At the End of the Year

As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.

--John O'Donohue

Finding the Holy in the Holidays

Holiness is a center that holds all peripheries; a pure internal almost-absence that makes sense of everyone and everything that busily comes to visit when we do nothing -nothing but pay attention in deeper and deeper ways; holiness is the beautiful something out of all nothingness, birthed inside us and growing inside us, that allows everything on the surface to gather meaning - an internal gravitational field of understanding - allied to an outward and radical letting alone: of family, of food, of other's perspectives; the holy is reached through letting go, by giving up on willed perfection.

Holiness is the rehabilitation of the discarded; the uncelebrated and the imperfect, in our selves, in others, even in our close, un-cooperating, and politically exasperating relatives, into new unities, perceived again as gift. Holiness is the bringing of the detailed outside into the vast unspoken and horizon-less inside, from where the inside seems to give again, transformed as if by the simple act of breathing in and breathing out, back to the world.

Holiness is memory independent of time, time not as besieging force in which things are done, but time radiating out from the place where we stand, welling from the unspoken that holds together all words said at the busy surface; holiness marries hurry to rest, action to spaciousness, and joy to heartbreak in our difficult attempt to give and receive, dissolving giver and receiver into one conversation, untouched by the hurry of the hours.

Holiness might be in Bethlehem, or Jerusalem, or the largest, most glittering, mall, but only if we are there in good company, with the invisible, with a friend, with a loved one, with our affections, with our best and most generous thoughts, most of all with a deep form of inhabited silence, a natural, grounded, central conversation with what and how and to whom we like to give. Holiness is coming to ground in the essence of our giving and receiving, a mirror in which we can see both our virtues and our difficulties, but also, a doorway to the life we want beyond this particular form of exchange.

Holiness is beautiful beckoning uncertainty: time celebrated and time already gone so quickly. Holiness dissolves the prison of time and lies only one short step from the present busy moment: one look into the starry darkness of the mid-winter sky at the midnight hour, one glance at a son or a daughter’s face; one sight of a distressed friend alone in the midst of a crowded celebration.

Holiness is a step taken not to the left or to the right, but to the heart of present besieging outer circumstances, to the core of the pattern we inhabit at the very centre of the celebration. Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the mid winter spirit of our days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of on going surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, flawed and far from perfection, but inhabiting the still center of a beautiful, gifted and glowing peripheral.

--David Whyte

[Photo from Christmas 2017]

First Snow

The snow

began here

this morning and all day

continued, its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why, how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning; such

an oracular fever! flowing

past windows, an energy it seemed

would never ebb, never settle

less than lovely! and only now,

deep into night,

it has finally ended.

The silence

is immense,

and the heavens still hold

a million candles, nowhere

the familiar things:

stars, the moon,

the darkness we expect

and nightly turn from. Trees

glitter like castles

of ribbons, the broad fields

smolder with light, a passing

creekbed lies

heaped with shining hills;

and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain — not a single

answer has been found —

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

--Mary Oliver

Hope

Either we have hope within us or we don't. It is a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or a willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, which gives the strength to live and continually try new things.

-- Vaclav Havel

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this 
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

-- William Stafford