Things I Continue To Learn

My apologies, dear reader. This particular post is designed to help me look back on my time in Bolivia and remember what was. It's primarily for my sake. Nevertheless, here are some things that have inspired me lately...

All that we wonder about and think and do is inevitably affected by the kinds of people we are, our temperaments, our histories, our surroundings, our limited horizons, our interests, fears, needs, and perversities. Sometimes these conditions are so pervasive that we even mistake them for Christianity itself… These continuing factors cannot be avoided. We cannot rise above them to gain absolute or universal truths, but we can acknowledge them and compensate for them as best we can.
We do so by fostering a certain modesty and self-awareness. We acknowledge that we are limited human beings who are always to some extent going to be wrong. But we compensate for this chiefly by opening ourselves up to as wide and varied a “community of disagreement” as we can find. It will be full of people as limited and conditioned and mistaken as we are, but fortunately they will be limited and conditioned and mistaken in different ways. If we open up to them, there is some hope that their insights, whatever their shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, will challenge and complement and correct ours and ours theirs, so that together the questions we ask and the insights we bring to bear and the conclusions we reach will be more adequate than had we been left to ourselves. (Not Angels But Agencies, Michael Taylor pp. 131-132)

Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, you come to see me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The moon. The full moon is inside your house.

My friends and I go running out into the street.
I’m in here, comes a voice from the house, but we aren’t listening.
We’re looking up at the sky.
My pet nightingale sobs like a drunk in the garden.
Ringdoves scatter with small cries, Where, Where.
It’s midnight. The whole neighborhood is up and out
in the street thinking, The cat burglar has come back.
The actual thief is there too, saying out loud,
Yes, the cat burglar is somewhere in this crowd.
No one pays attention.

Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There’s no need to go outside.

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

~Rumi

Chance had cast me on his island, chance had thrown me in his arms. In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. ~ Susan Barton (Foe)

I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart. ~ Cruso (Foe)

“Your master is dead, Friday,” I whispered.
Friday lay in his little recess wrapped in the old watch-coat the surgeon had found for him. His eyes glinted in the candlelight but he did not stir. Did he know the meaning of death? No man had died on his island since the beginning of time. Did he know we were subject to death, like the beasts? I held out a hand but he would not take it. So I knew he knew something; though what he knew I did not know. ~ Susan Barton (Foe)

Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. ~ Foe

There comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace. ~ Foe

We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it? ~ Foe

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

~Rumi

For many many years I feel as though my life has been a frantic running from silence. It's when I move to other countries, when I find I can't easily communicate with others, when my days and nights aren't constantly filled with this party and that gathering that I begin to slow down.

This is when I become spiritual.

To love life and all of its messiness, this is a gift.