On this Very Street in Belgrade
by Charles Simic
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
Nouwen: Your true identity is not in the hands of other people. Your identity can never be what some other person may think about you. You were fashioned by God in your mother’s womb. God knew you intimately before you were born. You are God’s beloved child. That is who you truly are.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
For all those I talk to every day. You don’t have to live like that.
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.
Rumi
Looking for God is like seeking a path in a field of snow; if there is no path and you are looking for one, walk across it and there is your path. – James Finley
Thank you Word Portland for inviting me and Reggie Groff for the recording
Photo: South Portland, Maine – March 2019
Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within. – Teilhard de Chardin
Edge of Atlantic 