Plum Trees
The blossoming plums are a comforting sight,
they understand I am heavy with wine
– Chiang K’uei
do you recall
when I planted plum trees
to the east of our home
and dusk promised us
a life still
as a Chinese scroll
yet later in darkness
I turned away
and seemed to sleep
so many winters
my head heavy
my plum trees gone
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
“…even a person who lacks skill may put to sea.”
– Wisdom 14:4
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
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.
Happy to say I have a poem in the Fall issue of Nixes Mate. Check it out here: http://nixesmate.pub/issue-9-fall-2018/
Photo by Vali S. on Pexels.com
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting… Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. – Martin Heidegger
Miracles are nothing other than God’s ordinary truth seen with surprised eyes. – Gerald May, Addiction and Grace
Edge of Atlantic 