The generator hums like a distant ding an sich.
It's early evening, and time, like the dog it is,
is hungry for food,
And will be fed, don't doubt it, will be fed, my small one.
The forest begins to gather its silences in.
The meadow regroups and hunkers down
for its cleft feet.
Something is wringing the rag of sunlight
inexorably out and hanging.
Something is making the reeds bend and cover their heads.
Something is licking the shadows up,
And stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in.
Something is inching its way into our hearts,
scratching its blue nails against the wall there.
Should we let it in?
Should we greet it as it deserves,
Hands on our ears, mouths open?
Or should we bring it a chair to sit on, and offer it meat?
Should we turn on the radio,
should we clap our hands and dance
The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance?
I think we should, love, I think we should.
‘Bedtime Story’
Charles Wright
What will bring me closer to You this day?
Where might I focus to find Your face?
What, or who might I consecrate with my camera?
Yes, I can look for beauty. But what if I cannot see You in it? Am I just not looking hard enough?
Perhaps. But I know that when I feel isolated, alone, and utterly abandoned that reality is otherwise. This is the Real: You are God with us, in us.
This is my assertion of faith, not a pat and easy answer. It is me trusting the mystery of the Incarnation, whatever that might mean and wherever that might lead. It is me becoming more open to receiving whatever this day brings.
As John O’Donohue reminds me in his beautiful reflection Anam Cara
The negative … contains essential energies which you need and which you cannot find elsewhere … You can only befriend the negative if you realise it is not destructive … The negative threatens precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self enlargement which our small thinking utterly resists.
Will I welcome in today’s negative experiences and emotions, alongside whatever I might name ‘positive’, and make my search for beauty start in them?
I believe I might glimpse Your dark dazzling brightness there and be transfigured in my turn.
As you lean in, you’ll surely apprehend
the tiny God is wrapped
in something more than swaddle. The God
is tightly bound within
His blessed mother’s gaze—her face declares
that she is rapt by what
she holds, beholds, reclines beholden to.
She cups His perfect head
and kisses Him, that even here the radiant
compass of affection
is announced, that even here our several
histories converge and slip,
just briefly, out of time. Which is much of what
an icon works as well,
and this one offers up a broad array
of separate narratives
whose temporal relations quite miss the point,
or meet there. Regardless,
one blithe shepherd offers music to the flock,
and—just behind him—there
he is again, and sore afraid, attended
by a trembling companion
and addressed by Gabriel. Across the ridge,
three wise men spur three horses
towards a star, and bowing at the icon’s
nearest edge, these same three
yet adore the seated One whose mother serves
as throne. Meantime, stumped,
the kindly Abba Joseph ruminates,
receiving consolation
from an attentive dog whose master may
yet prove to be a holy
messenger disguised as fool. Overhead,
the famous star is all
but out of sight by now; yet, even so,
it aims a single ray
directing our slow pilgrims to the core
where all the journeys meet,
appalling crux and hallowed cave and womb,
where crouched among these other
lowing cattle at their trough, our travellers
receive that creatured air, and pray.
'Nativity'
Scott Cairns
rocks in the way. Canon 7D. f7.1. 1/500. ISO 400.
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