Guest Writer: Abraham Joshua Heschel

Yesterday John was reading Hecshel's book, A Passion for Truth, and came across this:

"The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince--that he has royal power. All worlds are in need of exaltation, and everyone is charged to life what is low, to unite what lies apart, to advance what is left behind. It is as if all world, above and below, are full of expectancy, of sacred goals to be reached, so that consummation can come to pass. And man is called upon to bring about the climax slowly but decisively.

Nothing, therefore is accidental. Even an intruding thought does not come at random. A thought is like a person. It arrives because it needs to be restored. A thought severed, abused, seeks to be reunited with its root. Furthermore, it may be a message sent to remind a man of a task, a task he was born to carry out.

All facts are parables; their object is God. All things are tales the Teacher relates in order to render intelligible issues too difficult to comprehend literally, directly. Through things seen, God accommodates Himself to our level of understanding. What a shame it is that people do not comprehend the greatness of things on earth. They act as if life were trivial, not realizing that every trifle is filled with Divinity. No one makes a move that does not stir the highest Heaven."

(Please forgive brother Abraham's use of non-inclusive language. I seriously doubt that he intended to exclude those of us who are "She" and also part of humanity--holding up, as they say, half the sky.)

Before I Die

The hawk rides the air over the hollow, wings fanned, a cry that scatters all creatures small enough to be grasped by those talons. Shiku ducks underneath the deck. Mo growls. We are coming up the hill from the mailbox. The cry. Mo looks to the sky and pulls at his leash. How does he know? Shiku knows because she almost was taken, once, as a kitten preening herself on the railing of the deck, when suddenly the hawk swooped and was on her, wings beating, covering her. She didn't try to move. John believes she succumbed to the inevitable. But he, right there, rose up, waved his own human wings and cried out his own human cry against the bird. Hawk abandoned the kitten crouching under the churn of rising wings and flew away.

Danger rides the air and what are we to do? Terror rides the currents disguised as beauty. Or is it the other way around?

What fragile creatures walk the earth, all of us, even the hawk feels fragile in the current of John's human wings. We are all mere breath and bone. How take it in? How hold it in the heart? Because we must if we choose to live and be full-blown. Bones of glass, sand set to fire, made liquid, shaped with breath.

Before I die may I breathe in everything I see, hear, smell--everything that touches me or is touched. May everything, one at a time, drift on breath through mind and heart and soul and along the pathways of spine and nerves into my emptiness. And may I be formed, each bone, with that spirit, that primordial Breath, fragile as I am, into something clear, something beautiful, some one thing that contains it all. So that I can say in truth:

I am the hawk that cries out,

I am the wind,

I am the small one hiding,

I am the wing,

I am the hunger and the food,

I am the danger,

I am the beauty,

I am the bone,

I am the Fire.

Thunder and Fire

Thunder went silent. We moved back from our doorway to the still interior. August brings danger from the sky where coastal and mountain air currents meet and clash. While thunder reached its hand across the clouds, we opened our sunflower hearts, ready to be shaken by a Thing so far and near we cannot fathom it, nor resist laying ourselves open to its Fire.

This morning I've gone silent too, thinking of the vows I once took while kneeling in full sight of the Eternal Wild, The Awe, The Infinite Wind, The Thunder, The Complete Silence. She who knelt there never rose from her knees. She kneels and her forehead bends closer to earth each morning. Raindrops still adorn blades of grass. The thorn tree weeps.

SMOKE

MORNING TO THE SOUTHEAST

It's hard to breathe. Northwest winds carry the smoke from Big Windy and Brimstone across our hill and down into the Rogue Valley.

Oh breath. So precious.

I venture out with my camera. Hidden sunrise, not even a wash of rose but more a dusky tinge to the heavy gray. Breathe. On the nightly news we are told about the particulates in the air. We see them smeared in black across our white protective masks. We are told our condition is hazardess. We are told to stay in our air conditioning. What do they do who have none?

Where we live we see no fire. How far the smoke travels from its point of origin.

As age advanced upon me I expected to become at least a little bit wise. But the brighter the fire I feel within me, the more obscure the reality I see. Smoke provokes uncertainty so much that each breath, each step requires faith.

To see differently, releasing the known landscape.
To know nothing for sure.
To be dependent on the Wind.

This Having Been Earthly

Mo and I wandered down the road this morning to the mailbox to see if the proof for my new novel, The FarNear Journals had arrived. We went slowly. The road is steep and in places the stones skid on the dry and dusty way. Mo wanted the journey to be faster and pulled on the leash which was locked so I could more easily swing my walking stick. Leaves from the madrone had fallen and lay like old coins on the path. At the pace I walked I could see everything I passed--the tunnel webs of the brown recluse spiders who have been prolific this year in the long dry grass, the tough moss-green star thistle, holes marking the tunnels of ground squirrels, the curling bark of the young manzanita, clumps of mistletoe on branches of oak. What would it be like to travel the world this way, like a Russian pilgrim, the Jesus Prayer spiraling non-stop through mind and heart?

At the mailbox the road was quiet. Inside the box, a few letters, no book.

Making our way back up the hill, we stopped by the pear tree to admire the elegant Flemish Beauty and take a picture. During the past week I've been re-reading the poetry of Rilke, and on Saturday I ordered his Letters on Life, selections from over a thousand of those letters to friends, family and other poets. The pear made me think of a passage that struck me yesterday:

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."

 But to have been

once, even though only once:

this having been earthly seems

lasting, beyond repeal.

All that we

can achieve here, is to recognize

ourselves completely

in what can be seen on earth

RANIER MARIA RILKE

DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)

  

PENSIVE





Sunset at Bandon Dunes





 

Last time we visited Bandon By The Sea I was captured by the sunset. Moments arrive, unlike any others, when experience of being is unlimited, and whatever it is that I am seems to disappear into the immensity. Inside of that Close and Endless, or in the words of Marguerite Porete: the FarNear, the surf crashes on sand, gulls call, grasses sway, and the edges of what I call myself are gone.

 

Is not the whole point of life to live it fully?

To stretch myself from one end of it to the other,

Pulled taut by the tension of love

Tantalized by life’s beauty

Being both star and seed, planted

In ether and in earth?

 

-from my novel The FarNear Journals





A Jewel in the Eternal Crown

My dear sister, Liz, and me in 1972

Today marks the end to our family's year of mourning. Liz crossed into eternity on this day in 2012. My heart and soul are full of her. She seems to be everywhere. I think I will never stop saying Thank You for her life, her wisdom, and the courage she showed in her choice to remain with all of us for those many years of her battle with cancer. Such a beautiful one...an old soul.