Monastery of Christ in The Desert (crosses)
faith
#703
700 – 1
sparrows’ worth
You are worth more than many sparrows. Luke 12:7
Photo by Dan Hamill on Pexels.com
wisdom
“…even a person who lacks skill may put to sea.”
– Wisdom 14:4
Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com
And so I go on trying to walk…
And so I go on trying to walk on the waters of the breakdown. Worse than ever before and better than ever before. It is always painful and reassuring when he who I am not is visibly destroyed by the hand of God in order that the simplicity in the depths of me, which is His image, may be set free to serve Him in peace. – Thomas Merton, journal entry October 22, 1952
three new poems from New Mexico
Smoke
smoke in Chama Canyon
surrounds me like the ghosts
of all the dead I’ve ever known
somewhere close a lone cow bellows
echoes sound far upriver
in the dusk her calf replies
too late too late
from the other side
Morning – Chama River
For you are mist that appears for a little while
and then vanishes. – James 4:14
the silence
of breaking clouds
the little ones hiding
in side canyons
breaking free
above the river
a raven laughs
and drops a feather
Evening – Chama River
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
– Czelslaw Milosz
Pulling back the blankets tonight
I found a small cricket
quiet and shy
hiding under my pillow.
Oh, I know better.
Like me, though, it seemed alone
and in need of a companion
to get through the dark alive.
So, I’ll awaken before dawn
and give thanks if we’re still here
like the moths that flew to the light just now
when I opened the door to check for rain.
Mr. or Mrs. Nobody – William Stafford
Some days when you look out, the land
is heavy, following its hills, dim
where the road bends. There are days when
having the world is a mistake.
But then you think, “Well, anyway, it wasn’t
my idea,” and it’s OK again.
Suppose that a person who knows you happens
to see you going by, and it’s one of those days –
for a minute you have to carry the load
for them, you’ve got to lift the whole
heavy world, even without knowing it,
being a hero, stumbling along.
Some days it’s like that. And maybe
today. And maybe all of the time.
Poetry is a species of love
Christian Wiman – Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable. This is as true in life as it is in art. Thus we love within the lines that experience has drawn for us, we create out of impulses that are familiar and, if we were honest with ourselves, exhausted. What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The inner and outer urgency of it, the mysterious and confused agency of it. All love abhors habit, and poetry is a species of love.
The immense simplicity of things
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – I thank you, my God, for having in a thousand different ways led my eyes to discover the immense simplicity of things. Little by little, through the irresistible development of those yearnings you implanted in me as a child, through the influence of gifted friends who entered my life at certain moments to bring light and strength to my mind, and through the awakenings of spirit I owe to the successive initiations, gentle and terrible, which you caused me to undergo: through all these I have been brought to the point where I can no longer see anything, nor any longer breathe, outside that milieu in which all is made one.
Edge of Atlantic 