tonight

tonight it is so clear to me
that nothing good is lost

I am remembering yesterday:
how you threw me right off balance
I stuttered and felt uncomfortable:
a fish out of water.
but I am also remembering how you sewed distant things together:
one time and a place to another time and a place
(for there can be no time without place,)
a living tapestry of old and new.

just as I cannot be without a time and a place
(however uncomfortable that may be)
you cannot be within a time and a place.
and yet we meet!

do we meet, then, in a no-man's land?
no, not a no-man's land:
more a yes-man's land

despair

in this hideous place
your beauty sustains

the last two days

aware again of this strange inexplicable storm.
upon which doubt and fear - insidious seeds -
are thrown into the teeth of the gale
with one apparent aim:
to separate me from you.

we walk into the wind
anger and despair now a fuel

your purpose

I glimpsed something simple today
simple and completely essential.
missed all these years (though glimpsed before)
and still not fully understood.
its not what I do, or produce, or create that counts
it's the me that's left afterwards.

it sounds like an obvious wisdom, but without you it makes no sense
because of omnipresent death.

which takes me back to the time thing:
you ease it from sharp brittleness into something flexible.

I had strange thoughts about reincarnation a day or so ago.
nothing I could put my finger on, but I could see why people conceive of it.
for me the problem is uniqueness.
reincarnated as uniquely me or uniquely another?
but then perhaps the new problem becomes a misunderstanding of uniqueness in the first place. . . ?

it seems to me

that you distill a lifetime's experience and lead me to this strange and difficult place and time with a single purpose:
one that I cannot ever quite 'know'.

it also struck me last night that faith and love are the same thing.
neither lives without the other.
but faith expresses the truth closer to the mark than love can;
probably mostly because we misuse the word love far more often.
the word 'faith' is mostly left alone:
less contaminated perhaps.

you place your finger on my lips:
sssshhhh

zechariah

breathtaking.
he throws the gospel into a new relief.

sibelius

yesterday I struggled through a recording of his 5th symphony.
often marvelling at his sense of form and the way in which the movements pile into one another like mountain ranges,
but struggling nevertheless.
music remains a barrier rather than a bridge.
my hope: this will not be for ever.

isn't my music an attempt to paint you?
wasn't it always thus:
surrogate prayer?
isn't it time to put away the paints and seek the reality?

and still I dilly-dally:
I haven't understood

danger

I have been clawing my way back ever since monday.
the thread was broken and I had to start over:
each step an agony of indecision and doubt.
silence became again a booming emptiness.

every look backwards, every step sideways
can take me straight off the cliff.

this morning office:
the me not me but us.
bliss!

and so of course my illness is utterly relevant.
it blocks my path like a river.
turning back is not an option.
there is no bridge:
I must swim

my greatest fear: losing control.
but it has not always been like that.
control was something I learned.
it can be unlearned
and, as always, I can never choose the harder road
until there is no other road to take.
you unteach me

a two-day experiment

for two days I stopped the liturgical prayer
and the silent prayer also.
one positive effect: I wrote some overdue emails
and went for a short slow swim.

a link between my illness and my prayer?
[my cul de sac]
almost certain
but at a level too deep for me to fathom.
the way forward cannot be the way back.

like jane eyre,
I did, at one time, find a 'fork in the road'
but time and circumstance have changed all of that.
now there is no fork in the road:
only the Wall.

jane eyre

I finished reading jane eyre during a sleeplittle night.
the question: st john rivers or rochester.
choices I am refusing to make?
something the doctor said about work with soul . . .
the options seemed narrower than they may really be . . . .