As dusk walks down mountain

We return our descent.

It occurs, perhaps...

God is the whole of everything as well as the everything we cannot conceive.

And Christ is the Cosmos beyond imagination.

And earth is Gaia, mother, birthing one by one, each incarnation, each expression and manifestation of source itself.

As was Jesus.

As are you.

Today, when earth gives a particularly enlightened being to us, why not converse with insight, enthusiasm, and energy the nature of this gift?

Here is how it begins

Awake.

Bring in firewood.

Christmas morning. 

Only candle flame, wood stove, sunrise.

No other power.

And old reheated coffee.

Earth born

Earth rise.

NASA image AS8-14-2383, taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, 24Dec1968)

Earth wise.

Christus natus est!

In the middle off the night

Rokie, the white border Collie, barks.

In the middle of the night we call your name.

Jitai, (自体 = itself)

This. Itself.

How near?

The absolute near-side.

So close

Earth sees.

So near.

Winter

Ice

Snow

Mute Rockport Harbor.

Dancing herein, therein, and therefore

Something's coming.

“… somewhere in the last 50 years we have crossed a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live as if we were still in the nineteenth century. Whatever we may think of the new era, whether we imagine it as the millennium, the noosphere, or as the beginning of the end, there has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.”  

(p. viii, Introduction by Thomas Merton, from THE PRISON MEDITATION OF FATHER DELP, Herder and Herder New York, 1963.) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2006/12/prison-meditation-of-father-delp.html

A creative resolution, a creative tension.

 The issue of interhuman tension is secondary to earth-human tensions. If humans will not become functional members of the earth community, how can humans establish functional relationships among themselves? It is not exactly the question of whether the nations can survive each other, nor is it even the question of whether intelligent beings can survive the natural forces of the planet; it is whether the planet can survive the intelligence that it has itself brought forth. 

My proposal is that the cosmology of peace is presently the basic issue. The human must be seen in its cosmological role just as the cosmos needs to be seen in its human manifestation. This cosmological context has never been more clear than it is now, when everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of antagonisms rather than to peace in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being. Also, there is a general feeling of fullness bordering on decay that is easily associated with peace. Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place. As the distinguished anthropologist A.L. Kroeber once indicated: The ideal situation for any individual or any culture is not exactly “bovine placidity.” It is, rather, “the highest state of tension that the organism can bear creatively.”           

(-- from final chapter, "The Cosmology of Peace" in "The Dream of the Earth" by Thomas Berry, c.1988)

 That middle, that middle place, that middle way, that place the gospel refers to when it cites Jesus as saying "The kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of God) is between you." (Cf. John1:26, Luke 17:21) -- it is there that peace is found, not off and away and not oblivious to the push and pull of this and that in the ubiquitous and perennial vying for dominance and bettering. Step, rather, into the between, the center, the middle, the heart of what is being revealed in our midst.

The Pax Gaia is earth and all beings with and through earth coming into proper and true relationality.

Step out.

Step in.

Step between.

Dance herein, therein, and therefore encircle the center of existence.

Listen!

Something's near!

Revealing, itself.

morning after Handfasting

Newlyweds toboggan down from yurt laughing.

They kiss outside barn.

Everything is ice and grey.

Except their laughter. 

Breathing meditation

Sound of cat jumping to floor. Moving something not nailed down.

Puzzling episodes

As solstice gives itself on earth to early darkness, still, only now with the increase of returning light.

JE: OK, thanks for the interview Malcolm. I love the revival of Lewis / Tolkien’s theology of imagination, and their sense of the power of story, metaphor and myth to transform us. But it seems to me that way of thinking can end up in the postmodern idea that everything is a story or metaphor, that the gospels are just another inspiring myth. We just need to find some ‘sacred fiction’ that works for us, whether that’s Star Trek, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings (which by-the-by was voted the most popular book of the 20th century, and is obviously much loved by non-Christians.) 

MG: That’s the opposite of what Lewis and Tolkien were saying. The point is, it’s about the re-marriage of the divorced parents – Imagination and Reason. It happens that it was our mother, Imagination, rather than our father, Reason, who’s been absent, and who we need to get to know again. But the point of bringing them together – the reason, for CS Lewis, why coming to Christ was so transformative – was that he loved myth, but as long as it was just myth, however moved by it he was, he didn’t feel he could re-connect it to Reason. The problem with Reason by itself was that as long as it was devoid of resonant story, it was just facts without meaning. The point about the Christian story was not simply that it was mythically resonant, but also that it was (they believed) historical fact. Tolkien said Lewis should think of the Gospels as a great myth written by God in the material of history. The previous poets had used language to tell a story, while the Author of the cosmos was able to tell a story in and through the actual material fabric of what happened. 

JE: But it sounds like Lewis was saying ‘there’s various different myths, of Dionysus, Oedipus, Balder the Brave etc but my myth is true’. 

MG: Well he’s not simply saying it’s true, he’s also saying it’s the truth of all the other myths as well, it’s the one that gives the other ones their grounding. It would not be sufficient to say ‘we all need a story to live by’, because someone could come back and say ‘you’re just making it up’. If you can show that something actually happened, which seems to make sense of all these other myths….There’s a great essay of Lewis’ called The Grand Miracle, in which he refers to the life, death and resurrection of Christ as like a missing chapter in a great work, the great work being the Cosmos. He says ‘if someone proposes to me that there is a missing chapter to a book I know very well, they’d have to show not only that it’s in the style of the rest of the novel, but that it makes sense of otherwise puzzling episodes’. And that’s exactly what he thinks the resurrection did.

(--from  "Malcolm Guite on poetry as a door into the dark" at the Website of Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life) - See more at: http://philosophyforlife.org/malcolm-guite-on-poetry-as-a-door-into-the-dark/#sthash.CVKdhm47.dpuf

So it is incremental anticipation holds still in exchange a pivoting intuition into its own rediscovery.

Turning light

“silence is the language of god, 
all else is poor translation.” (-Rumi)

and the wisdom to dwell in the difference

Alone, we can do nothing.

Another instance of Heidegger's use of the hermeneutic circle occurs in his examination of The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1936). Here Heidegger argues that both artists and art works can only be understood with reference to each other, and that neither can be understood apart from 'art,' which, as well, cannot be understood apart from the former two. The 'origin' of the work of art is mysterious and elusive, seemingly defying logic: "thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift or a defect. To enter upon the path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought, assuming thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles this circle. In order to discover the nature of the art that really prevails in the work, let us go to the actual work and ask the work what and how it is."[2]^:18 

(--Wikipedia, re. Hermeneutic circle) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle

Together, there’s something.

O come all ye lightfilm

Short day-

light, long dark- 

night; winter sol-

stice rain and

ice: moving

picture

Listening Itself

At first poetry seemed precious.

Then it became interesting.

Now, it is the creative energy of existence.

My word! (As the saying goes.)

Prelude to final class

It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

(--from "The Opening of Eyes," poem by David Whyte)

Night prayer

Here.

Alone.

Words, too, stretch morning exercise

The quote arrived in this form:

"Only in God is man capable of living fully." (p. 35,  Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder, New York)

It thought about transforming into: Only God! Only Cosmos! Only all existing beings and things! Only this awareness will allow life to fully be capable of meditating within itself.

How will we know when it is time?

Day will become itself.

And the tiger cat will lie down with the border Collie.

Sun will pass through cedar branches

.

And we will "See what is revealing itself with and through this becoming." 

(Om mane padme hum!)

David Whyte: Preserving the Soul (excerpt) - Thinking Allowed with Dr. J...

Starting on the path with a poet-guide.

Plowing job ok?

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” (--Simone Weil)

Window evaluation.

What does orange hatted Buddha and Celtic cross have to do with me?

I don't snow.

Sunday morning service of light and snow and trees

Deus, in adjutorium meum intende!

Snow cancels

 everything

remains still

Nothing moves

Except this question:

Domine ad adjuvandum me festina?

It is curious that Latin word for God (Deus) could be misspelled (dues) thereby fashioning a completely different theological emphasis.

Woods things be different still if trees and snow and light were our reverent soul companions?

Saskia speaks new mantra

"Be it. Do it. Shut up."

Thus endeth Saturday Morning Practice.

Exeunt omnes.

Zero

Start here for first pre-winter storm.

Poetics just-eyes

Poetry sees itself in words.

What words say

Before dawn.

They say: We are awareness which is . . . not read.

Look at us.

Carefully.

Eternity is...

Space without time.

Still, it is cold tonight.

Stay with inspiration

A story I first heard today.

A young man was taking a religious studies exam at Oxford nearly two centuries ago. He and his fellow classmates had been asked to write about the spiritual significance in the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine. For two hours all the other students busily filled page after page with their thoughts. However, the young man just gazed out of the classroom window through most of his allotted time. Nearing the end of the period the examiner came over to him and insisted that he start writing or fail the exam. The young man, who happened to be Lord Byron, took up his pen and wrote only one line: “The water met its master and blushed.”   (As told by Catherine Ingram in Passionate Presence, Gotham Books, 2003, page 129.)

Poets!