fall

To the bright east she flies,
Brothers of Paradise
Remit her home,
Without a change of wings,
Or Love’s convenient things,
Enticed to come.

Fashioning what she is,
Fathoming what she was,
We deem we dream –
And that dissolves the days
Through which existence strays
Homeless at home.

--#1573 by Emily Dickinson, c. 1883

unexpected insight

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--"Musée des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

Present-ness

Excerpts from the daily prayers of Irish Jesuits, on what it means to be present...

"What is present to me is what has a hold on my becoming. I reflect on the presence of God always there in love, amidst the many things that have a hold on me. I pause and pray that I may let God affect my becoming in this precise moment..."

"To be present is to arrive as one is and open up to the other. At this instant, as I arrive here, God is present waiting for me. God always arrives before me..."

--www.sacredspace.ie

(sigh)

"Truth hurts and Grace is not easily accepted."
--Elliott Haught

memory

I have strayed like a lost sheep.
Seek your servant,
for I have not forgotten your commands.
--Psalm 119:176

Implication

"Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write."
--Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

prayer

What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support
--Paradise Lost