If you will cling to Nature

/ Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

Rainer Maria Rilke – If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.FB_IMG_1515864264340-1.jpg

Calling A Wolf A Wolf

/ Bill Schulz / 2 Comments

I am reading a remarkable book of poetry by Kaveh Akbar, Calling A Wolf A Wolf. Brave, bold, astonishing – the poems express the desolation of addiction, the madness of alcoholism.

Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus 

in Fort Wayne I drank the seniors        Old Milwaukee
Old Crow         in Indianapolis I stopped         now I regret
every drink I never took        all around          coffee grounds
and eggshells      this sweating         a mouthful
of  lime        as a boy I stole a mint green bra
from a laundromat       I took it home to try on
while my parents slept       filled its cups with the smallest
turnips in our pantry       the underwire grew
into me like a strangler fig       my blood roiled then
as now       back on earth frogspit is dripping
down wild aloe spikes       salmon are bullying
their way upstream       there is a pond I leapt into once
with a lonely blonde boy       when we scampered out one of us
was in love      I could not be held responsible
for desire       he could not be held at all     I wonder
where he is now       if he looked up he might see
me      a sparkling     I always hoped that when I died
I would know why        my brother will be so sad      he will tell
his daughter I was better than I was     he will leave out
my crueldrunk nights       the wet mattresses      my driving alone
into cornfields unsure whether I’d drive out       I wish
he were here now        he could be here      this cave
is big enough for everyone        look at all the diamonds

Sunrise demands this rightness

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

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Sunrise – an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of one’s being, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for a new day, praise Him in the name of all the beings that ever were or ever will be – as though now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, and acknowledging it, and praising God, so that, whether or not they praised God back then, themselves, they can do so now in me.

Sunrise demands this rightness, this order, this true disposition of one’s whole being.

  • From Thomas Merton’s Journal – January 20, 1963