I remain clumsy with cameras, perhaps unsurprisingly, given their mechanical intrusion on the supraplenary nature of image. The old family bible at last relinquished, albeit tearfully, at the dump. Prismatic striations flow from the west to the east end of the bedroom but happiness stays strangely distant. Plain talk as ideal, plain talk to mark the way. And yet.
How frightened of myself I am and remain and as a result, how divided. It is imperative we question consequence, staying with the analysis until we realize we are being led to freedom through no effort of our own. God in a woman's voice, God in her shoulder, and God in the way she lets you lean against her before you go out walking. A letter in transit somewhere over Ireland. How many church floors I have swept searching for the one altar before which to fall weeping!
"To clutch" the salient - the cautionary - verb now. The old dog watches me from his bower of light and plenitude. I walk the forest crying, as if Jesus really were a shepherd and I a lost confounded sheep. Binoculars abound! On the other hand, how happy I am, thinking of the spring's first bear.
Attention given without condition yields awareness of an underlying harmony. Can we - at last may we - move beyond the crutch of metaphor? We are not completed by another and the idea we can be remains obfuscatory. Yet the sun appears to scale distant hills and lines of trees and its movement insists on yet another - a deeper - form of surrender. I mean moonlight as the envelope into which she tucked herself a thousand times a thousand lifetimes past.
Appreciating your subtle nod in the direction of the day and, on an inclusive note, I keep sweeping those church floors, too. :)
ReplyDeleteYour Course post brought to mind the line "Fear holds close, love holds dear," and that led to other thoughts and on and on until they formed a poem.
Funny, how that happens ... And, because it begs to be said to someone named Sean: "Happy St. Patrick's Day."
Hope you have a productive spring break, one that includes a little Spring :)
Cheryl
. . . and my middle name is Patrick, no less.
ReplyDeleteThe Ireland reference was a strange coincidence. I wrote this a few days ago and only noticed it was scheduled for the 17th yesterday. For assorted reasons, most of them familial, I don't give this holiday much thrift. Happy to see so many beer makers pulling out of NYC and Boston parades, though . . .
Yeah, fear . . . Got to look at it, and keep looking at it, until we see it's not there. Glad some of the sentences were generative - my best writing is always a response to others' work, as if a chain were being forged, a transcendent one.
re: spring . . . just got back from a long walk listening to little feeder brooks singing under snow and chickadees practically alighting on my shoulders when I stopped to listen . . . sometimes we take the prism with us and sometimes we are the prism. . .
~ Sean
I imagine we become the prism when we lose all sense of I, me, my, mine. There are mornings I start with that thought, but too quickly lose it, only to remember again later. Still, there was a point when it never entered my mind to lose this concept of "me." Always baby steps...
ReplyDeleteChickadees are such personable birds. I have a pair building a nest in a hollowed limb of the flowering cherry tree just outside my kitchen window. They're so effervescent and full of life. The other day as I watched, a bluebird perched on the branch and stuck its head in the chickadees' sanctuary.
Unlike chickadees, bluebirds are so shy. What a gift to see one -- and a brilliant boy bird at that -- so close. No doubt I, too, enjoy the presence of a feathered God.
I fell in love with birds in the early nineties, felt like I had a bird-shaped hole in me somewhere. Hayden Carruth did a think little anthology of bird poems & talked about how birds are almost more recognizable as silhouettes than in full-color photographs. That resonated for me for some reason. I watch them all closely, mindful of E.D.'s "thing with feathers." Bluebirds, yes!
ReplyDeleteMorning is when "me and mine" is most fluid. Aurobindo, of whom I am much enamored, is very gentle in teaching that we aren't really called to lose that so much as just relate to it differently. Someone asked Tara Singh once how to get rid of their selfish and nattering thoughts and he said to let it be. We wouldn't try to shut a waterfall up, why try to put the kibosh on thought which is, in a way, natural enough.
I think it's a choice: I think we are making decisions every second to be something, to step out of the flow - to separate from God - and what's needed isn't to fix the bad choices but to just choose again - to slip back into the flow, God, whatever. If I remember it's a choice - and remember I've made it before and can make it again - it seems to be easier to call back to mind and bring to application.
Baby steps, indeed. But the company is nice . . .