in breathing, the quiet of life
cascades of starlight washing the skies
the unmoving focus in rhythm’s rails
watches through darkness as time fades
now to dream as cry in the crowd
as we dance with solitude
and the thundering heart, in pieces
joins with moonlight in cool passion
the spell unfurls a new heaven
breathless, as the rain is set loose

Léon Spilliaert: Night

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I found that when some goal was pie in the sky, an abstract fancy, it was easy for me to have faith that it would one day come to pass. But when the hour came round at last, when there was actual potential for this thing to become reality, suddenly I could find only the feathers left where angels once dwelled, there in my heart. Where did my believing go? Or is it like the muscles in exercise that they must be torn in order to gain strength? That the egg must be broken in order for us to hatch? And thus the test: to regain what we once had, that the fates stripped away, to find the believing when the reasons suddenly make no sense. This is the fire in which we are tested, until we emerge as the rarest silver, as the most angelic gold, shining like light itself. Like we were blameless.

Every complexion of the inward man, when sanctified by humility, and suffering itself to be tuned, and struck, and moved by the Holy Spirit of God, according to its particular frame and turn, helps mightily to increase that harmony of divine praise, thanksgiving, and adoration, which must arise from different instruments, sounds, and voices. To condemn this variety in the servants of God, or to be angry at those who have not served him, in the way that we have chosen for ourselves, is but too plain a sign, that we have not enough renounced the elements of selfishness, pride, and anger.

to have escaped the gravity of sadness
to find new orbits in this outer of spaces
i let go of the grasp of time
so everything begins to happen at once
and not happen at all, it is strange
i seem to recall when it was like this before
when i awoke in a dream of a dream
i found all beginnings were illusions
and nothing ends, it is all happening:
we are merely trapped in this sorrow
this life, of pain and finality
one day to let go, and suddenly, today
the doors of eternity blast open

White cliffs that hide the mountains’ height when one looks up from the beach, below; clouds that have meaning in the shapes they seem to describe, as if our dreams lifted off from within our minds’ eyes into the heavens; rivers that flow in constant rhythm, as if time traveled down them, rode the currents steady, fish who swim within them never to grow old… I painted images within my imaginings in dull technicolor, all that a mortal visualizing could generate, and then I understood that it would serve better in words, which could invoke in greater hearts much the more spectacular sights: if God Himself would read them, I could wonder what the pictures would be in His cogitations, and how incredibly wonderful and strange they might be.

on the most tenuous of threads is traced
the fabric of fate
and life will play at the edge of experience
as we learn how gravity can fail
time can be cheated in the briefest of dreams
now, giddy from some idea of flying
one leaps, spinning
the lifetime of sitting flashing by
to find love where there was nothing
no mystery in her eyes
only a rose unfolding forever

Beware the Devil: even when he tells the truth, he lies.

[We look for a time when Christians] will consider and practically remember, that all Christians are “called [to be] Saints,” and endued with the Holy Spirit of God; not indeed to inspire them with a new revelation, or to confer any miraculous gifts, (which do not either prove, or make, the possessor the more acceptable in God’s sight,) but to enable them to purify their own hearts and lives. The wicked Balaam was a prophet; and the traitor Judas worked miracles. These extraordinary powers, therefore, are neither any proof of superior personal holiness, nor any substitute for it in God’s sight. Nor is the absence of these miraculous gifts in ourselves, any argument that a less degree of Christian virtue will suffice for our salvation, than was required of the Apostles.

Egon Schiele: Agony

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