Have faith in your faith.

[This is a book I’m writing, veeery slowly. Chapters 1-4 are at alquemie.com.]

[Chapter 5.]

I have a dream that I live in a dystopia, whose beginning has been long forgotten and which seems to continue to eternity. I am the secret leader of the resistance, a fact that I do not even let myself in on unless absolutely necessary, for They can read minds, and often do. I am organizing a mass uprising, intricate in its complexity, its scheme — the plan of which grew even through several generations of leaders, the unfinished version I inherited from my predecessor. On the night that everything is to unfold, I see lit up on a large screen where in the world the revolution is beginning. Then the door breaks down, and it is the forces of authority — but as I am overrun, I realize that I am not the real leader, only a diversion, that I am meant to get caught…

I like to watch birds drink from fountains, small pools, anywhere there is water after a rain. They drink until they are satisfied, dipping their heads, little shivers to shake off the chill. I find it fascinating. The birds fly off — I never encounter them again. They will probably remember nothing of the drink, not really; I will remember it better than they, hold it closer, for it is not always that I see the birds so sip. Somewhere in me, there is a place I can go where the birds are, dipping their heads in little waters. Somewhere in me, I can believe nothing is wasted, not even the smallest drink of water from the tiniest of birds.

It is for us, in whom the Christian Church is at this moment partially embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the Christian faith can do that for the world which the world needs. You say, “What can I do?” You can furnish one Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so determined not to commit every sin, that the great Christian Church shall be the stronger for your living in it, and the problem of the world be answered, and a certain great peace come into this poor, perplexed phase of our humanity as it sees that new revelation of what Christianity is.

Mordecai Ardon: Testament of a Dead Leaf

Click on the pic for a larger version.

There was a light, but it faded. It was not faith.

There were visions, but they twisted. They were not faith.

There was a feeling, but it was illusory. It was not faith.

Faith was to hold on, when all those things went wrong.

Because I saw that light, had those visions, felt what I felt.

The narrow way is a journey, and rest may only be momentary.

It is a life that leads to life.

Will you indeed be His disciples, and be kind to the point where it is dangerous to be so? Or will you stand instead in safety with those who hold the guns?

time unfolds into a flower with infinite petals
the sky washes away to reveal the silver gears underneath
i stare inside myself so intently that i burst into light

Not to all men, not to any man always does God give complete abundance. To all men sometimes, to some men in long stretches of their lives, come the abasement times, — times of poverty, times of ignorance, times of friendlessness, times of distrust and doubt; but God does not mean that these times should be like great barren stretches and blanks in our lives only to be travelled over for the sake of what lies beyond. To him who, like Paul, knows how to be abased, they have their own rich value. They do for him their own good work. To have our desire set on nothing absolutely except character, to be glad that God should lead us into any land where there is character to win, — this is the only real explanation of life. He that has it may be more than reconciled to living. He may do more than triumph over his abasements. He may make close friendships with them, so that he shall part from them with sorrow when he is called to go to the right hand of God where there is no more abasement, nothing but fulness forevermore.

Far

Where did I see you? I never saw you.
When your sigh haunted the forests of Heaven,
I fell bottomless. The lower curve of your eye
flew on a dove’s wing one Autumn
when the leaves stilled their breaths to the
hint of your passing. Flight is your touch’s toy.
Your fingers unearthed a depth my understanding
yet kneels to drink, there in the starry
mountain sky as rose petals fluttered endlessly
from your fingertips. I inhaled the
echo of your look, the page of my spirit
I cannot help but rhyme into my every breath.
Where did I see you? I never saw you. Slower
than a dream I gazed into your eyes, but you
were a vision of a farther dreamer than myself.

I am a dream of myself, who can see through the ghost that is the world. The ethers have flowed through me, and I am a fragrance pleasing to the winds; I have flowed myself like rivulets of gravity, which desire the depths, but are left open to the atmospheres, never to be home. Angels brush by. Halos glow in the twilight, and I am between the love and the wondering of love: half real, half swimming in imaginary solitudes. I can awake at any time. The rapid city glows against the starlit horizon, never to find itself, always below moons too selfish to tell which road I walk on. Where in dreaming have I ever looked down? For my feet do not exist, I a low-hanging cloud of thought. Mirrors have never captured me. I am a feather remembering flight.

Joan Miró: Still Life with Old Shoe

Click on the pic for a larger version.

In the dreaming, light lifted me into the realms of thought.

In the dreaming, an eternity of quiet ended as stars fell from heaven.

In the dreaming, I wrestled the darkness till dawn’s dispel.

In the dreaming, a tree with leaves of fire lit the dark forest.

In the dreaming, night and day shared the sky, sun amid the stars.

In the dreaming, I lived a life in an hour, but this is as life is.

In the dreaming, a girl with sapphire eyes stirred the elixir of destiny.