I am a child of Earth and the starry Heaven,
but my roots are in Heaven.

-- Orphic Tablet at Petelia, 4th Century

O, this is the beast that doesn't exist...

Rilke

It came to me in a flash that in the organ of the plant which we are accustomed to call the leaf lies the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms.  From first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot think of one without the other.

J.W. v Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790
 

"In November 1895 Venkataraman realized that Arunachala, the sacred mountain, was a real place. He had known of its existence from an early age, and was overwhelmed by the realisation that it really existed...."

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible?

-- R. M. Rilke

Being, the source of all characteristics, has no characteristics itself. And yet it is a specific being, a person.

Lead Us From the Unreal To the Real,
Lead Us From Darkness To Light,
Lead Us From Death To Immortality,
Let There Be Peace Peace Peace.

bṛhadāraṇyaka upaniṣad 1.3.28

There are certain joys -- and they are the most precious -- which, when imagined, are extremely pale; whose whole value consists in their presence itself.  We lack stimulus to seek out these pale joys, even though it cost only a slight effort, unless.... 
(May I no longer commit this crime towards myself of allowing them to slip by.)    
--  Simone Weil

How poore, how narrow, how impious a measure of God, is this, that he must doe, as thou wouldest doe, if thou wert God.

John Donne, sermon preached in St. Paul's Jan. 30, 1625

Any chance you get, please read and then re-read Weil's spiritual classic, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God."
You'll find it here: http://www.hagiasophiaclassical.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Right-Use-of-School-Studies-Simone-Weil.pdf

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light— and in the best of cases the fullness of light — in the heart of that same religious tradition. … It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.  
 
Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

It is given to very few spirits to discover that things and beings exist. 

Simone Weil

To walk with tender assent is to walk steely as a mountain in cloud, your delight concurring with heaven.  

I Ching, Hexagram 10, “Walking”

The sound of water says what I think.  
Chuang Tzu  370-287 BC
 
What the river says, that is what I say. 
Wm Stafford, 1914-1993

"Who inside Daddy gave Mommy the flowers?"

Rody, age 4
 

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

Emerson

Great power, not clinging to power, has true power.

Lao Tzu