Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.

– Rumi

late December
    locked up tight
    like a cloister door
a splinter of light
    opens the sky
    a crack before 

the nurse with red hair
    is there with your
    meds saying
for God’s sake
    close the door and
    put on your clothes

I wake to doze while
   beyond the walls
   it’s Christmas

When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms, we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so empty-and a shock to ourselves. But the biblical God takes away our shame and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form. Then we find out who we really are and who God is for us – and it is more than enough.

– Richard Rohr

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Where Jesus lives, the great-hearted gather. We are a door that’s never locked.

If you are suffering any kind of pain, stay near this door. Open it.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Julian of Norwich

If the only prayer you say in your whole life is “thank you” that would suffice. – Meister Eckhart