Weil 5

There are certain joys -- and they are the most precious -- which, when imagined, are extremely pale; whose whole value consists in their presence itself.  We lack stimulus to seek out these pale joys, even though it cost only a slight effort, unless.... 
(May I no longer commit this crime towards myself of allowing them to slip by.)    
--  Simone Weil

Weil 4

How poore, how narrow, how impious a measure of God, is this, that he must doe, as thou wouldest doe, if thou wert God.

John Donne, sermon preached in St. Paul's Jan. 30, 1625

Weil 2

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light— and in the best of cases the fullness of light — in the heart of that same religious tradition. … It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.  
 
Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

Mindstream

The sound of water says what I think.  
Chuang Tzu  370-287 BC
 
What the river says, that is what I say. 
Wm Stafford, 1914-1993

Tao

We have ways within each other
that can never be said by anyone.

--  Rumi

The way that can be told
is not the eternal way.
--  Lao Tsu

The Form of Ibn Arabi's Heart

My heart can take on any form: a meadow for gazelles, a cloister for monks; for the idols, sacred ground; Ka’aba for the circling pilgrim.  The tablets of the Torah, the scrolls of the Koran.  My creed is love.  Wherever its caravan turns along the way, that is my belief, my faith.      

 Ibn Arabi 1165-1240

Rumi 1

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.  It will not lead you astray.   Rumi

Christmas 2017

Everything only connected by "and" and "and."
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
--the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets,
--and looked and looked our infant sight away.
Elizabeth Bishop

LORD's Prayer 6

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.