Category: faith

Safe Passage

For shelter in the event of this now.

How do you enter?

What, you mean this? It can help to know that you are already here.

Parents have been sending the children to school with special stickers: names, telephone, blood type––in case, in the event––unmentionable, but. Some schools made these stickers mandatory. They have been practicing. In case of fire, one drill; bomb, another. The idea is not to panic.

How?

It can help to know that–– 

Not to say too much. We want them to feel normal, say the mothers.

What now?

We pray, says one mother. We pray a lot, she says, for peace.

But how can––

Look. We are already here.

But––

We hold the babies, hold the prayers. We hold on, and the windows are shaking.

Shhh, we say, shh.  What else?

***

For the mothers and the babies, the brothers, fathers, the missing, and those holding in solidarity and love.

Sources referenced: Foreign Policy and Today.

Dark Matters

And other enigmas of being.

You can try to name it with an austere smile or sprinkle it over the garden; count the universe in years, a galaxy in stars, a recognized species in projected numbers to a beginning or end; you can wave self-proclaimed insights with the strength of an eye pressed hot against an iron will, claiming the inconstant sun like a trophy in a body’s feeble attempt to make itself into a direction. But then comes this spinning and the compass will not hold, and all the fragile parts of a theory of everything collapse into the gap between the last exhalation and the next breath.

Walking

A lesson in surrender.

Before the iron star,

earthquake snaking 

over the far side of 

dreams, listening for 

butterfly whispers 

in the hard blue of

a desert sky, a child 

holds a foot over a 

knee to examine a 

thorn. For a moment, 

all is the space  between

his hand, his foot,

and the tiny barb. What

follows is a long 

discovery: how 

a body can learn to 

abandon itself to 

pure endurance.

Compass and Compassion

Reins, range, and possibility.

Considering the freedom of a given will, one might ask, which is it: from some impediment, or into some possibility? But here’s a tired habit again, the old insistence on one or the other: acting in nature vs. enacting Nature, and never beyond reach from creation, enduring the fractals of a multiplicity of loves, and the wounds a body learns to bear for their sum, ever toward some abundance of seeming opposites unveiled, this vast body assembled from so many shattered shards.

Opening Address

To the morning assembly.

Cat––

Bed, I––

Coffee, I will.

Sink, please help me.

Pillow, will you stay here?

Wonder, find me again in this haze.

Hope, flood through this dark space.

Heart, pay attention, keep watch, and remember.

Head, stop trying to lead and figure. You tend to get in the way.

Feet, hold still while I find the ground. Then get moving and lift me across.

Water, wash my tired eyes, these shadows beneath them.

Pen, carry on and continue to follow these invisible lines, trust the moving hand, however clumsy and dumb, though it keeps dropping the hold. 

We are here today––

Begin again each time it loses the thread, and it is always––

We are here today to––

Dearly beloved. 

We are gathered here to

meet these beginnings.

For Courage

An invocation.

Not fearless but moving through peril––not undone by it but doing. To draw from the reservoir that sustains any worthwhile action. To examine danger well enough to draw its portrait, and still move against it. Instead of blocking ears against its detailed threats, to answer them. To resist the urge to reel toward relief. To recognize impending death and continue to grow; witness destruction and dare to love; recognize enforcement of silence and dare to speak aloud. To refuse the given stories and unfurl your own myth, replacing willingness to die with courage to live. To bear the agony of doubt and raise it like a torch, toward some new beginning.

Bodies of Evidence

What lives beyond measure.

Our forms in flight evaded all process of proof, and when they came to measure us, we laughed ourselves into vapor, evading capture. We were solid only when we wanted to be. Yes, we danced freely among clouds, but were neither formless or endless, those ideals that only vanity presumes, and we had none when we were running, streams of selves flowing; would you put a river in a jar?

Forms and Fallacies

Matters of perception.

Regarding certain questions of form and matter, an old, wise one observes, beyond earshot, there’s no joy in what doesn’t exist. Meaning certain illusions, such as righteous selves, but these are too busy saving to hear. Who else is saving? There’s a dragon somewhere in one of those caves, guarding what some would call fortune, but there’s another myth.

Imagination is another thing, a vital series of high-powered lenses for seeing what the naked eye, long dulled by resignation, will commonly miss, especially in moments read as ordinary time and especially in moments of crisis, where matters of life and death are prone to changes of direction before reaching orbital velocity.

I wanted to know more, so asked. The wise one said, it doesn’t matter, and then waited until we were both done laughing. Then said, Beware hallucinations of rote perception. Sight without surrender is only illusion.  Then we kept watch together until we were both done cracking up. Our eyes were wet when we parted, washed into a state of fleeting and magnificent clarity.

***

The observation, “There is no joy in what doesn’t exist” comes from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation

Beings of Theory

Contending with a shapeshifter.

Some qualities of some visible bodies

––form, size, weight––are supposed 

to belong to them even when they are

not sensed, by cultivated habits of

mind, creating certain illusions of

fixity. And yet

being has never been sensible––

or, for that matter, some thing,

and so many are terrified by 

its/ not its evasion of form.

An old sleight of hand: make

a thing of what is/not, in order

to pretend control over what

moves too well for naming.