The Heart of Solitude

When you inhabit

your solitude

fully

you will find that at its heart

there is neither

loneliness

nor emptiness

but intimacy

and

shelter.

There is a lantern

in the soul,

which makes your solitude

luminous.

- John O’Donohue

(arranged quote)

Speech of the Rain

What a thing it is to sit 
absolutely alone, 

in the forest, at night, cherished 
by this wonderful, unintelligible, 
perfectly innocent speech, the most 
comforting speech in the world,

the talk that rain makes by itself 
all over the ridges, 
and the talk of the watercourses 
everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, 
nobody is going to stop it. 

It will talk 
as long as it wants, this rain. 

As long as it talks 
I am going to listen.

-- Thomas Merton
“Rain and the Rhinoceros” in Raids on The Unspeakable
(arranged quote)

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

 -- David Whyte
     from The House of Belonging

Reckless Poem

Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
      tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
      is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
      until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
      red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
      among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

—Mary Oliver

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting 
their bad advice–

though the whole house
 began to tremble

and you felt the old tug
 at your ankles.


“Mend my life!”
 each voice cried.


But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried
 with its stiff fingers 
at the very foundations,

though their melancholy
 was terrible.


It was already late
 enough,
and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen
 branches and stones.


But little by little,
 as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn
 through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly
 recognized as your own,

that kept you company
 as you strode deeper and deeper
 into the world,

determined to do
 the only thing you could do–

determined to save
 the only life you could save.

-- Mary Oliver

Kyrie

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.

It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

-- Tomas Tranströmer