"Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning."

{Thirst by Mary Oliver, emphasis added}

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls."

I've been reading a lot of the poets lately. Maybe its the stirring of the orange leaves tossed upon the roads, or perhaps its because I recently bought a whole new stack of delicious books of poetry and prose, some famous and some not, from Amazon and they all happened to arrive last week. Perhaps.

Here's a few captivating portions from T.S. Eliot's work, 'The Rock', excerpts from part I & III; published in 1934. The italics signify my favorite lines.

. . .

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

A Cry from the North, from the West and from the south
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.'

..A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or go...

When the stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
To make money from each other?' or 'This is a community?'
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.


. . .

To eat, to breathe

to beget
Is this all there is
Chance configuration of atom against atom
........... of god against god
I cannot believe it.
Come, Christian Triune God who lives,
Here am I
Shake the world again.

{Francis Schaeffer}

I've noticed something about myself: my friendliness can be quite fair weathered.

I can be friendly and benevolent when I want to and when I feel like it, but usually when I don't- I am not. I do it all rather unconsciously, perhaps that's why I've just started noticing this pattern.

One day my heart is bursting with benevolence for mankind and life is beautiful. And then... there are the days that I saunter through the store, ignoring the well meaning, ill dressed cashier, deliberately rolling my eyes at that noisy, screaming child and it's helpless mother. When I catch myself in the middle of such pretentious absorption- I'm a little mortified and ashamed. How on earth did I go from being Wendy Darling one day to Medusa the next?

I don't want to make a deliberate, forced, un-genuine point of practicing friendliness, but I know real love won't just flourish entirely on its own. So, recently I'm trying to keep self-preoccupied, ugly Medusa at bay. She wastes my time and misrepresents the love I want to show the world and she distorts who I really am. What I've begun to do is to simply just smile; to smile when I don't want to. Yes, its elementary. But, truly, it is a gem of an idea. And more than being a nice idea, it works. There is just something mystical about showing kindness to people, to strangers, to the world. It haunts you with satisfaction, especially if the love you show is reciprocated, then life becomes even more welcome and sacred.

Every time you smile at someone,
it is an action of love, a gift to
that person, a beautiful thing.

{Mother Teresa}

I think God was very kind when he gave us the seasons.

I wonder just how bored we'd end up being if life was one long summer, a perpetual sunny summer. I know right now my mother is strongly disagreeing with me, as she maintains that life would be so much more delicious without rain and winter, and most likely that if she ever was planted on a tropical island for the rest of her life, she'd be perfectly happy. To some that might sound like a novel idea-- "always summer"-- how lovely. I like summer very much, but I cannot help but realize how blasé it would become to us if the sun was always shining and glaring, the heat always penetrating, and the clouds never hanging above, comfortingly, softly, strongly. I think the reason I adore summer so much is because I appreciate it after the rain subsides and the puddles evaporate. I adore fall just as much because summer has unknowingly nurtured inside me a hope and craving for wind and cold and umbrellas (although I never use one, but the concept is pretty) and mossy things and ferns and windshield wipers and freezing, frosty mornings and evenings. Each year the seasons unfold with a story of its own-- and while each one is similar to the other-- every year the portrayal of the story is still specialized, unique.

Thank you, God, for all our seasons. I am so glad I don't live in a box.

And thank you for the elongated shadows and the animated, cold, apple air of Autumn.

To speak analogously is to admit that you can't say it directly; you really can't say it at all; it's outside the realm of proven fact. But it is not a coincidence that some of the greatest poetry in the English language is in the form of the sonnet. The haiku is one of the most popular forms of poetry today: what could be more structured?

[Once I was giving a lecture] and the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you this freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt if it has much fun.

{L'Engle}

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many placed is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

{C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory}