I am numb as the day pours over me and solidifies into the past. While I am still soft and pliable, still able to change, I sit as if waiting for the end of the world, as if all action were meaningless. Thought is too heavy: the wheels of my perception are thick and made of lead, too much inertia to move. Thought is too light: it floats off before I can make sense of any pattern. Time is a messenger whose tongue I do not understand, only to realize so much later that something important was being said. I only wait. While somewhere, at any given time, someone’s heart is being broken, I have only a dream that love ever was — and I envy those who have felt enough that its lack is painful. I imagine I am a fool. And I guess, in the end, no one ever promised me a future — it’s just that I look around and there is all this present going to waste, with nothing to wrap it up in and bring it home.

the heart knows its own, watching for the rose that materializes in full bloom
the action is immediate, the consequences permanent
halfway to heaven the wind turns into shifting harmonies of assembled voices
i have dreamed of the music to cast me aloft in the moonlight pale
to return to earth smelling of starlight
not to lose whatever believing has given me up to the voices, forever knowing
night to ascend as dawn presses up from the deeps

As the word “unreasonable” is open to misunderstanding, the matter may be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

I am not one who has ever traveled the straight course, always to the road. I am a wanderer. I am often carried by the wind to places I did not know were there. I think sometimes that I am very little responsible for much of my life’s courses; it is like I am a feather blown by the breezes. I am thankful that I have come this far, blind as I am to where my foot will land the next step I take — I am fortune’s meager pawn. And the sum of the good in myself, any of the good I have done, somehow I think it is an accident — that if I were to have tried to do the right thing, it would have turned afoul. Accidental virtue, I recognize, is perhaps very little credit to a soul.

Has control always been an illusion? I would like to believe that, I think, seeing as I seem to have so little command of my life. We take whatever situation presented us and make do — we wander astray unaware that the road we travel is not the one we believe we’re on. We are each of us only human; we are small and the world is large; the universe is little changed if we exist or are not. I find I must put my trust in a higher voice — that I must acknowledge my smallness and my frailty. I cannot be left to myself; I have faltered and fallen before, and I will always find some way to fail if I go it alone.

I remember, now, what it was to lie on my back and face the sky midnight blue, myriad stars scattered throughout the canopy of night — to face it alone. How much the larger I was, back then, the whole world at my grasp. But however great I thought I was, those salad days when I was yet strong and unbroken, it was much the lesser treasure than what I have now: the courage to be as small as I am, in a world so much larger.

What is the nature of God? It is merely as the nature of the humblest love, which makes much of the smallest good thing. We might sense why the cruel world is as it is. Why there is toil, why there is pain. There is wisdom in the very air we breathe that we most probably will never fathom — not because it is so grand and complex, but because it is so simple, and plain. We must verily seek that humble nature within ourselves, to properly understand the way things are, and how we should be. Why it is that the soul of being itself, that love supreme would have it there is so much pain and wrong in the world: we cannot learn all there is to know if all we have are toys. We cannot understand the greatness of good, not beyond a casual thought, if we have not fought with all our might for it. And then, even if we fail, to survive with a soul that has known the truth of fire.

Max Ernst: Configuration

Click on the pic for a larger version.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
– Unknown, Hanlon’s Razor

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
– George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Act 2

To understand all is to forgive all.
– Germaine de Staël

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
– Blaise Pascal

It’s easy to say no! when there’s a deeper yes! burning inside.
– Stephen Covey

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
– Malcolm Muggeridge

The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer.
– Edward R. Murrow

Three people were at work on a construction site. All were doing the same job, but when each was asked what the job was, the answers varied. Breaking rocks, the first replied. Earning my living, the second said. Helping to build a cathedral, said the third.
– Peter Schultz

i collect myself again
the broken pieces scattered not so far as all that
i prepare myself to be amazed
the chaos in the smoke has a primordial pattern to it
though the signs are vague
the ink of our memories dry in strewn, uneven patches
in triplicate the prophecy
of the intricate spools unthread the lines of life
thinking much of nothing
let me not believe me forsaken if caught in the rain
worlds will to change
there is a perfect rose that dies shrouded in secret
heartbreak and confusion
breakthroughs come from strange ignitions of sense

If you aren’t sure how to love, try this: give, and do not take.

It is extraordinary that sects of religious enthusiasts, from the Montanists down to the Catholic Apostolics, should have imagined that to make verbal noises which nobody else could understand was evidence of Divine Inspiration, a repetition of the miracle of Pentecost. What happened at Pentecost was exactly the opposite, the miracle of instantaneous translation — everybody could understand when everybody else was saying.

the paths that i am led down are all imaginary
though i suspect no dream truly has an ending
but too much has happened, things cannot remain the same
our eyes must accustom themselves to strange lights
i wonder, how do hearts form their ghosts?
when can we let go of the guy wires that prop up our facades?
where the spirits of the dead gather, a hive of whispers
and i am imaginary, too, a passing shadow
easily slipping from the holograms we remember of childhood
the ghost who dreamed he was flesh and blood
trapped in the heart of a lover trying to forget