angelbirdflies

“Basho said: avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.” - as paraphrased by Robert Hass Just this. Just this is it. Our opinions, judgements and comparisons are unnecessary. Look how far they’ve gotten us. Why not try a different approach? Love what is. And celebrate the simple fact that we don’t really know what’s going on here. That’s the true leap of love. The vulnerability of the unknown, acknowledged and embraced. Love, no longer relegated to mere preference, resumes its natural function in benevolent welcome to what is... as it is.

Earth. Rock. Desert. I am walking barefoot on sandstone, flesh responding to flesh. It is hot, so hot the rock threatens to burn through the calloused soles of my feet. I must quicken my pace, paying attention to where I step. For as far as I can see, the canyon country of southern Utah extends in all directions. No compass can orient me here, only a pledge to love and walk the terrifying distances before me. What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart. I climb the slickrock on all fours, my hands and feet throbbing with the heat. It feels good to sweat, to be engaged, to inhabit my animal body. . . . Once I enter the Joint Trail . . . it is dark, cool, and narrow with sheer sandstone walls on either side of me. . . . The palms of my h

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made sing his being simply by being the thing it is: stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made, means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made there is given one shade shaped exactly to the thing itself: under the tree a darker tree; under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. A part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made. BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind  haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider-- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep