Image of Jordan Pond where everything can seem so clarifying and sacred. The Lake of Beauty by  Edward Carpenter Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store. All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your Nature so specially fits you for — that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It will surely come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefore do not begin that game at all. Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert. But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still; And let them become clear, so clear — so limpid, so mirror-like; At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peac...

  “We don’t sit in meditation to be good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we will be more awake in our lives.” Pema Chodron During times of grief, like that which I am experiencing now after the death of my father, there is an almost constant voice crying out: Do Something!   And all my training, all my formation, all my experience whispers back: That is the wrong question.   Again the counter voice: Don’t just sit there, do something! And still small voice: Be still…be I often turn to Pema Chodron in times of anxiety and uncertainty even though her answer seems to be: learn to be in the anxiety, in the uncertainty. I have in the past wanted to reject that difficult prescription. And yet persistent events of loss, deaths, pandemics, broken relationships, violence and injustice continue , beyond my control. So I try to shift my perspective away from the How can I fix it mode, toward the how can I simply be in this situation mode. Seems passive at first and counter ...

  "On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’   And they were filled with great awe   and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’" Mark 4:35-41 Awe is a very important word in Christianity. It is the human response to God’s divine acts; it is even God’s reaction to divine creativity; and as such it evokes and focuses human response ability. ‘And awe came upon them...

  Awe is a very important word in Christianity. It is the human response to God’s divine acts; it is even God’s reaction to divine creativity; and as such it evokes and focuses human response ability. ‘And awe came upon them all’ is the phrase which describes the response when the Holy Spirit breathed the Word of God upon all gathered after the resurrection on Pentecost. Specifically, the cacophony of tongues created a confusion which was also a cosmic witness to that which surrounded, inspired and bound all humanity.   And today in Mark’s gospel in the calming of the stormy sea, not a confusion of language so much as a chaos of survival dimensions was calmed by the Peace which passes understanding. And awe came upon everyone.   I am fascinated by awe. It strikes me as the response whenever even the tiniest sliver of holiness is revealed in the world shrouded in darkness and anxiety, violence and injustice.   Awe is the response to unexpected mercy, to beauty peeking...

  On the Parable of the Mustard Seed Who ever saw the mustard-plant, wayside weed or tended crop, grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful of shade and nests and songs? Acres of yellow, not a bird of the air in sight. No, He who knew the west wind brings the rain, the south wind thunder, who walked the field-paths running His hand along wheatstems to glean those intimate milky kernels, good to break on the tongue, was talking of miracle, the seed within us, so small we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust, nothing.                    Glib generations mistake the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees, not noticing paradox. Mountains remain unmoved. Faith is rare, He must have been saying, prodigious, unique — one infinitesimal grain divided like loaves and fishes, as if  from a mustard-seed a great shade-tree grew. That rare, that strange: the kingdom            ...

  Accordion by Teddy Macker There are no more roses anymore, even though there are roses. Fastly tightening, people looking down into their hands, styrofoam everywhere, energy drinks, plexiglass, porn, there are no more accordions, no more bluebirds, no more freckled girls and rivers, rivers of water. But we -  we must make prayers again. The navel of every human is lonely. The innocent countries of the back.Shoulders like night-quiet pines. Don't ask for God. Don't ask for happiness or liberation. When you pray, ask for the world to return to your eyes. The poem above has haunted me since I encountered it. It seems so creatively expressive of the way things are...when we look away or look down in our preoccupations or absences. We miss so much. And we are not aware of how much it matters.  And yet we desire happiness and freedom... Perhaps it is there. The roses are there whether we see them or not; so are the buds of spring and the golden pollen...

  At first it was the drama of the color and the wonder of witness. Then I realized the arc which seemed to embrace the beauty, seemed to embrace the dawning of eternal grace on yet another day in yet another dimension. And so with the chaos which prevails in the flatness of news I became aware of and rested in that faint arc of justice and felt refracted hope.

  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...