I Was A Shadow Among Shadows Brooding

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

In The Desert, An Old Monk Had Once Advised A Traveler, The Voices Of God And The Devil Are Scarcely Distinguishable.

Every Time We Walk Along A Beach Some Ancient Urge Disturbs Us So That We Find Ourselves Shedding Shoes And Garments Or Scavenging Among Seaweed And Whitened Timbers Like The Homesick Refugees Of A Long War... Mostly The Animals Understand Their Roles, But Man, By Comparison, Seems Troubled By A Message That, It Is Often Said, He Cannot Quite Remember Or Has Gotten Wrong... Bereft Of Instinct, He Must Search Continually For Meanings... Man Was A Reader Before He Became A Writer, A Reader Of What Coleridge Once Called The Mighty Alphabet Of The Universe.

We Think We Learn From Teachers, And We Sometimes Do. But The Teachers Are Not Always To Be Found In School Or In Great Laboratories. Sometimes What We Learn Depends Upon Our Own Powers Of Insight.

At The Core Of The Universe, The Face Of God Wears A Smile