Images Not Made By Hand

Yesterday's feast of the Icon Not Made By Hands remembers when King Abgar of Syria was suffering from leprosy and asked for an image of Jesus, the sight of whom would be enough to heal. Christ wiped his face on a towel and sent it with his retained image to the ruler, and he was healed; many more were healed by the image for years afterward.

Coincidentally, I also realized that I posted almost fifty photos yesterday. It got me wondering: What is a photograph but a surface that is open and receptive to the forms before it? Aren't they also images written not by hand but by light? While not miracles, I do hope that my "images-not-made-by-hands" can be not only beautiful but maybe even a bit salvific or healing.

Happy Feast Day to my many photographer and filmmaker friends!

 

Insight

During my time doing my Masters at Boston College, I had the honor of being a Lonergan Fellow and studying the work of Bernard Lonergan, S. J. Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest whose philosophy and theology centered around what it means to have an insight (which can also be called an "intellectual conversion"). I'm convinced that Lonergan will likely be known as one of the most comprehensive and original philosophers in modern history, if only because I have seen the kind of community that has grown from the study of his work. There are few communities as joyous, intellectually acute, or collaborative as Lonerganians, who are some of the most attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving people you're likely to meet.

There are two recent developments in my post-grad Lonergan community. In the first place, this fall I will present my paper "Façadebook: The Internet, Cognition, and Grace" at Marquette University's Lonergan on the Edge conference (Sept 19-20). Look forward to snippets of my research appearing on here as I stumble upon things and sketch them into a presentable form. Secondly, my Thinking About Thinking (with a Little Bit of Drinking) reading group starts up next week, and our first book is Lonergan's masterwork Insight. We are an Inklings-style group interested in reading about cognition, epistemology, and creativity (over beer). Sketches from our readings and meetings will appear on here as well.

The reason Lonergan appeals to me as a creative human being is that creativity is contingent upon and constituted by insights. An insight is what gets us out of writer's block and what lets us lay down the first lines of a drawing—so one could say to be creative is to have insights. But one must not only have insights; one must also know what an insight actually is. Thus, one must have insight into insight (and, for that matter, insight into oversight) if one is to be truly creative, and not merely a hack who regurgitates old solutions or someone ever waiting on the capricious muses of inspiration to show up. Without insight into insight, people will try and force things that have worked in the past on the present or they will stare blankly and wait for things to fall into some ideal order. However, a truly insightful and creative person can look at the present and look at themselves and know that the answers are emerging from the questions, the solution is in the problem, and what is to be is already coming into being.

Lonergan begins Insight with the anecdote of Archimedes. Even if the average person doesn't recall the story of the Greek thinker rushing out of the baths after discovering the displacement of water and solving the problem of the king's crown, still the shouting of Eureka! is the archetypal image for most people about what it means to have an insight.

For the time being, here's an excerpt from the introduction where Lonergan unpacks the gravity of inquiry and the joy of insight nascent in this story:

Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted has many names. In what precisely it consists is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide from him the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success. What better symbol could one find for this obscure, exigent, imperious drive, than a man, naked, running, excitedly crying, 'I've got it'?

Finding the Right Words

I'm a little embarrassed by how long it's been between posts, but silence is a good thing. While I've never been particularly consistent about posting on here (After all, it is largely a poetry blog and when have poets ever been known for consistency?), in the past I could always use my Master's degree as an excuse—essays, theses, research, editing, and proofreading were always higher priorities that ate up my daily word quota.

Since leaving the academic world, there have been many other things conspiring to scatter my attention. A deluge of decisions and surprises pertaining to work, relationships, family, housing, and career have all taken the words out of my mouth month by month this year.

While I wasn't necessarily content with living the contradiction of being a poet, a writer, a theologian and teacher without words, I knew it was never time wasted. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Arsenius, said, "I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having been silent." I was also strengthened by the curious image of Abba Agathon, who purportedly lived for three years with a stone in his mouth in order to find peace in silence.

It makes me think of St. John's Apocalypse, where it says "To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it" (Rev 2:17). I'm sure that after three years of conquering his passions, desires, and tongue that stone and the stillness that came with it gave Agathon both a sense of perpetual sustenance and identity—if only because it was a constant reminder to listen to God, who was constantly listening to him.

Another reason I have stayed away from blogging is a distaste for the oversaturation of media today. Whether you look at your Facebook news feed, your email inbox (or work inbox), Twitter exchanges, or Instagram feeds, it all seems like a losing game of Tetris. Information is rushing in, and you never have a chance to put it—or yourself—in order before another bit drops from on high.

If it doesn't come from an impersonal marketing machine trying to entice you toward some commodity, and if it doesn't come from celebrity or mainline news sources which are uniform on trivial matters but confused on important matters, it often comes across as some blogger narcissistically "working through things" with all of us as his or her anonymous therapist.

Needless to say, I didn't want to be known as that guy. Hopefully, I never have been. Hopefully, I never will be.

But thank God, words and thoughts have been flooding back to me lately, and I'd like to share some with you. Summer leisure, great books, being invited to speak and contribute to great conversations, letting go of what you can't fix and being open to that which fixes you, all with an abundance of encouraging blank pages in notebooks and sketchbooks tend to help with these things.

You see, I'm a creative soul, which means I measure my life not by what I receive but what I give away. Actually, I think we're all creative souls, and the reason I hate today's media is that it is designed for consumption and not creativity; it's designed to be stored away, like food that can only to be turned into fat and not muscle. Likewise, most of today's media is good for nothing else but being burned.

So enough of this apologia pro vita sua, I doubt my absence was noticed by anyone besides myself. And again, the absence was not me being on my blog, but the right words being by me. Though, the problem I found with finding the right words, is that you can never find the right words. Life is a work always in progress, and speaking is always an unfinished business. We speak, because we think someone is listening—and we not only want them to listen, but for them to speak, which means our words are not the end of the story but its beginning.

So let me get on with some of the things I find, and let me know what yours are. Let me share some words with you that were surprises to me, and hopefully they are to you as well. Then maybe we'll be like the Desert Fathers, hanging around in one of the most barren places one could find going around to each other, asking for a word.

Boston Marathon Anniversary

Last year, the Boston Marathon bombings set the scandal of suffering and beauty down the street from me. Friends stumbling with ears ringing, wounds being dressed by flags, chapels crowded with runners still wearing their foil shock blankets—whether seen, heard, or felt, suffering was experienced with every sense, and yet there was no promise of it ever making sense. 

Then a kind of Spring came as spectators became heroes near the finish line, old friend friends who I thought forgot me long ago called to see if I was still alive, runners donated blood at hospitals, and whether shoes, rosaries, or prayers, we all left something at the Copley memorial. In a city where normally no one looks anyone in the eye, in the days afterward, every glance was imbued with gratitude that the other person was fine, with charity if they were not, and with compassion because not none of us was. 

I remember even taking stock of myself during a phone call that day, and I just felt utterly guilty when I realized I had no wounds, no tears, no dramatic stories to share. Why did my friends feel the street shake, while I was safe miles away: experiencing things from a distance, like everything else in a scholar's life? When my prayer asked, "Where is my suffering? Why do have to feel so fine? To feel nothing?" I just had the feeling that I was missing out on something. My dry eyes could not see what my friends' eyes clouded with tears could. Though, with time the shock and dam fell and it came to me too.

I would never say that suffering is "necessary" for such beauty to come to light, but when I remember the unprecedented strong yet tender love that followed the bombings, it's hard to say why exactly that's not the case.

A year has passed, this pain pricks our memories once again, and I ask myself a hard question: have we once again fallen so far and become so numb that it would take a bomb to make us grateful for one another and our city? Has our love become so weak that it only exists as a reaction to evil? I pray that's not the case, because that would be a tragedy worse than the one we already suffered. The fact is that we are all missing out on something—everything is gradually being taken away from us. That's the sad but true revelation of the Marathon; so please, let us be grateful for everything today even as it is leaving us, because it was given to us for some joyful reason at the present moment.

My heart goes out to Boston today, because in many ways I found it there and left it there one year ago today, and there's nothing I'd love more than to go for a long walk down to Copley right now to find it again. Κύριε ελέησον ημάς.

The Tongues of Babes

I'm certain infants would speak if only they wanted;
but their lack of desire comes from being all too often
caught up in all that which we are too busy to behold.

When God perfects His praise on the tongues of babes,
it is very likely through an eloquence of silence that
their gaze proclaims His Mystery, and it is only when

they learn to look away (in a way they learn from us)
that they begin to fuss and cry for Him whom they've
lost. Each wrenched and contorted call is a fall into

speaking, which seems to us less a lapse from presence
into absence, but rather a growth and development, in
our manner of self-expression and -proclamation. Yet

mixed among jumbled attempts at restoring communion
through communication, this babe reaches up with eyes
and hands while it sucks from its mother's breast. With

its stubby nipple fingers it plays with its mother's lips
as if to ask, if she is also hungry, if she remembers
her own mother's milk and breast, and with its eyes

imbued with all severity, "Do you remember that love
which held and gave you life?" it, while drinking, asks.

Thomistic Posture

With his feast day now passing, I thought I should share this favorite passage of mine from Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiæ. For anyone who thinks Scholasticism is nothing but a bunch of hairsplitting rationalizations about trivial questions, look at how Thomas mystically answers the question of why we stand up straight:

An upright stature was becoming to man for four reasons.

First, because the senses are given to man, not only for the purpose of procuring the necessaries of life, which they are bestowed on other animals, but also for the purpose of knowledge. Hence, whereas the other animals take delight in the objects of the senses only as ordered to food and sex, man alone takes pleasure in the beauty of sensible objects for its own sake. Therefore, as the senses are situated chiefly in the face, other animals have the face turned to the ground, as it were for the purpose of seeking food and procuring a livelihood; whereas man has his face erect, in order that by the senses, and chiefly by sight, which is more subtle and penetrates further into the differences of things, he may freely survey the sensible objects around him, both heavenly and earthly, so as to gather intelligible truth from all things.

Secondly, for the greater freedom of the acts of the interior powers; the brain, wherein these actions are, in a way, performed, not being low down, but lifted up above other parts of the body.

Thirdly, because if man's stature were prone to the ground he would need to use his hands as fore-feet; and thus their utility for other purposes would cease.

Fourthly, because if man's stature were prone to the ground, and he used his hands as fore-feet, he would be obliged to take hold of his food with his mouth. Thus he would have a protruding mouth, with thick and hard lips, and also a hard tongue, so as to keep it from being hurt by exterior things; as we see in other animals. Moreover, such an attitude would quite hinder speech, which is reason's proper operation.

—S.T. I, 91, 3 ad 3

And as a post scriptum, I might add he goes on for the sake of thoroughness:

Nevertheless, though of erect stature, man is far above plants. For man's superior part, his head, is turned towards the superior part of the world, and his inferior part is turned towards the inferior world; and therefore he is perfectly disposed as to the general situation of his body. Plants have the superior part turned towards the lower world, since their roots correspond to the mouth; and their inferior part towards the upper world. But brute animals have a middle disposition, for the superior part of the animal is that by which it takes food, and the inferior part that by which it rids itself of the surplus.

A Morning with Marmi

Suffused with this winter's morning light
the drapery glows a gentle eggshell white
casting stripes stretched across a blue floor
umbric bars breaking space up a little more.

The clock ticks and it tocks, the cars pass by,
the lone piano quietly drinks in their sound.
Its silent keys, its hidden strings give no reply,
but stand still with light and questions all around.

In the kitchen window a spindly naked tree
reaches beyond the curtains' faux floral lace.
Descending from her sun-basking, now I see
my cat climbing up the couch, and to my face.

She puts paws to my belly and begins to knead.
My hands brush her aside, but don't succeed,
as she deftly returns to the task at hand
for reasons only felines must understand.

It could be she was a baker in her former life,
who filled mornings punching dough for bread.
Away from pastry-cases, she was a devoted wife
even years-after her husband fell ill and dead.

Perhaps she also had a piano not unlike my own
where their faded photos and portraits would alight:
family, youth, and love, like birds who'd never flown;
and her hands would play by the curtains' white

simple scales and preludes to how things used to be
for her husband, for herself, for the naked spindly tree.

Now her paws have paused to rest,
and after purrs, her green eyes pour
a glance imbued with some request
to me, the piano, then the floor.

Eine Einladung

Freude und Freunde haben eine Wahrnehmung, 
wo ich gerne meine Wahrheit nehme. 
Leben ist ein Satz, ein Schatz, und sie die Übersetzung 
zu einem Brief, der fragt, ob ich käme.
Es ist schon geschrieben und schön geschrieben,
und er ladet uns ein, zu lächeln und zu lieben.
Unser Wein ist schwach heute und das Brot krustig,
doch bleib munter, aufgeschlossen und lebenslustig.
Denn das Warten ist nur eine kurze Zeit
in den frohen Augen der Ewigkeit.
Wir denken oftmals Leben ist Staub
und es gibt irgendwo einen Besen.
Aber sei nicht so müde, nicht so taub;

anstatt, versuch jenen Brief zu lesen.

I Hear I'm Here

I laid my head down those early nights in Boston, when I was
still not used to how the street lights would seep in and bathe

the ceiling milky blue with an incessant, vigilant light whose
subtle warmth softly burned and blinded through the eyelids.

In those nights I pressed my eyes tight and my ears would
widen to hear that the wind was still while the cars still went

and in those passing wakes, they issued a sound that echoed in
my memory as the gentle crash of waves on shores I left behind.

And as the last trolley gradually trucked and thumped the bumps
and rails of Comm Ave, I could hear how squeals of the wheels

and the squeak of lines could recall in some rare way birds and
crickets I heard on rural evenings with solely stars for company.

With familiar tones and timbres the city could almost compose
a home out of its unacquainted places. But upon returning here,

to the birds, the bugs, and waves, I have found that when those
same sounds echo in me, the cars and trollies rarely come to mind.

Though they meet my ears all the same—whether they come from
here or from there—my soul listens closely and can tell me how
they belong to the one but were merely borrowed by the other.

A Sunday Sketch

My success lies in Sundays,
when the sun lays its rays
warmly on me reclined,

while my body hums a
eucharistic hymn and my soul
remembers how to sing.

Bread and wine linger in
my flesh and memory and
I wonder if what could be
did in fact happen to me.

I take stock of myself and
all there is while the breeze
breathes and my collars lap
like waves upon the shore.

Blessings are measured in
grateful sips—a mug lifted to lips.
I spill ink and I will think
of how richly he arrays my days

and when the sun's light dyes
the buildings rose and gold
I know the eve is not far

with which he dazzles the eyes
today as in those times of old
with many a precious star.

When A Tree Falls in the Woods

I am a once-great tree
that has fallen relieved
in your welcome woods.

I held within myself many
homes and hidings for others
while I leaned upon empty air.

I stood for many years
tall and mighty, and alone
until your love felled me.

The answer, by the way, is

no, I never made a sound;

that is, until you where here.

I am poor today, but break my bark
and tap the sap that surges sweetly
from rarely open and broken me.

My branches bounty, my rent roots,
have held for far too long what I have
never tasted, though it's mine to share.

I don't care what becomes of me—
if I sink and rot or am cut and burned:
to house and to sweeten was enough.

For, as I fell before your eyes
with my trunk cracked, exposed,
you can see my fragile matter.

All my rings sing as though
they were pages of countless letters
tightly bound around my core,

all addressed to you,
your woods, and

even your axe.

Grammar and the Beasts

English teachers must not understand that
grammar is what separates us from the dogs,
who are oblivious to the fact that subjects
verb adjectival objects in, out, and through
prepositional phrases, occasionally adverbally.

Most of their students tune in and out unless tone,
like the promise of a bone, rouses them with a
buzzword or phrase to which they have something
to say, though what came before remains unheard.

When philology is forgotten we no longer gnaw
our words in euphony, working etymologically
to the marrow of their meaning.  We simply lie
lazily until it is our chance to respond or to bark.

But somedays we fall below the hounds bellow,
are shamed by the bird's delightful and aimless tune,
and cannot keep still with the lap-cat's silent and
content life of silent observation and satisfied purrs.

When we forget that words were also wrought to woo,
our courtship will recall the obnoxious quaking of ducks,
whose copulation involves more coercion than consent—
though, there are really very few troubadours among beasts.

When has the pursuant squirrel ceased tree trunk chases
long enough to leave a sonnet in the cache, so that Spring
might yield romance along with acorns?  For that matter,
has the lonesome owl ever recited Neruda under the still
stars of a given evening?  For that matter, when have we?

Perhaps, someday soon, poetry and grammar will give
us the courage to speak ourselves and each other
above the cacophony of the crow's complaints, over
the lion's angry roars, and sad lonely songs of whales.

Break and Bloom

Despite never having asked for
—and my often attempts to shirk—
this state of being and occupation, 
I am a vessel from which Christ 
overflows. Not of the immaculate sort, 
but a simpler kind,  which serves as a 
thurible swinging along sidewalks, 
incensing passerbys with an aroma 
not my own.

Despite that fallen tendency to collapse 
myself and my world into something small 
enough to be thought, his image and signature 
are radiantly written in all that lives and moves 
(even the stones quiver with their vital role to play) 
although we do not take the time to marvel 
at the Word's work, the calligraphy of being.

We think the glory is somewhere else and 
it couldn't possibly be us. But we have much 
to learn from the unmoving and unwavering 
mystery of the flowers, who have no legs 
with which to leave their native soil.  The bud 
never asked for petals to flaunt.   
      
He was simply there, 
between the stalk and the air, 
and in just being there

he blossomed. 

We are where we are, 
between whence and whither 
and when we are open to the 
to and fro we can be like this. 
But we are always blooming 
bliss by nature of our being, 
where the saddest and loneliest 
are such because they write
epics no one reads. Our longing 
to blossom and to overflow 
is not so much in some kind of life; 

for, by living any kind of life 
we already do. Rather, it is to 
erupt in taking notice and giving 
thanks for what we have and are. 

All of us are there and 
—you might be startled to know—
it's always been here. 
If only we'd break off from busyness 
and break forth in bloom.

Two Wash Your Face

At the end of the evening fold the washcloth
in two as it drinks the warm water and let the
soap sing before it greets your day-worn face.

Scrub this face and follow its broad contours
along the ways of forehead, nose, and cheeks,
as if this land were foreign and not your own.

Keeping it moving until you can drop the
cloth and feel her ghostly and future fingers
tracing your face at the end of the evening.

Your appearance is not your own to behold,
but hers to enjoy; and her eyes are so unlike
the tired and flat ones found in your mirror.

Walking in the dark hall toward bed, her hands
still run along your face like waves crashing
against the shore of you, felt long after leaving

the beach at which you both have yet to be.

Imago Dei

Even the sharpest tool in the shed is just a tool dead and dumb,
having no will in its wielding, but always yielding to be used
according to the workman's intent. To swing, to stay; to be sharp,
to rust—there are no choices to be faced in the life of an axe.

Thus, another analogy falls of short explaining human liberty:
the axe is heaped with the stick and the stone and worthless
grimy coins—while free will and the human paradox stands
as a thing too bizarre to be compared with any other referent.

We are cursed to stand as unaccompanied anomalies, whose
every portrait is smudged and blurred. But this is to be expected
of creatures made in the image of the Undepicted; whose life lets
no image be its grave, except perhaps mysterious and mortal man.

Despite, and yet somehow even through, our frequent falls
he saves images, those broken but beloved analogies, restoring
his much-mangled form into greater clarity. He holds that stick
pushing the stone, such that his hand moves within the lonely pebble.

His face emerges as he polishes the past from an unwashed coin as
words are reminding through shining from whom the wealth came.
By now we see that it is still a forester's will, which sharpens and
swings. But without an axe, we ask, what work would be done at all?

While he could not be held in any meager analogy, he despises none
of the stories each tries to tell. To be big is to celebrate in the small
and to see one's character depicted in the discarded images. Perhaps,
we like-fated beings might, in every gifted day, humbly do the same.

The Prestige

This poem comes after watching one of my favorite movies, The Prestige.

Everything is magic and it all works
by those rules known by every heart:

The first is the Magician's presentation
of something ordinary and Pledge that it
will not surprise us anymore than usual.
It could be a dull coin dragged from one
of your pockets, a lovely assistant who
we've all been watching anyway; doves
are not uncommon, but anything will do:
so far you are probably underwhelmed.

Then there's the Turn where what we knew
is taken away with the Magician waving
his hands before our faces in empty air.
To stop here would not be magic, but only
flashy robbery, which makes up so much
of our lives: lives full of things taken, stolen,
leaving.  It might definitely be called a trick,
but hardly magic.
    
                           The Turn is when time
slows as the glass vase falls, when the
heart sinks as we bury our dead heroes,
when we know her eyes have turned and
her footsteps fade off in the distance, just
as they begin to swell in our memory.
The sun must always set and over time
each and every moment will vanish ...

Here we realize that even the smallest
coin would buy something and the world
is quieter without the dove cooing—so the
audience holds its applause and its breath.

We all know we need the return, the Prestige,
the resurrection.  We need to know that love
has not been sawed in half yet again, nor has
it been lost to thin air.

                                       So now the Magician
brings back what we once called ordinary, but
now with something extra.  We count the hearts
or spades, flip it over, and find joy that what we
hold is very much ours and it always has been.
Everything that was volunteered was returned—
the only difference is, this time we're grateful.

We're surrounded by magic and know its comings
and its goings. So please look around, see the Pledges
made to you in this moment, and know that, even now,
they are making the Turn, like all those other late-loved
things which took your breath in passing and left that
twinge in your chest.  I've told you what comes next,
so, for now, what you must do is just wait ...

To Inspecter 74

I found your yellow ticket in my pocket
the other day, and I thought should let
you know my jacket is holding up well.

It gets cold where I am and this tweed
keeps me as warm as the Scottish sheep
from whose wool the fabric was woven.

It has elbow patches now—in case you were
wondering—and my breast pocket always
wafts the lingering scent of pipe tobacco.

Sometimes I think of how your precise
eyes followed each of these seams, to
keep its wearer from catching a draft,

or how your hands might have run along
these folds, lapels, and sleeves to make
sure the weave ran smooth and straight.

I'm wearing a light blue shirt with it today:
is that okay? Do inspectors ever wonder
what shirts or men might fill these coats?

I imagine you are a man with round glasses and
a trimmed moustache who ends each of his days
judging jackets with some well-aged Bourbon.

But there are other times, when I imagine you're
a stunning woman, whose attentive eyes could
lovingly gather up all the loose threads of my life
and would weave them into something beautiful . . .

If the latter is the case, let's go on a long evening
stroll down by the water—and don't worry—
if it gets cold, I have a jacket you can borrow.

Dwarvish and Valaam Chant

Far over the misty mountains cold,

To dungeons deep and caverns old,

We must away, ere break of day,

To claim our long-forgotten gold.

The pines were roaring on the height

The winds were moaning in the night

The fire was red, it flaming spread

The trees like torches, blazed with light.

If you're having trouble getting this song out of your head after watching The Hobbit this weekend, or if you want something in the same style, I got it.  I was wondering, what it was, besides the depth of the dwarves' range, that resonated with me in this song.  Then I realized, dwarvish "chant" has the same thick and haunting bass drones (ison) as the Russian Orthodox chant from Valaam.

Both styles of chants have a single distinct melody, but rather than shadow the lead with some kind of harmonious parallel melody, the basses simply and deliberately shift up and down to change "the ground of the sound."  I don't know if Howard Shore or the other composers were inspired by Valaam, but it is interesting to note that monks, like dwarves, are bearded men, who enjoy singing and ale (Trappists), but who are more profoundly united by a common mission: their longing return to their true home, which was lost long ago.

The Beatitudes

Rejoice, Thou Bride Unwedded

A little more polyphonic

Dance and Kneel

this need to dance
this need to kneel:
                           this mystery:

                           Of Being, Denise Levertov

If you can kneel you can dance.
They use the same muscles:
beating hearts and ready legs.

Remember to Move

Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you. It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out. And how we may all be mobilized together to free him. — Nikos Kazantzakis, 'The March', The Saviours of God


Think of those gentle quickenings
when the heart picks up its pace 
and you finally start
to walk with the rest of the world.

We move when meditation
becomes mediation and
walking with every thing.
All desires find their ends,
as feet and beat are one 
and we move to the one 
who made our rhythm 
and who thus makes us.

It only takes one before the other, 
but we lack the courage to stride.
When we don't respond,
our steps are stilled, but
the beat of our desire will not die.

These are the throbbing times
when the heart beats you and
drags you along by the ribs,
stomping grapes in your chest
to make the wine for which we long
and which is itself our longing.
All of which explains why we're
so impatient when the stomping starts.

The burning is the half-remembered cue 
that greatness lies beyond,
but we're too dim to think it could be
anything other than utter tragedy.

In these moments the rhythm's will is done and
it has its way with you, who never made way for it.
It hurts and is scary, as are all things to the timid.

So give it room to move you,
because when it is not with you,
you are not with yourself;
though the beat goes gladly on.

I wish I could say these words have freed me,
or that this journey had a cadence to it
which got me where I wanted to go.

But these were really all
one simple step forward,
which now awaits the other . . .


Of like kind: Moving On