My wish is that I remember it in the harsher days: “God is love.” For when all is bright day and joy, that declaration rolls right through all your senses, and you are alive in its conceiving. But when the day grows dark, and the storms destroy things that are yours; when in hurt over the seeming cruelty of the world: shall we recollect that sentence then? For it is the duty of a servant of God to count it all joy, even the tragedies. Even the tragedies. And I suppose it is forgiven when we fail to so do, but that He told it to us lets us think that it is possible. Perhaps for the saints, or even the saints inside us, when an angel happens to pass by and lets us be the person we wish we could be. We can be.

Thomas a Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, “A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.” The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr’s stake or noose into a place of coronation.

we are none of us so wealthy as to wake without fear
the ledgers of destiny strangely sparse in entries
(how many spend themselves in pursuit of themselves)
nothing to desire that costs less than the pain exacts
even hope can rob us of everything in its desire to be true
hearts the deepest when overdrawn of what had filled it
hurt the vacuum of debt we unknowingly signed for
nothing! nothing! nothing! is this to buy a beginning?
(the business of the future is always at our expense)
most of us want to make the little noise of petty change
to wake without fear too much meaning to afford

Maybe it is like in the movies. Maybe the world gets saved, again and again, and we never are the wiser that we were that close to oblivion, destruction, cataclysm, all of us. The only way to know if this is so would be if we stepped into that narrow window of the supernal fates, that only the heroes and villains are privy to. The aliens and the men in black. The bearer of the charm and the hidden world underneath the surface of the present day. Perhaps these stories do that well because in us, they speak to that child within us that never lost their belief in magic. Who wants to think that we are all of us at every step only a wrong turn away from the chance to save the world. Blink, and everything’s alive.

Without a noise
Without my pride
I reach out from the inside

– Peter Gabriel

Piet Mondrian: The Gray Tree

Click on the pic for a larger version.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: but in between, life.

He who only dreams of better is no better off than one with no dreams.

He who knows nothing is one better than he who knows it all.

Ask questions, because some of the answers are correct.

Choosing faith over kindness: like choosing love without the heart.

Imagine God loves you the best; now, imagine that for everyone.

Death is the one secret that is shared by everyone.

We all seek the truth, in one way or another.

none, no horror in the world than what human minds conceived
we like to blame what is not in our control, and deceive ourselves
have you not seen that the blood is nowhere but on our own hands?

[From our side] our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust Himself. Our arrogance demands that, in addition to everything else, some super-world should also be known and accessible to us. Our conduct calls for some deeper sanction, some approbation and remuneration from another world. Our well-regulated, pleasurable life longs for some hours of devotion, some prolongation into infinity. And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In “believing” on Him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves.

[More book.]

It is strange to think I am one of them: I am a person. Could it be, that no matter how different any of us are, we are only within fractions of being the same entity? After all, 99% of our genes are exactly the same as a chimpanzee’s; does our mental makeup fit this rule-of-thumb type commonality? Or are we like the snowflakes? For they are all made of the same stuff, if you think on it, water and floating particulates, yet how wildly divergent are their makeups, if we look at how they fill the small spaces they exist in. That even if we share the same biology, the patterns of our brains can be so incredibly individual, that we can truly scarce be thought of as being of a common species? Perhaps the answer lies in the middle, like many, many things. An answer in the big, boring bulge of the bell curve.

Happy Easter!
What are we supposed to believe? That a man rose from the dead, alone in a tomb, who was surely deceased, with no intervention save God above? That is the meat of it. With our “modern” sensibilities, we who have lead miracle-free lives, how are we to swallow such fare? I do not know if Christian Science so believes this, but it is in my opinion that Jesus Christ had science beyond us, not any kind of magic. That the miracles came from how He understood the world can work. This is what we believe: that his genius was beyond all genius, being the Son of the Infinite. When we think on what He said to us, we get glimpses of this kind of knowledge, this authority. If you care to look, He prayed like no mere saint ever has. This is what we believe: so great a man lived, a savior for all humanity. We recognize Him today.

You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won

– Glen Hansard

Emil Nolde: Autumn Sea VII

Click on the pic for a larger version.

i am aloft, floating in a stream of information
the idea has been hiding in oblivion, dug out from creation
i have picked at the outline, careful not to break the metaphor
clumps of false equations lie all around me
i do not know to where i drift, but trust these currents
to where next i must excavate, sift through the unknowns
where i dig, i shake the dust of immortals

There is not merely beauty in truth, and there is not merely truth in beauty.

[Book again.]

The street view is washed in light. Everything is clear. The air is fresh, for a city. Where have I been? I seem to have blinked into existence fully grown, here in the shade of the standing city, and the memories in my mind are all fake, a simulation of a life implanted by a team of mad scientists. Down the street a woman has turned the corner and walks in my direction on the other side of the street. I am assuming that what she is wearing is season appropriate, and wonder if I myself am in some state of nudity that I have forgotten about. I look down on me, and then wonder why I picked these clothes on me, vaguely groping into my memory to fumble about the some sort of matching algorithm I use to pick the proper colors from the clean pile of clothes that I’ve neglected to sort from my last wash. Proper enough, I suppose; I don’t recall being too fussy. I might guess these garments were the ones on top.

I have at times a sense of the impermanence of things. That the most solid of stone, which is oft mentioned as having things carved in it — that it, too, will pass, will crumble into dust. Just like us, dust to dust. When I lived in San Francisco, there was a time when I experienced a short earthquake: sitting at a desk at work, suddenly the whole building shook. And it was at this time I was the most aware about how flimsy the entire structure was, the building which seemed so solid when the ground was stable. How great the powers of nature. And I think, too, time is the most awesome of these powers. Which seems to do nothing, and everything, too. Driving the trickles that forge the mightiest canyons, inexorable.