Someday, after mastering the winds,
the waves,
the tides and gravity,
we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And then,
for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.
~Teilhard de Chardin
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May we not forget~
the energy of love was harnessed
within one Man:
God come to our side
to help us master ourselves
in the name of the Master.
Once the fire of the spirit is within us
it can never be extinguished.
~EPG
We want to reach the kingdom of God,
but we don’t want to travel by way of death.
And yet there stands Necessity saying:
‘This way, please.’
Do not hesitate to go this way,
when this is the way that God came to you.
~ Augustine
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We too easily forget;
we are not asked to bear more
than God endured for us,
always pointed to the well-worn path
bearing the footprints
coming to lead us home.
Some ask for the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
~R.S. Thomas “Gift”
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A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold,
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”
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I am astonished at my thirstiness
slaked by such simple things
as a moment of pink,
a burst of birdsong,
the softness of fluff about to let go,
a glimpse of tomorrow over the horizon of today.
How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
Without a turn in temperature,
With weather life can scarce endure,
That light has won a fraction’s strength,
And day put on some moments’ length,
Whereof in merest rote will come,
Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
O crocus root, how do you know,
How do you know?
~Thomas Hardy from “The Year’s Awakening”
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Only a handful of days with temperatures over 50 degrees F and the ground begins to crack with sprouting bulbs. They are emerging early, sadly misled that winter is done. In any case, it is glorious to see them. I won’t be surprised to hear the peepers starting their night chorus before long.
The year awakens despite the darkness when I leave for work in the morning and the darkness when I return. We are turning a corner, staggering and bleary-eyed, emerging from the underground, preparing to face the light.
Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be,
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.
~Thomas Kelly from his hymn “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him”
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Because I finished my term on earth
and had no knowledge of either
fear nor care, no morning knowledge,
no knowledge of evening,
and those who came before
and those following after
had no more knowledge of me
than I had of them.
~Mary Ruefle from “Marked”
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Whether we are coming or going,
beginning or ending,
leading or following,
rising or setting,
north or south,
east or west,
one day we shall be
where or what we should be,
even if not now
even if not now
even if not now~
we soon shall be.
If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.
― Rainer Maria Rilke
As a child, I would sometimes spend long rainy afternoons languishing on the couch, complaining to my mother how boring life seemed. Her typical response was to remind me my boredom said more about me than about life – I became the accused, rather than the accuser, failing to summon up life’s riches. Thus convicted, my sentence followed: she would promptly give me chores to do. I learned not to voice my complaints about life was treating me because it always meant work.
Some things haven’t changed all these decades later. Whenever I am tempted to feel pitiful or bored, accusing my life of being poor or unfair, I need to remember what my accusation says about me. If I’m not poet enough to celebrate the gilded edge of the plain and ordinary, if I’m not poet enough to articulate beauty even in the sharp thorns of life, if I’m not poet enough to recognize the Creator’s brilliance in every molecule, then it is my poverty I’m accusing, not His, and a poet I will never be.
So it’s back to work then.
There is a world to admire, a life to be lived and yes, poems to be written.
Let us go in; the fog is rising…
~Emily Dickinson, her last words
I have watched the dying
in their last hours:
often they see what I cannot,
listen to what I do not hear,
stretch their arms overhead
as fingers extend and grasp
to touch what is beyond my reach.
I watch and wonder how it is
to reverse the journey that brought us here
from the fog of amnion.
The mist of living lifts.
We will enter a place
unsurpassed in brilliance and clarity;
the mystery of what lies beyond solved
only by going back in,
welcomed to return to where we started.
Cold is an absence, an absence of heat, and yet it feels like a presence–a vigorous, hostilely active presence in the air that presses upon your naked face and that makes your fingers and toes ache within their mittens and boots. Cold is always working, it seems– busy freezing water in the ponds and rivers, knitting intricate six-sided snowflakes by the billions, finding cracks around the walls and windows of your house, forcing furnaces in the cellar to roar away.
I like winter because it locks me indoors with my books, my word processor, and my clear and brittle thoughts. There is a visual poetry that goes with the cold. Ferns and stars of frost mysteriously appear on the windows and take their place in a child’s mythology.
The cold has the philosophical value of reminding men that the universe does not love us…cold is our ancient companion. To return back indoors after exposure to the bitter, inimical, implacable cold is to experience gratitude for the shelters of civilization, for the islands of warmth that life creates.
~John Updike from “The Cold”
Today, a goodly portion of the eastern seaboard of the United States is bracing for a mammoth blizzard immobilizing travelers and rendering folks home-bound. Meanwhile, here in the Pacific Northwest, our temperature reached an unseasonably balmy 60 degrees yesterday.
Even in our relative warmth here, we’ve already endured our string of sub-freezing temperature nights and days with crystal clear skies once the frozen fog abates. Several feet of snow are back on our summer drought-bared hills and mountains. During our cold snaps, everything shimmers with diamonds of frosty glitter all day long. It is the kind of cold this Pacific Northwest native can actually enjoy. It is not the cold of the midwest plains, or the Alaskan frontier. This is civilized, “kill the bugs and the allergens” cold that helps balance out the ecosystem as well as our internal thermostats. It is just not natural or seemly to live at 70 degrees year round, toasted by the stove in the winter, soothed by conditioned air in the summer.
We are not always so lucky here. The cold that sometimes descends in northeast winds from the Arctic can blast through the strongest Carhartt clothing, sneak through drafty doors and windows, and freeze pipes not left dripping. It leaves no one untouched and unbitten with universal freezer burn.
Bitter cold or a heavy snow storm ensures even independent fair-weather individualists must become companionable when the going gets rugged, mandating shelter with others for survival. It can even mean forced companionship with those we ordinarily avoid, with whom we have little in common, with whom we disagree and even quarrel, with whom sharing a hug or snuggling for warmth would be unimaginable.
Our whole nation is in just such a bitter, inimical, implacable political cold snap today, terribly divided as we suffer through one of the most hostile and regrettable presidential election cycles in memory.
If we don’t come in out of the societal deep freeze that is afflicting us all, we each will perish alone. It is time to be thankful we have each other, such as we are. At least we can generate heat, even if we can’t manage to lighten up.
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”
There are mornings surrounded by His stilling presence~
when God is felt,
neither seen or heard,
overtaking me
within each breath taken,
following the path of each glistening tear,
becoming the ground reaching to meet my foot
with each step I take.
Barnstorming 