A happy feast day to all my dear Companions of St. George, wherever you are in the world – Let faith be your shield and let joy be your steed ‘gainst the dragons of anger and the ogres of greed. And let me set free with the sword of my youth, from the castle of darkness the power of truth.
The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you, whether you know it or not. – Thomas Merton
A storm that needed a mountain
met it where we were:
we woke up in a gale
that was reasoning with our tent,
and all the persuaded snow
streaked along, guessing the ground.
We turned from that curtain, down.
But sometime we will turn
back to the curtain and go
by plan through an unplanned storm,
disappearing into the cold,
meanings in search of a world.
Photo by Matt Hardy on Pexels.com
Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~ Rumi
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.
Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.
The ground turns green. A drum begins.
Commentaries on the heart arrive in seven volumes.
The pen puts its head down
to give a dark sweetness to the page.
Planets go wherever they want.
Venus sways near the North Star.
The moon holds on to Leo.
The host who has no self is here.
We look in each other’s eyes.
A child is still a child
even after it’s learned the alphabet.
Solomon lifts his morning cup to the mountains.
Sit down in this pavilion,
and don’t listen to religious bickering.
Be silent as we absorb the spring.
Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality.
A person is a person in so far as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand.
A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him: it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his. – Thomas Merton
For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. – Thomas Merton, journal entry – April 14, 1966
Edge of Atlantic 