We humans, a struggling species, can use more prayers like this. The Heart can show the way, though, if we let it. This Morning I Pray for My Enemies And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the [...]
And what if what we want is already given. What then? (Image: Little Child in the Grass, Bernt Gronvold) And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver (1938-1988) from A New Path [...]
Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart. Without knowing it, from various ills— A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. Then he wants to use himself and things So [...]
Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down [...]
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear [...]
You need a reason, any reason—skiing, a job in movies, the Golden Gate Bridge. Take your reason and drive west, past the Rockies. When you're bored with bare hills, dry flats, and distance, stop anywhere. Forget where you thought you were going. Rattle through the beer cans in the ditch. If there's a fence, try [...]
A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not [...]
Diagnosis By the time I was six months old, she knew something was wrong with me. I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child in the family, or the extended family, or the neighborhood. My mother took me in to the pediatrician with the kind hands, a doctor with a [...]
Space Aliens Found Performing in Carnival Freak Shows In 1920, my great-aunt Jane hopped a midnight freight and ran away from home to sing on a New York stage. She was only sixteen. The family took her photograph off the grand piano and never again spoke her name. Later, they grew lonely for her voice. [...]
Untitled Holy Spirit, Giving life to all life, Moving all creatures, Root of all things, Washing them clean, Wiping out their mistakes, Healing their wounds, You are our true life, Luminous, wonderful, Awakening the heart from its ancient sleep. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, [...]