The house without a window is Hell:
to make a window is the foundation of true religion.
Don’t thrust your axe upon every thicket:
come, use your axe to cut open a window.
~ Rumi
Photo: Assisi 2005
prayer
a fellowship of the weak
Fear, shame, and guilt often make us stay in our isolation and prevent us from realizing that our handicap, whatever it is, can always become the way to an intimate and healing fellowship in which we come to know one another as humans. After all, everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual, physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. Only when we use these symptoms of mortality to form a fellowship of the weak can hope emerge. It is in the confession of our brokenness that the real strength of new and everlasting life can be affirmed and made visible. – Henri Nouwen
Photo: Portland, ME – November 2017
Something inside the moth…
A Mystic and a Drunk – Rumi
The universe turns on an axis.
Let my soul circle around a table
like a beggar, like a planet
rolling in the vast, totally helpless and free.
The Knight and the castle move jaggedly
about the chessboard, but they’re actually
centered on the king. They circle.
If love is your center, a ring
gets put on your finger.
Something inside the moth
is made of fire.
A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.
A drunkard thinks peeing is absolution.
Lord, take these impurities from me.
The lord replies, First, understand
the nature of impurity. If your key is bent,
the lock will not open.
I fall silent.
King Shams has come.
Always when I close, he opens.
Photo: Alba Street, Portland, ME – September 2013
Return to the most human
Return, return to the deep sources, nothing less
Will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
To carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
And still that ancient necessary pain preserve.
We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,
To the dark places where modern mind imprisons
All that is not defined and thought apart.
We must let out the terrible creative visions.
Return to the most human, nothing less
Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,
The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,
And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.
– May Sarton, Santos: New Mexico
Monastery of Christ in The Desert (crosses)
#703
700 – 1
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.
#662 high tide
Edge of Atlantic 