Hello and Welcome!
Please use the categories at the top of the page to navigate throughout the website. I am living in the United States of America, working as the Education Director/Librarian for Goodspeed Musicals, painting, writing, and being myself.
Please consider the following quotes:
“To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”
-The Fountainhead-
“The sage holds Oneness as the shepherd of the world.”
-Lao Tzu-
“Only those who are not slaves to life are wise to the value of life.”
-Lao Tzu-
“Embrace the universe as a mother embraces her first born child.”
-Ancient Expression-
“Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”
-Nietzsche-
“If the followers of any particular religion understood the saying of Junayd, ‘the color of the water is the color of the vessel containing it,’ he would not interfere with the beliefs of others, but would perceive God in every form and in every belief.”
-Ibn-ul-Arabi-
“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstances. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life-no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground-my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
“As by knowing one lump of clay, dear one,
We come to know all things made out of clay-
That they differ only in name and form,
While the stuff of which all are made is clay;
As by knowing one gold nugget, dear one,
We come to know all things made out of gold-
That they differ only in name and form,
While the stuff of which all are made is gold;
As by knowing one tool of iron, dear one,
We come to know all things made out of iron-
That they differ only in name and form,
While the stuff of which all are made is iron-
So through spiritual wisdom, dear one,
We come to know that all of life is one.
In the beginning was only Being,
One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.
-Chandogya Upanishad-
I may be reached at the following email
address for any comments or questions:
Joshua.Ritter@yahoo.com
-My wife Cathy and I outside the Giralda in Sevilla Spain.-
Be Happy by H.E. Situ Rinpoche
Sasquatch Music Festival 2009 - The Birth of a Dance Frenzy
