Station Island XI by Seamus Heaney/St John of the Cross As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope I plunged once in a butt of muddied water Surfaced like a marvelous lightship And out of its silted crystals a monk’s face That had spoken years ago from behind a grille Spoke again about the need and chance To salvage everything, to re-envisage The zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift Mistakenly abased …. What came to nothing could always be replenished. “Read poems as prayers,” he said, “and for your penance Translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.” Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness, His consonants aspirate, his forehead shining, He had made me feel there was nothing to confess. Now his sandaled passage stirred me on to this: How well I know that fountain, filling, running, Although it is the night. That eternal fountain, hidden away I know its haven and its secrecy Although it is the night But not its source because it does not have one, Which is all sources’ source and...

  I learned a new word this week or should I say I let a word which I had heard before, but to which I had never paid attention, into my consciousness. The word is “precarity”! By now, you may have come to expect that I love to riff on words which have surfaced or even erupted in my life. This feels a little different.   Precarity seems to be a word to which I am called to pay attention because it is part of a surrender of false self, a process to which I am deeply committed. Precarity is defined as the state of uncertainty or precariousness. It seems to feed doubt and despair. However, it speaks to a certain fragility which we so often avoid. Precarity calls us to the vulnerability and powerlessness which comes right before conversion and redemption. Precarity is not separate from resurrection; it is essential to it. So much of my life has been spent denying any weakness and, in turn, shoving precarity down. I am realizing there is a lot of precarity residing in my dark wells...