I dreamed of a friend last night. But still, I don’t call him.
This Is Just to Say
I hate the way
we left things
before
I did not mean
what I said,
I was so angry
and you
are just so
beautiful
(forgive me, William Carlos Williams)
30 Sep 2005
29 Sep 2005
Murmur (3 of 7)
In school we learned how to dream effectively, though not by the teachers, and not by the books:
it was all attitude, and that was something you had even if you had to fake it — and it’s a scary thing
when you’re twelve, and that attitude is real — though even in its most genuine, it was mostly posturing,
shuffling out the alpha males and females from the beta, learning submissive postures early,
that pyramid of popularity we learned more and more up through high school, and never really outgrew:
because we find that those same people who run high school are those same people that run the world:
and it’s all attitude, the tragedy being that if you fake it for long enough, you become that fake.
to be continued…
27 Sep 2005
Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.
– C. T. Studd
Murmur (2 of 7)
We live in the shadow of the generations that have come before us, and stood so much taller than we
ever knew how to, because we could never be heirs to the pride that came before us — we never knew:
we never knew what it was to struggle, and therefore, could never hope to win against any odds:
we always had had enough, and so were never satisfied, and when we got more and more and more, if we could,
we stripped off the skin and threw away the meat, whether we could afford to or not, sometimes
even to spit out the tastiest tidbits, out of a contempt for some unnamable thing, perhaps
what we desired most of all, and never figured out that we could have had it, so easily, and never tried to.
(1 of 7)
to be continued…
26 Sep 2005
Murmur (1 of 7)
Media saturation, deluged by so much information that we don’t know where we stand anymore:
we are the children of this age, a childhood strangely extended, and sharply shortened, apocalypses
that come and go with the TV seasons: catered to for as long as we have electronic shopping carts to personalize,
crowds of us that speak in acronymic grunts, wondering if the word “perversion†ever had meaning
(or if it was an old media creation, too, like “loveâ€): dreaming in pixels, so digitized our eyes, not
ever having seen a photograph that was not retouched, watching reality on TV, not wondering
why In Real Life, that which is not recorded never happened, and fiction is more effective than experience.
to be continued…
24 Sep 2005
There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.
– Frederick W. Faber
23 Sep 2005
I have this feeling that there really is not much different between us, the least from the great, the worst from the best — the only exception I would make being Christ, but I’m going to leave him out of it for the rest of this little thing. Could it be that the saint and the sinner are one and the same man, who at merely one point took one road instead of another, made one choice rightly or awry? Is that what that famous saying goes like, “There but for the grace of God go I� Or is it just me, who has tasted what he has of failure and success, and saw how little the distance was between them, how you flip a coin, and suddenly a fate is decided? For there seems a very fine line between genius and folly, from champion’s epic to madman’s cautionary tale, and great things that are done — how without such and such a stroke of luck it would never have happened. I wonder how many things have failed that had no such luck. I wonder just how much it is that was not of happenstance, that one man willed himself not to be a pauper, but a prince — I imagine there be not so much a difference in the tune, but rather one song sung merely in two alternate keys.
22 Sep 2005
Mist upon the waters, straying, like someone else’s dream…
I meet myself as the reflection winks, as if it knows something…
I cannot tell if forever passes, or if time has stopped…
20 Sep 2005
When you hear someone saying unworthy and hard words of you, then it is given to you to drink medicine for your soul from the cup of the Lord.
– Thomas à Kempis
It’s hard to imagine, I think, but I believe there exist those rare people who are truly blessings upon the world. I know we have all grown up cynical, and have grown used to everyone we know having the ulterior motive whenever acting on our or another’s behalf — but I think there do exist exceptions. I feel this feeling, however naïve one might perceive it to be, that there are those who are, in fact, saints, to the actual extent of the word. Haven’t we all experienced it, too? That swelling of the heart, when one thinks nothing of himself, for once, and we do what is right for no reason than justice be served? For us, it is a momentary phenomenon, but the world being what it is, out of the billions that are and were and are to be, there must be the handful whose hearts are swelled in a permanent state. They are aberrations of the human character, surely, but the chance for these mutations is an inevitable consequence simply by the overwhelming numbers. How amazing they are to me — and perhaps if I were to say that to one of them, how they might laugh, and simply say that, “It’s only me,†and brush aside anything that might be like such, my wonderment.
19 Sep 2005
1
The notion exists that there is good in the world, and that whatever may stand against that good, somehow, the good shall prevail. Some might call the existence of this notion evidence for the existence of God, or some greater, guiding force; while some others will pass this notion off as a childish wish fulfillment fantasy; but no one will deny that such a notion lives in the heart of human beings. If the human animal is born with any instinct at all, this appears to be primal among them, as if it was with us from the beginning, like the fruit we ate in Eden, of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — what it became when we digested it. It is an essential part of this human condition, what we call life, or even what we call a world: for in the darkest of hearts, an ember of this notion still glows. It speaks of hope in us all.
2
The life cycle of a typical animal consists of birth and death, and in between, reproduction, eating and excreting. Perhaps there are certain other niceties along the way, but that is the basic contract for life. Everything else, in fact, is a sort of magic: that which holds us in some spell, which engages our interests and time, which changes our minds and changes the world in certain purposeful ways. These may have nothing to do with the basic contract, yet usually, what is known as the meaning of life — what it is all worth — is found only there. In the magic.
(Thinking of what 3 could be…)
17 Sep 2005
Seducers we, they say; but they lead men astray. Oh, what a noble seduction ours, that men should change from dissolute to sober living — or towards it; to justice from injustice — or tending that way; to wisdom from being foolish — or becoming such; and from cowardice, meanness and timidity, show courage and fortitude, not least in this struggle for the sake of our religion.
– Origen
15 Sep 2005
And I remember one moment of epiphany, watching a gauge returning to its center as I sat in the car listening to Mozart — how the piano’s keys sounded like touching the chill of leaves after a spring rain — as the dial eased into place in perfect accompaniment, and I marveled how beautiful it could be, the delicate slowness of ordinary things. This is what life has for us, sometimes, plain elements that are remixed in some way that is startlingly creative, as if such things are meant to be: something to hold within you and wonder at the grand design, wonder at the miracles that must happen every day, most of them which we don’t notice for the simple fact that they are all around us, happening at will, maybe only to catch us off guard every once in a great while. This is God saying hi, leaving no signature except the feeling in the soul that there is some meaning to it all we can never quite express, yet somehow understand that such meaning there — for us to touch the garment of love itself, and be healed.
