Dear darkening ground, you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built, perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour and grant the churches and cloisters two, And those that labor—maybe you’ll let their work grip them another five hours, or seven before you become forest again, and widening wilderness in that hour of inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things. Just give me a little more time! I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they’re real and ripe and worthy of you. I want only seven days, seven
The Road Here is the road: the light comes and goes then returns again. Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they move through the world of stone and stars whirling with you yet every one alone. The road waits. Do not ask questions but when it invites you to dance at daybreak, say yes. Each step is the journey; a single note the song. -Arlene Gay Levine from Bless the Day, ed. by June Cotner I have returned from an amazing week. For the last six days my teaching partner Betsey Beckman and I have been immersed in our Awakening
The image is my view from the hermitage over the Hood Canal toward the Olympic mountains. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
Preface to Leaves of Grass (excerpt) Love the earth and sun and the animals,despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,stand up for the stupid and crazy,devote your income and labor to others,hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,have patience and indulgence toward the people,take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,or to any man or number of men,go freely with powerful uneducated persons,and with the young, and with the mothers or families,re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;and your very flesh shall be a great poem….
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the earth; for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas. -Rainer Maria Rilke, from In Praise of Mortality My dreams lately have been inviting me to enter into dark and uncomfortable places. We have such a fear of darkness in our culture — a denial of death and a resistance to the work of grief , as well as resisting the gifts darkness offers to us. I am slowly realizing that this is in part what my time at this cottage by the sea is about — moving into the literal growing darkness of the