Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez
Quoted in:  F. Lynn Bachleda "Blue Mountain:  A Spiritual Anthology Celebrating The Earth" (2000)

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of the conscious mind: how to live a more compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself.....There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

John Caputo

John Caputo
The Weakness of God: A Theology Of The Event (2006, p122)

God calls us before we call upon God, calling up what is best and highest in us.  In that sense God pursues us, preys upon us, or even prays to us, inasmuch as God calls upon, provokes, and invokes us.  The name of God is the name of what we desire, of everything that we desire, but it is also the name is what desires us, of what desires everything of us.....We are called by God, which is our vocation, even as we call upon God, which is our invocation.  We subsist in the space between these calls.

Miracle Fair - ~ Wislawa Szymborska

 

MIRACLE FAIR

The commonplace miracle: 

that so many common miracles take place.

 

The usual miracles: 

invisible dogs barking 

in the dead of night.

 

One of many miracles: 

a small and airy cloud 

is able to upstage the massive moon.

 

Several miracles in one: 

an alder is reflected in the water 

and is reversed from left to right 

and grows from crown to root 

and never hits bottom 

though the water isn't deep.

 

A run-of-the-mill miracle: 

winds mild to moderate 

turning gusty in storms.

 

A miracle in the first place: 

cows will be cows.

 

Next but not least: 

just this cherry orchard 

from just this cherry pit.

 

A miracle minus top hat and tails: 

fluttering white doves.

 

A miracle (what else can you call it): 

the sun rose today at three fourteen a.m. 

and will set tonight at one past eight.

 

A miracle that's lost on us: 

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers 

but still it's got more than four.

 

A miracle, just take a look around: 

the inescapable earth.

 

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary: 

the unthinkable 

can be thought. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

 

(View With a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

 

(View With a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Monet Refuses the Operation - Lisa Mueller

Monet Refuses the Operation

Lisa Mueller

 

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

~ Lisel Mueller ~

 

(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

"Remember" by Christine Valters Paintner

Remember 
by Christine Valters Paintner

And what did you do on earth?
I descended daily into the hush – if only for a moment,
but sometimes for blessed hours at a time.
I followed the shimmering threads which lured me
into the night, full of wonder at all that was unfolding.
I opened myself wide to gratitude,
to the delight that there was anything at all,
much less pink-petaled peonies
and generous handfuls of red berries,
the incredible sweetness of things,
or the way dawn and dusk could reveal
my own new thresholds,
how a walk by the sea can change
everything,
and that I could be so well loved, and love in return,
that I could dance on earth’s forest floor
and say “yes” to life from the belly of sorrow.

And what was the best of it?
I was saved by beauty again and again,
the golden glimmer of sunlight
across wet pavement revealing a luminous world,
and the stone ruins of churches and monasteries,
with their arches of ancient longing holding
ten thousand prayers, ten thousand paths to hope.

And what would you have changed?
Only perhaps to have worried less about what might come,
which never did
in exactly the way I imagined.
And to spend less time in front of screens,
offering more of myself to the elements of wind and rain and mud,
to roll with playful abandon in the wet grass, the way dogs do.

And what will you do now?
I will reach across the veil and whisper the word
“remember” to anyone who will listen.

"Remember" by Christine Valters Paintner