Divine Dance Quotes

“Just a moment ..., I savour this ... ah, but it’s flown already.
... Only a bit of music, stamping in time, humming-:
Girls, you grow warm, - girls, you silently mime, -
Dance the flavour of this fruit as we experience it!

Make of the orange a dance. Who can be oblivious
Of how it drowns in itself, of how it restrains
Its very essence of sweetness, holds it back? It
Has possessed you. You have deliciously converted it into you.

Dance the orange. The warmth of the landscape,
It draws you forth, so that your ripeness streams forth
Resplendent on the local breezes! A glow arising, revealed

Aroma after aroma! Evoke its affinity
With the pure, self-denying peel,
With the juice which joyously fills it!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Comtemplation