a glimpse of shimmer
A quiet night behind my grass hut.
Alone, I play a stringless lute.
It’s melody drifts to the wind blown clouds & fades.
Its sound deepens with the running stream,
expanding till it fills a deep ravine
& echoes through the vast woods.
Who, other than a deaf person,
can hear this faint song.
…Ryokan
the space of deep imagination cracks us open to a poetic cleansing…..this mantra becomes the heavenly call & response of ritual…..we believe in our cave when we come out to the light….
Herakeitos says, ‘Everything flows & nothing abides; everything gives way & nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.’ To be in ritual is to be in the river. One does not find baptism at the river; rather one finds the river in baptism. It is the river one is searching for…..Thomas Moore
the sweet taste of wine & a riverbank-kind-of-day…
As he went on speaking & Vasudeva listened to him with a serene face, Siddhartha was more keenly aware than ever of Vasudeva’s attentiveness. He felt his troubles, his anxieties & his secret hopes flow across to him & then return again. Disclosing his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool & one with the river. As he went on talking & confessing, Siddhartha felt more & more that this was no longer Vasudeva listening to him. He felt that this motionless listener was absorbing his confession as a tree absorbs the rain, that this motionless man was the river itself, that he was God Himself, that he was eternity itself……Herman Hesse
our deepest bones feel our ancestors tug, through time & the vapor of a diety cast in a shadowed annointing….this is letting go…this is communion with truth….
