2 posts tagged “home”

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The Soul Finds Its Own Home If It Ever Has A Home At All

Dec 18, 2008
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This is a picture I excavated from my mother's and grandmother's effects.
I believe it is my maternal grandmother and her family.

"And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father's hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?
In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape ! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him.
She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Stangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her, Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life.
In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting, and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all."
"Home" p. 281-282
Marilynne Robinson

A Stream Has Welled Up.....

Sep 25, 2008
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Fire.rainbow

"A stream has welled up, it has become a torrent . . .
It has flooded the universe, it has converged on the temple.
No bank or dam could halt it . . .
All who were thirsty have drunk of it and their thirst has been
quenched,
For the Most High has given them to drink.
By means of the living waters they live for ever. Alleluia!"
- Odes of Solomon, 6 -

(These Odes are from the first century of Christianity and were
likely sung as hymns.)

*

Humility always has a good cry and then forgets petty insults.

Remember this. If you want to conquer the devil, arm yourself with
humility.'

- Hildegard of Bingen, "Scivias"

The awe-inspiring kindness and encouragement of the Holy Spirit,our ever-present Lord, strengthens us daily and prepares us to receive our divine reward for every hardship we've lived through,and these rewards will surely surpass anything we've ever dreamt or imagined.

- Julian of Norwich, "Revelations"

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly,now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

- The Talmud

"No one, except the enemies of the Church, could conceivably be helped by Christian creeds and dogmas being emptied of their content. Where everyone might benefit, however, is by attention being focused more directly on the content, rather than on its,necessarily inadequate, verbal expression. Thus the Church's doctrinal propositions may never be disregarded; but they are intended, like every form of words, to be 'seen through'--in the sense indicated by St. Thomas Aquinas . . . The only way to escape 'illusion,' even in matters of faith, is to get beyond the verbal propositions to the reality they signify."

- Dom Aelred Graham, "Zen Catholicism"

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"God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: "You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, *Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,*
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility

-- James Thurber

Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.

--Nisargadatta Maharaj

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THE BIRTH IN DARKNESS OF THE IMAGINATION

The fundamental human imaginative act is to see the other, to guess what the other needs, to engage with the other, to be the other, and to make, thereby our own selves. Through this empathy, our fear of deep night gives way to a chastened sadness, an understanding of the poignancy of our situation. Expression is all, and yet life flows through and falls from us like a dream. So underneath our fear is a companionable loneliness, a serene light. This light is humble; it doesn't attempt brilliance, and there is nothing grandiose or selfish about it. It is a steady glow, full of kindness.

When we completely inhabit our fear, it reveals itself as a tenderness toward life. Then it leads us to make images, stories, music. Basho in his travels encountered an ancient battlefield, with overgrown mounds and rusted bits of equipment in the dirt:

Summer grass.

Dreams of warriors

under the hill.

Here the wanderer has a memory of those he never knew, and a lonely for them, and his loneliness then spreads out like a kind of light, the taste of mortality leading into a timeless world.

At each new step, the walls we have built fall down like Jericho's. We are as afraid of changing as of failing to change -- our alteration asks that we let ourselves fall into the outstretched arms of the world, into a sleep of what we already know. We have to trust that we will be awakened at the right time.

Perhaps you remember the story of the old, grand meditation teacher who late in life was still eager to learn. His wife of many years died. He grieved and, as many people do, seemed to take on some of her qualities. His friends thought him more intimate, more interested in the sort of close connections she used to bring into his life. It was as if she were still walking with him, and her going into the darkness was a going inside him, her companion. Nevertheless it was a hard period. He knew he had finally turned the corner when he was given a dream -- of little flats of plants in a nursery, growing well and almost ready to be planted out.

Time is in those green plants, time and more tasks to do. Their life is delicate, but then nothing is as forceful as new things. When we are at the growing tip of life, our dreams are full of babies, young animals, seedling plants. The new work, the new music, the new idea, the developing consciousness, is finding a way to get into the world. The image of the greenhouse is important, too. Life is not fostered only by good fortune and fine weather. Everything -- grief, refuse, the nondescript black material -- feeds our imagination. Loss can bring us to the

nursery.

--John Tarrant
The Light Inside the Dark

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My friend and client, Joan died today. She entered hospice last week. She was a charming, humorous witty and wise woman. God's peace for her and her family.

I am moving along in my process and thank my friends and brothers and sisters, and those who don't know me for the grace of their good wishes and presences.

Death is not the final answer.

I am listening to David Byrne and Brian Eno's latest effort.

Home.

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[cross posted to Alive on All Channels]