There is nothing around me

In the things that I see

That can give me a taste of Eternity;

All the images and icons and memories

Are but human endeavor to find sacred and holy.

It is only when I feel the weight of the cross,

When I am naked and humble with less gain and more loss

And the comfort and caution into the wind I can toss

That my vision and my sense would seem to clear.

Then nothing is everything

And I am a part;

And my living is loving

What is close to the heart;

Where the journey is the end

Just as sure as the start

And the silence is the season

That would steer

All my longings

To a wandering in the desert

With the knowledge

That they are all just passing years

And the Promised Land is the only expectation

I should ever want

To see or to taste or to hear.

2013.01.20.1800 ©

I have no control over that which is given to me

As I enter the world from the dark and the quiet

Each day I begin;

From the birth day at which I started it all through

The years that I strove to manage it,

The elusive spin.

But so soon will come a day

With no need for observation

Of the others’ response;

The dark and the silence

Will all of my attention

By my dying

Be my living

Entrance.

2013.01.08.1800 ©

The quest for the constant Presence

Like we had with God before the fall

Is the battle to recapture the silence

Of the innocence

From the shadow of the pall

That covers it with the noise and confusion

From everything but that which we had

Because now we must find the truth for ourselves

Of the difference between the good and the bad.

The practice of the constant Presence

Requires our death

To what we hold so dear

So that the voice of God that we knew so well

Once again in the silence we can hear.

The quest is the mark of our knowledge

Of the measure of our gain and our loss.

The practice is the presence of the One that came first

And our comfort with the way of His Cross.

2013.01.05.0900 ©