back cove misty morning
patience
arguing with Plato on an overcast morning
day #615
a branch that traces back to the roots of presence
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The Lame Goat – Rumi
You’ve seen a herd of goats
going down to the water.
The lame and dreamy goat
brings up the rear.
There are worried faces about that one,
but now they’re laughing,
because look, as they return,
that goat is leading!
There are many different kinds of knowing.
The lame goat’s kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
Learn from the lame goat,
and lead the herd home.
a new name
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To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it. – Revelations 2:17
Being an artist means…
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything! – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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This is hell on earth and hell in hell…
What runs and ticks is, however, no longer important. What is important is that life itself should be “lucid” in me (whoever I am). I am nothing but the lucidity that is “in me.” To be opaque and dense with opinion, with passion, with need, with hate, with power, is to be not there, to be absent, to nonexist. The labor of convincing myself that this nonexisting is a real presence: this is the source of all falsity and suffering. This is hell on earth and hell in hell. This is the hell I have to keep out of. The price of keeping out of it is that the moment I give in to any of it, I feel the anguish of falsity. But to extinguish the feeling of anguish, in any way short of straight lucidity, is to favor ignorance and non existence. This is my central fear and it defines my task in life.
~ Thomas Merton, Journal entry June 22, 1966
and not only that…
…And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. – Romans 5:3-5
waking up
The conviction that I have not even begun to write, to think, to pray, and to live, and that only now am I getting down to waking up. And that, by God’s grace, this comes from finally trying, with great difficulty, to be genuinely free and alone, as humbly as I can, in God’s sight, without passively accepting all the standards and the formulas which have been adopted by others – or, at least, that I am now exercising a wider choice in my sources of inspiration. – Thomas Merton, journal entry June 22, 1958
We went through fire…
we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
~ Psalm 66:12
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Edge of Atlantic 