Author: Bill Schulz

if you don’t have – Rumi

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

if you don’t have
enough madness in you
go and rehabilitate yourself

if you’ve lost a hundred times
the chess game of this life
be prepared to lose one more

if you’re the wounded string
of a harp on this stage
play once more then resonate no more

if you’re that exhausted bird
fighting a falcon for too long
make a comeback and be strong

you’ve carved a wooden horse
riding and calling it real
fooling yourself in life

though only a wooden horse
ride it again my friend
and gallop to the next post

you’ve never really listened
to what God has always
tried to tell you

yet you keep hoping
after your mock prayers
salvation will arrive

The man who writes…

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons.

Once there was a rabbi who always made his will and tearfully bade farewell to his wife and children before he went to the synagogue to pray, for he never knew if he would emerge from the prayer alive. As he used to say, “When I pronounce a word, for instance Lord, this word shatters my heart. I am terror-stricken and do not know if I shall be able to make the leap to the following words: have pity on me.”

O for the person able to read a poem in this way, or the word massacre, or a letter from the woman he loves-or this Report by a man who struggled much in his life and yet managed to accomplish so very little!

– Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

To say that the world…

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?

And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.

It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.

Let them know

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Wisdom 13:2-5
…but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.
And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them.
For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.