Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
The Motives and Yearnings of Sea Creatures
Has this animate wall of seaweed evolved to feed on others?
Or shall we tell the story to others of as victim, donning the color and form of surrounding flora to hide?
Cunning predator or desperate prey?
How we want an answer as life itself moves forward, indifferent to our questioning, yearning for what it wants and running from what it fears.
What does it mean to say: I am this?
In whose eyes?
If they are God's eyes, what might God say to these motives and yearning we were given?
Perhaps that's why God left the naming to Adam.
Instead, this morning as the sun catches your attention, startles you as it peaks around that building,
God asks: what do you want? what do you fear? and what does each have to do with the other?
Or shall we tell the story to others of as victim, donning the color and form of surrounding flora to hide?
Cunning predator or desperate prey?
How we want an answer as life itself moves forward, indifferent to our questioning, yearning for what it wants and running from what it fears.
What does it mean to say: I am this?
In whose eyes?
If they are God's eyes, what might God say to these motives and yearning we were given?
Perhaps that's why God left the naming to Adam.
Instead, this morning as the sun catches your attention, startles you as it peaks around that building,
God asks: what do you want? what do you fear? and what does each have to do with the other?
Sunday, September 9, 2012
From a poem by Robinson Jeffers
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
Seeing clearly
The glasses hang on rusted barbed wire. The remaining lens is coated with a thin film of salt from the ocean spray. Did the vista of the Pacific coast make the owner forget he would ever need to see anything close up again? Or is it possible that a single view of this magnificent beauty can heal the eyes forever?
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Warrior
Nothing can inspire you more than watching the strength, beauty and poise of a warrior.
I am so blessed.
I am so blessed.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Encountering the Dragon
And then you see, finally, what the dragon looks like.
You never saw it for the mess you imagined in front of you: the multi-colored Post-It notes, the scraps of paper, notes scrawled on the back of receipts, half-filled journals that were scattered all over the floor of that dark cave.
But when it rises up, the dragon is a whirlwind of glittering fragments, sharp, cutting, metallic shards that spin and gather shape -- out of the chaos then, this order of beast: your own Grandiosity given shape, taking form, taking flight.
Slay it or tame it.
You never saw it for the mess you imagined in front of you: the multi-colored Post-It notes, the scraps of paper, notes scrawled on the back of receipts, half-filled journals that were scattered all over the floor of that dark cave.
But when it rises up, the dragon is a whirlwind of glittering fragments, sharp, cutting, metallic shards that spin and gather shape -- out of the chaos then, this order of beast: your own Grandiosity given shape, taking form, taking flight.
Slay it or tame it.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Happiness
There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
Jane Kenyon
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
Jane Kenyon
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
What are you focused on?
The backstory to this photo:
Monday evening on my way to Centering Prayer, I decide to take my half hour and walk past the Buddhist temple to see if I might find any photos.
I spot this bodhisattva in the bushes and climb up on a short concrete ledge to get several different shots -- zooming in, framing it horizontally, vertically -- all the while pressed up against the metal fence. Shooting above it, then between the wrought iron posts.
"Hugh?!" I hear someone call from behind me. To turn, I have to step off of the concrete ledge and down to the sidewalk. "It IS you. I thought it was you."
It is Chelsea from my office. She tells me she lives three doors down -- and at first thought that it was odd, just an hour after work, to see me standing taking pictures of the Buddhist temple. And all the while I'm thinking about what I had been focused on....
Monday evening on my way to Centering Prayer, I decide to take my half hour and walk past the Buddhist temple to see if I might find any photos.
I spot this bodhisattva in the bushes and climb up on a short concrete ledge to get several different shots -- zooming in, framing it horizontally, vertically -- all the while pressed up against the metal fence. Shooting above it, then between the wrought iron posts.
"Hugh?!" I hear someone call from behind me. To turn, I have to step off of the concrete ledge and down to the sidewalk. "It IS you. I thought it was you."
It is Chelsea from my office. She tells me she lives three doors down -- and at first thought that it was odd, just an hour after work, to see me standing taking pictures of the Buddhist temple. And all the while I'm thinking about what I had been focused on....
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Shadow of the Singer
A beautiful song, poem, painting or photograph leaves shadows. Sometimes scars.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
In the alley...
In the grey, rain-dampened alley behind the restaurant, sit two darker smokers filled with smoldering charcoal. Bright coals, dense smoke: what's cooking/I think.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Sunday Thoughts
We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability - and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually - let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time, (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
From Rimbaud's Genie
From John Ashberry's translation of "Genie" by Arthur Rimbaud
He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from tumultuous pole to castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.
He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from tumultuous pole to castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.
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