Poem: The Best of It

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

              Kay Ryan

 

 

 

 

 

By love

I believe that the world
was created and approved by love,
that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love,
and that, insofar as it is redeemable,
it can be redeemed only by love.

           Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank 

 

 

 

 

 

The secret of transformation

The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment. 

               Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind 

 

 

 

 

 

Double victory

To our most bitter opponents we say:
"We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering
by our capacity to endure suffering.
We shall meet your physical force with soul force.
Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you.
We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws
because noncooperation with evil is as much
a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Throw us in jail and we shall still love you.
Bomb our homes and threaten our children,
and we shall still love you.
Send your hooded perpetrators of violence
into our community at the midnight hour
and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.
But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.
One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves.
We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience
that we shall win you in the process
and our victory will be a double victory."

                  Martin Luther King, Jr., Loving Your Enemies

A test of faith

I know nothing grander,
better exercise, better digestion,
more positive proof of the past,
the triumphant result of faith in human kind,
than a well-contested American national election.

           Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas 

 

 

 

 

 

All Souls Day

The soul of one who loves God
always swims in joy,
always keeps holiday,
and is always in the mood for living.

                 St. John of the Cross

All Saints Day

What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.
It is impossible to say what that possibility is.
I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
Contact with this energy results in the exercise
of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos;
if he did the world would have changed long ago.
I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,
for there is something arrogant and warlike
in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is the caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment
of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world
that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance.
Far from flying with the angels,
he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle
the state of the solid bloody landscape.
His house is dangerous and finite,
but he is at home in the world.
He can love the shape of human beings,
the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.
It is good to have among us such men,
such balancing monsters of love.

             Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers