Tag: understanding

To Walk Alongside

barnstormingblog8 Comments

josehomer

thebuds

None of us can “mend” another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it.

Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.

What we can do is walk alongside the people we care about, offering simple companionship and compassion. And if we want to do that, we must save the only life we can save, our own.
~Parker Palmer writing about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”

outforawalk1

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
~Eugene O’Neill

mapleponygold

We are born hollering and suddenly alone,
already aware of our emptiness
from the first breath,
each tiny air sac bursting
with the air of our fallen world~
air that is never enough.

The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether alveoli
or stomach
or synapses starving for understanding,
still hollering in our loneliness
and heart
broken.

So we mend ourselves
through our walk with others
also broken,
we patch up our gaps
by knitting the scraggly fragments
of lives lived together.
We become the crucial glue
boiled from gifted Grace,
all our holes
somehow made holy.

brothers

eaglecouple2

3musketeers2

homerhooter

I Greet Him

barnstormingblog3 Comments

sunset5251

sunset92horses

clouds101143

I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west;
Since, though he is under the world’s splendor and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

I greet Him when I meet Him
as the color of the evening sky
spills out as tipped paint
far fleeting across the horizon,
cleaned up and gone before grasped,
I kiss my hand
to the drama played out before sun is set.

I greet Him when I meet Him
as starlight speckles
the overhead ceiling,
each touching infinity
where it begins
and never ends.

I greet Him when I meet Him
in glowing cloud mountains
sparking lightning
and clapping thunder,
applause for His
resplendent magnificence.

I greet Him when
He is hidden
mysterious
unknown and unknowable,
waiting for the blessing
of understanding
wafting from Him
in color, in speckle,
in glow, in spark,
in appreciative applause
for His splendor
wrapped in wonder.

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sunset1181

Congeries of Colored Things

barnstormingblog3 Comments

marketstars2

marketflowers

chihuly1

wlczinnia

It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find.
It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time.
Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors.
We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps
to reveal more colored things.
Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe.
There is no crack.
Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams?

It is our lives we love, our times, our generation, our pursuits.
And are we called to forsake these vivid and palpable goods
for an idea of which we experience not one trace?
Am I to believe eternity outranks my child’s finger?

Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone to Talk

If we look closely enough
we see farthest
with eyes closed
to the distraction of life’s colored things,
real and imagined.

Eternity — beyond what we can know
Infinity — beyond what we can conjure

We reach for it
because we are told
it is within our grasp.

fallcrocus4

marketstars1

chihuly15

homerose2

chihuly16

marketstars4

Sublime Beauty

barnstormingblog2 Comments

thistledowndrizzle

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens and gives you a deeper understanding… Everything that is really good and beautiful, of inward moral, spiritual and sublime beauty, in human beings and in their works, comes from God.
~Vincent Van Gogh

Enclosed field with rising sun --Van Gogh
Enclosed field with rising sun –Van Gogh

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