Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”

― Mary Oliver

A Hidden Wholeness

Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”

...Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.

...Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world disappears from your own view! The wall itself and the world outside it become all that you know. Eventually, you even forget that the wall is there — and that hidden behind it is someone called “you.”

--Parker J. Palmer (excerpt)

When Death Comes

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse



to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox




when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,




I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?



And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,



and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,



and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,



and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.



When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.



When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.



I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

--Mary Oliver

Much Has Been Said

Much has been said about the eternal and untouchable nature of love, its tidal ungovernable forces and its emergence from beyond the ordinary, but love may find its fullest, most imagined and most courageous form when it leaves the abstractions and safety of the timeless, the eternal and the untouchable to make its promises amidst the fears, vulnerabilities and disappearances of our difficult, touchable and time bound world. To love and to witness love in the face of possible loss and to find the mystery of love's promise in the shadow of that loss, in the shadow of the ordinary and in the shadow of our own inevitable disappearance may be where the eternal source of all of our origins stands in awe of the full consequences of everything it has set in motion.

--David Whyte

One Day You Realized

…so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened, and long ago and in the dwelling place
in which you lived before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise,
that first set you off and then drew you on, and that:
you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:

--David Whyte (excerpt)

Winter Apple

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down.
Let the coolness
of autumn
and the breathing,
blowing wind
test its adherence
to endurance,
let the others fall.
Wait longer
than you would,
go against yourself,
find the pale nobility
of quiet that ripening
demands;
watch with patience
as the silhouette emerges
and the leaves fall;
see it become
a solitary roundness
against a greying sky,
let winter come
and the first
frost threaten,
and then wake
one morning
to see the breath
of winter
has haloed
its redness
with light.
So that a full
two months
after you
should have
taken the apple
down
you hold it in
your closed hand
at last and bite
into the cool
sweetness
spread evenly
through every
single atom
of a pale
and yielding
structure.
So that you taste
on that cold,
grey day,
not only
the after reward
of a patience
remembered,
not only
the summer
sunlight
of a postponed
perfection,
but the sweet
inward stillness
of the wait itself.

--David Whyte