The world existed

The world existed.

Before anything else, it was all fire: Golden, molten, radiating, relentlessly bright flame.

Nothing was hidden. But nothing could be seen either, because it would melt the eyes. Even God was nervous to approach the world.

God longed for the dark things. Ash meant everything had burned, but it also meant substance had cooled. God could gaze upon charcoal and see all the folds and tunnels that ran through it, marking a flame's path. God could hold it in the hand, stick it in the pocket, carry it elsewhere.

Let us be open to what has never happened before

In the gift of this new day,
in the gift of the present moment,
in the gift of time and eternity intertwined,
let us be grateful,
let us be attentive,
let us be open to what has never happened before,
in the gift of this new day,
in the gift of the present moment,
in the gift of time and eternity intertwined.

To love things

That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual" pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to “love the things / as no one has thought to love them."

Stars

How shall the mind keep warm
save at spectral fires—how thrive
but by the light of paradox?

Ask what makes you come alive

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Making sense of the world takes so many forms

Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others... you could expand... to so many other forms of art, including the unheralded art of living our everyday lives, and the creation and maintenance of connection. What does it look like to cherish other people? To cultivate our empathy for one another, even when our own experiences are so disparate? If a burning world is our lived reality, how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?

Small Kindnesses

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don't want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

The limits of what we could know

We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.

Transform our individual actions

We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

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