “god” spelled backwards is “dog.” So, a man or woman turned backward becomes an animal.
–the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."
I think that the lower animals, with all their reactions and adjustments made and established are in a somnambulic state, like the Chinese. But the Chinese are waking up! Do you think that anything could wake up the ants and start them plotting against human civilization?
And would again could whispering grassies wake him and may again when the fiery bird disembers.
–Finnegan’s Wake
From the beginning until now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth, and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free.
–Romans 8:22-23
What Jesus represents cosmologically is the possibility of a breakthrough to another form of humanity that goes beyond and transcends the local mammalian mind.…our circle of concern extends billions of years into the past, billions of years into the future and throughout the entire community today; that is what the promise is.
–Brian Swimme
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins [29]To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Our hopes, like towering falcons, aim
at objects in an airy height;
the little pleasure of the game
is from afar to view the flight.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.
–Rumi, “The Seed Market”
* * *
The world is a mask that hides the real world.
That’s what everybody suspects, even though the world we see won’t let us dwell on it long.
The world has ways - more masks - of getting your attention.
The suspicion sneaks in now and again, between the cracks of everyday existence…the bird song dips, rises, dips, then trails off into blue sky silence before the note that would reveal the shape of a melody that, somehow, would tie everything together, on the verge of unmasking the secret armature that frames this sky, this tree, this bird, this quivering green leaf, jewels in a crown.…
Then the song dies, the secret withdraws.
The tree is a mask.
The sky is a mask.
The quivering green leaf is a mask.
The song is a mask.
The singing bird is a mask.
* * *
# posted by Unknown : 10:00 AM
