Another Tree, Another Stone

Standing on my patio,
looking above, looking below:

Within This Tree

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body:
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.

By Jane Hirshfield (born 1953)
American poet and translator
From her beautiful book The October Palace

Within Within Within

Optimistic Verion

"You can think of the universe as a set of wooden Russian matryoshka dolls, with each doll having a smaller one inside of it. The entire visible universe is the outermost doll, and nested inside it are galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets -- right down to the smallest doll, which is you. But inside of you is an even smaller doll that somehow has the biggest doll inside of it. When you figure out this riddle, you will have discovered the key to your ascension!"

from Reincarnation: The Missing Link In Christianity
by Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1939 - 2009)

Pessimistic Version

“You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?"

"There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me — just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller.”

from Turtles All the Way Down
by John Green (b 1977)