Divan as quoted in Classical Islam and the Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition By Muhammad Hisham Kabbani p.195
Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.20
Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 1.3
Variant: Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.
Source: Four Quartets
Two in the Bush (1966)
Context: We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion, cutting down forests and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities — water — with industrial filth and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the Brown Rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.
Section 7 : Spiritual Progress
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Context: By what sort of experience are we led to the conviction that spirit exists? On the whole, by searching, painful experience. The rose Religion grows on a thorn-bush, and we must not be afraid to have our fingers lacerated by the thorns if we would pluck the rose.
“We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.”
Space: What love's got to do with it - The Space Review (2004)
