Henceforth, From The Mind – Louise Bogan

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Henceforth, from the mind,
For your whole joy, must spring
Such joy as you may find
In any earthly thing,
And every time and place
Will take your thought for grace.

Henceforth, from the tongue,
From shallow speech alone,
Comes joy you thought, when young,
Would wring you to the bone,
Would pierce you to the heart
And spoil its stop and start.

Henceforward, from the shell,
Wherein you heard, and wondered
At oceans like a bell
so far from ocean sundered—
A smothered sound that sleeps
Long lost within lost deeps,

Will chime you change and hours,
The shadow of increase,
Will sound you flowers
Born under troubled peace–
Will echo sea and earth.

the true self

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

The false self is your psychological creation of yourself in space and time. It comes from your early conditioning, family, roles, education, mind, culture, and religion. The false self is who you think you are! But thinking doesn’t make it so. The false self dies and passes away. Yet it is the raw material through which you discover your True Self in God, so you must not hate it or kill it. Just learn from it. Of itself, it does not know how to pray, because it does not understand simple presence, communion, or relationship. The false self is all about utility and “What can I get out of this?” Not bad, but very incomplete.

The True Self is not created by anything you have done right or wrong. Nor can you lose it by doing anything good or bad. The True Self is not formed by adhering to any requirements; it’s about relationship itself—the quality and capacity for connection. Only the True Self can pray. The false self will say prayers but the True Self is a prayer and looks out at reality from a different pair of eyes larger than its own. This is why in Ephesians it can say “pray always” (6:18). We pray always whenever we act in conscious and loving union with things—which eventually can be all the time. Then whatever you do is a prayer, not a recited prayer but a full-bodied, bigger-than-mind, contemplative prayer. When you are in your True Self, your prayer and your breath are the same thing.
– R. Rohr

the work is being done

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Even the purest metaphysical Taoist thinkers, the Lungman Taoists, say that people “can assist in improving the divine handiwork” – or, as the modern Taoist puts it, people may “follow the Will of the Creator in guiding the world in its evolution towards the ultimate Reality.” Even Meister Echhart said, “God needs man.” God needs man to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him, Teilhard said. His friend, Abbe’ Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about God: “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it is up to us to accomplish it.” “Little by little,” – the paleontologist himself said, “the work is being done.”

– Annie Dillard, For The Time Being

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(Photo: Portland, Maine – August 2012)

Approaches to Blue Hill Bay: Chart No. 13313 – Donald Junkins

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Late June, walking the deer runs
to Goose Pond after supper,
summer begins. Sidestepping
stormblown poplars,
dry-wading the slash from the pulper’s camps
ten years ago, keeping the imaginary
straight line from Duck Island Light to the  north side
of Goose Pond Mountain in our minds’ eyes, poking
straight-arms, trying to keep from snagging
the green fur, the purple stars in the schooldesk landscape
of the nautical chart.
Yellow, blue.
The island woods are yellow. The evening sun
sprays through from the other side of the evergreens.
Watercolors, our first grade pegs
arranging. We push for the first view
of the marsh-edged shore, spruce stumpsticks
edging deep water trout
neverminding the cold. We know where we are:
a mile straight in on the yellow.
We lose our way. My son climbs a blue spruce
to see where we’ve been: the two Sisters,
Long Island Plantation. On the left, the Baptist
church in Atlantic. We head into the sun.
Late June, walking the deer runs
to Goose Pond after supper,
summer begins suddenly. We can hear
the creeing of gulls. Beyond the trees
they are landing, taking off, landing.
Saltwhite. Freshblue. It is all
prearranged. In a minute now
we will see the pond. Nothing has changed.

Donald Junkins, The New Yorker, June 1977

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