Poetry Archives | Page 21 of 24

Forty Early Mornings

A New Moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and how one gives birth to oneself slowly. Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe. What nine months of attention does for an embryo forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness. -Rumi Tonight is the New Moon and Wednesday begins the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday. I am feeling especially reflective this weekend, listening for what my spirit needs during this holy season ahead. What will those forty early mornings do for my gradually growing wholeness? What possibilities lie dormant in the seeds that are just awakening beneath the ground of my soul? With the New Moon, the sky is swathed in darkness with only the points of light from stars shining in the night. Watching the moon wax forth from her place of surrender to the beauty

February 17, 2007

A Celebration of Love

Please Note: I added some more Lenten Resources in the post below, please keep the ideas coming for books to read or practices to take on. The ultimate Mystery of being, the ultimate Truth, is Love. This is the essential structure of reality. When Dante spoke of the ‘love which moves the sun and the other stars’, he was not using a metaphor, but was describing the nature of reality. There is in Being an infinite desire to give itself in love and this gift of Self in love is for ever answered by a return of love….and so

February 13, 2007

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

I am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimage–silent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation. I will examine their leaves as pages in a text and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter. I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia. I shall begin

February 9, 2007

Groundhog Day

Celebrate this unlikely oracle, this ball of fat and fur, whom we so mysteriously endow with the power to predict spring. Let’s hear it for the improbable heroes who, frightened at their own shadows, nonetheless unwittingly work miracles. Why shouldn’t we believe this peculiar rodent holds power over sun and seasons in his stubby paw? Who says that God is all grandeur and glory? Unnoticed in the earth, worms are busily, brainlessly, tilling the soil. Field mice, all unthinking, have scattered seeds that will take root and grow. Grape hyacinths, against all reason, have been holding up green shoots beneath

February 2, 2007

Rise Up Rooted

Book of Hours II, 16 How surely gravity’s law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the strongest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing – each stone, blossom, child – is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they

January 29, 2007

Zen of Housework

Rachel at Swandive left me my 1000th comment and so is my drawing winner! Another wonderful poem about finding the sacred in the most ordinary: The Zen of Housework I look over my own shoulder down my arms to where they disappear under water into hands inside pink rubber gloves moiling among dinner dishes. My hands lift a wine glass, holding it by the stem and under the bowl. It breaks the surface like a chalice rising from a medieval lake. Full of the grey wine of domesticity, the glass floats to the level of my eyes. Behind it, through

January 21, 2007

Sacredness of All Things

I love poetry that speaks of the holiness of the ordinary, the sacredness of all things. We make artificial divisions between sacred and secular, between what is worthy of our awe and gratitude and what is not. This is one of the elements I love most about Benedictine spirituality. In the Rule, Benedict wrote that “all utensils and goods of the monastery” are to be treated as “sacred vessels of the altar.” (RB 31:10-11) Esther DeWaal writes that Benedictine life “simply consists in doing the ordinary things of daily life carefully and lovingly, with the attention and reverence that can

January 18, 2007

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I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

Groundhog Day

Rise Up Rooted

Zen of Housework

Sacredness of All Things

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