The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact
that it was made by someone capable of believing
that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton
photo carl wycoff, Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill.
Tag: Life
….and learning
Each thing — each stone, blossom, child— is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each 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 are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Rilke, The Book of Hours
Sunday Quote: Seeing…..
The invariable mark of wisdom
is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, chapter 8
…..finished and unfinished
I love this quote from Karl Rahner, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the last Century. There is a great comfort in knowing in our bones the truth of these words. We have to continually balance two aspects within us: one which wants to know everything, to be everywhere, to be faithful to the energy and desire within. The other is that restlessness which knows that this can never really be possible, and that how we relate to what we don’t know is ultimately more important than what we do know.
In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable
we eventually learn that here, in this life,
all symphonies remain unfinished
Light and shade….
The Full Moon is more beautiful
when partially obscured by clouds.
Murata Shuko
Summer light
Every year the lilies are so perfect
I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding
the black, mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them –
the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild.
But what in this world is perfect?
I bend closer and see. how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight – and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away – and that one is a slumped purse, full of its own unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything – that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Mary Oliver, The Ponds
