No one heals himself by hurting another.
gratitude
quarantine dream #10
Today, like every other day…
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
Dark Sweetness – Rumi
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.
For to write…
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
should I fall behind…
Let Evening Come – Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005
Rumi
Your life is like a purse of gold:
day and night are like money changers.
Continually Time counts out that gold,
until your purse is emptied and death is here.
If you dig away at a mountain
and don’t replace anything of what you’ve taken
a desolate land is left behind.
So for every breath you breathe out,
put another in its place.
Fall in worship and draw near
so you may reach your aim.
under God’s sky
Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under God’s sky. – Thomas Merton
Edge of Atlantic 