n y m p h

“Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
― Anaïs Nin

“A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite from boyhood, when
I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro’ repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were
out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a
confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the weirdest of the weirdest,
utterly beyound words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility,
the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only
true life.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“And more, my son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange not mine – and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
Were Sun to spark – unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”
― Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson

“A Thousand mountains will greet my departing friend,
When the spring teas blossom again.
With such breadth and wisdom,
Serenely picking tea—
Through morning mists
Or crimson evening clouds—
His solitary journey is my envy.
We rendezvous at a remote mountain temple,
Where we enjoy tea by a clear pebble fountain.
In that silent night,
Lit only by candlelight,
I struck a marble bell—
Its chime carrying me
A hidden man
Deep into thoughts of ages past.

— "The Day I Saw Lu Yu off to Pick Tea”
― Aaron Fisher, The Way of Tea: Reflections on a Life with Tea