spring

We meditate in the library's garden, desolate in winter. We shiver but aren't in a hurry... After a while I feel more rested, and strangely fortified, too, as though by a company of unseen helpers, wise ones who know what it means to live with a heart as open as a clear blue sky, as passionate as the summer sun, as patient as rain on rock. How I want to live that way. A Zen saying burrows into my quiet, becomes a prayer: "May I walk hand in hand with you, ancestors, the hair of my eyebrows entangled with yours." The empty garden is full.

Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at God's disposition, and listening for Love's voice in the depths of our hearts.

Prayer is not an idle occupation. It's a very powerful instrument of our work and love.

Better a little prayer with devotion than much prayer without devotion.

St. Augustine said, "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee." Our dissatisfaction could, therefore, be the admission and awakening of our longing for the eternal. Rather than being simply the edge of some personal emptiness, it could be the first step in the opening up of our eternal belonging...desire cultivates dissatisfaction in the heart with what is, and kindles an impatience for that which has not yet emerged...There should always be a healthy tension between the life we have settled for and the desires that still call us. In this sense our desires are the messengers of our unlived life, calling us to attention and action while we still have time here to explore fields where the treasure dwells!

Only I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
of finite hearts that yearn.

Tears are prayers that reveal our truth before the Beloved...God honors tears...receives and tenderly holds tears as if they are precious, explosive testimony that must be preserved for some future day. Perhaps this vigilant, seeing, and tear-collecting God weeps with the weeping world.

In feigned completeness I would walk the lonely
longest distance between all points and all others
because in their connection my geometry will have
been faithful to its own imagined laws.