Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, Be more silent. – Rumi
sit quietly
open road
From this hour, I ordain myself
Loos’d of imaginary lines
– Walt Whitman
It will be your church – your cathedral
I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can- in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal-but then you need to do that-then you are freed from the power of them. If you do that with these eyes for instance they will cease to draw you. You should never try to make the visions come again. Think of it in your imagination and try to paint it. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church-your cathedral-the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them-then you lose your soul-for in that book is your soul. – C.G. Jung
the nearness
the nearness there was this song I heard January 2017 I was driving on a Sunday evening I had to pull over in the dark to cry for the nearness of you after you had gone
if it be your will
a kind of charm
Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding: it is something you remember. So much for definition! We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again. – Thomas Merton
to discover the truth about myself…
Man’s intelligence, however we may misuse it, is far too keen and too sure to rest for long in error. It may embrace a lie and cling to it stubbornly, believing it to be true: but it cannot find true rest in falsehood. The mind that is in love with error wears itself out with anxiety, lest its error be discovered for what it is. But the man who loves truth can already find rest in the acknowledgment of his mistakes, for that is the beginning of truth.
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error. A false and illusory “experience” of what appears to be God’s action in the soul may bring with it, for a moment, a kind of interior silence: the silence of a soul that rests in an illusion. But this silence is quickly disturbed by a deep under- current of unrest and noise. The tension of a soul trying to hold itself in silence, when it has no truth to appease it with a superior silence, is louder than the noise of big cities and more disturbing than the movement of an army.
– Thomas Merton
from Song of The Open Road by Walt Whitman
War
Old age in the towns. The heart without an owner. Love without any object. Grass, dust, crow. And the young ones?
In the coffins.
The tree alone and dry. Women like a stick of widowhood across the bed. Hatred there is no cure for.. And the young ones?
In the coffins.
MIGUEL HERNANDEZ
(translated by Hardie St. Martin)
Edge of Atlantic 