O brothers let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down,
Come on brothers let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way !

Heart of mine! What strange surprises

Mount aloft on such a stair!

Some great vision upward rises,

Curving, bending, floating fair.

This is Michal Angela Wilson. Dear friend, genuine soul. Portland, Oregon, December 2009.

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please–tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore. If you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”

- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Words have been my source of exhaustion more than I’d like to admit, words read in the leaves of a book, spoken by me or you, by he or she. There is a key to closeness that you cannot hold in your pocket but comes only with your eyes or the proximity of your being. Is the missing word your or my?

It is the exhaustion that destroys me most. The places a soul goes to discover what other surroundings cannot bring have become so crowded, so loud. Such a place can be only lonely, and with such awareness, I sit a little further every day…

Me– the dog who bites his own stitches, the soldier preferring the medal to the trench, if only I were honest. Don’t be mistaken, don’t even be taken. I’m not clear, I’m not tame, I’m only wanting. Were you sitting a little closer you would know that.

But if I were asked what I really want, which pathology or awareness to return to sender, which experience to undo, which control to regain, it would be none of these. It would only be to finally be worth it– worth the silence, worth the words, worth a look from the center of your eye. Only in silence can contradiction make sense.

And so far this just isn’t making sense. I must have mistaken our roles, because I’m either directionally challenged, or the closer I sit every day brings me closer to far away. So maybe it should be you taming me.

Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sanford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the the sun compass and the odometer  mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

- The English Patient, pg246

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched… Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.

- The English Patient, p138

Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the world is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thoughts to his conscience and returns… we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence.

-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

I can expect the dark and the bright times. I can expect and enjoy the repeated shock of cold water jumping into a stream. But without effort on my own part, without the willingness to step/dive/fall in, I can expect nothing in contrast from what I have now.

Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you:

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you;
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

On a sunny day in Portland, August, 2009

more. more. more.

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
- Thomas Merton, From New Seeds of Contemplation

Sharing hand-rolled cigarettes, Daniel and I considered the path of those who’ve walked from the realms of contemporary church culture like a salty insect shell they would find somewhat discomforting in making any attempt to return to their shoulders. Our stories include us in this demographic, and we consider the heavy weight of this world left behind, but not as though shoulders were made only for burdons or for looking back over. It is the gift of a contemplative soul to shed the conventional in its falsehoods but its burdon to recognize that the only homes to be found are those that embrace the broken. Contemplation that considers the honest shape of the shell shed and the new home will recognize the cracks and scrapes and holes of any home but will continue the mendings. Like a cigarette that just won’t stay lit, only a bit of fire will bring new life, and with it, new impending death. In such a repetition, I can hear Vonnegut’s chorus: “So it goes..”

“I myself own a flower,” he continued his conversation with the businessman, which I water every day. I own three volcanos which I clean out every week (for I also clean out the one that is extinct; one never knows). It is of some use to my volcanos, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them. But you are of no use to the stars…”
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

Hidden in this passing conversation is a philosophy of ownership that I believe could battle the depths of all that silliness that just doesn’t make sense in man’s (especially the Western Man’s) need to own. De Saint Exupéry is suggesting that man’s role in being and his responsibility in his perceived ownership is an action of pouring out. It is not an action of pulling in or becoming an effectual vacuum. The great responsibility man has been given is that of his active service to the world he is a part of. The world does not exist to service man, man exists to service it.

If you haven’t read de Saint Exupéry, please do.

Bryan and Beth’s wedding
Omaha, Nebraska, May 2009

near Copper Mountain, Colorado
September 8, 2009

Poudre River Canyon, Colorado
September 7, 2009

And a poet said, “Speak to us of Beauty.”
…
The tired and the weary say, “beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”
…
All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
…
[B]eauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Beauty (abridged)

Hasselblad 500c/m
Cannon Beach, Oregon, March 2009