Look Up – Look Down

Muddy puddle
Muddy puddle

What a difference ones viewpoint can make. Looking down and the world is full of muddy puddles. Especially so lately with the onset of autumn rains. However there in the puddle is reflected the blue sky above.

Steps going up through woodland
Steps going up through woodland

Stepping stones leading up through the woods into the light but it easy to miss ones footing where the steps are not lit by the sun.

Navigate the Way with safety and in faith.

I’m in Northumberland where I will remain for the next three weeks.

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4 thoughts on “Look Up – Look Down”

  1. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

    ‘Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.’

    (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 377–8.)

  2. He points to what the Taoists so succinctly show in the yin yang symbol; that each contains the opposite. That we could not find dark times dark if we had no awareness of the light, that it is never entirely dark. This places us in a place where we ‘see’ both the dark and the light together. Or, grey and colour. Adorno, in referring to the negative whole, points to the unsatisfactoriness or dukkha which we experience. But he reminds us not to see only the unsatisfactory, that it seems so only because we know of the other.

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