quarantine dream #5
silence
quarantine dream #4
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
quarantine dream #3
quarantine dream 2
6 parables of outer perception
If there are obstacles, it cannot be space
If there are numbers, it cannot be stars
If it moves and shakes, it cannot be a mountain
If it grows and shrinks, it cannot be an ocean
If it must be crossed by a bridge, it cannot be a river
If it can be grasped, it cannot be a rainbow
These are the six parables of outer perception
–Milarepa
on the first anniversary of W.S. Merwin’s death
For The Anniversary of My Death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
– W.S. Merwin,“For the Anniversary of My Death” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)
recovery
To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. – Bernadette Devlin
when your tongue is silent…
When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.
– Thomas Merton, journal entry, March 17, 1952
photo: Assisi, January 2005
Edge of Atlantic 