~ Thích Nhat Hanh
"Every morning I
awake torn between a desire to save the
world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it
hard to plan
the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what
possible
reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the
savoring must
come first."
~ E.B. White
"Love has reached the seventh heaven.
Before the mind can figure how
Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.
I must stop this talk now and let
Love speak from its nest of silence."
~ Rumi
Hour of Stars
The round silence of
night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.
Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o'-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.
A thousand butterfly
skeletons
sleep within my walls.
A wild crowd of young
breezes
over the river.
- Federico García
Lorca
Image by Peter
Shefler. (Moon reflected on the Milles River).
TOUCH
is what we desire in
one form or another, even if we find it
through being alone, the agency of silence or the felt
need
to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or
someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass
on
the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of
another’s
hand; even an understanding we formally could not
hold.
Whether we touch only
what we see or the mystery of what
lies beneath the veil of what we see, we are made for
unending meeting and exchange, while having to hold a
coherent mind and body, physically or imaginatively,
which
in turn can be found and touched itself. We are
something
for the world to run up against and rub up against:
through
the trials of love, through pain, through happiness,
through
our simple everyday movement through the world.
And the world touches
us in many ways, some of which are
violations of the body or our hopes for safety:
through
natural disaster, through heartbreak, through illness,
through death itself. In the ancient world the touch
of a
God was seen as both a blessing and a violation, at
the same
time. Being alive in the world means being found by
the
world and sometimes touched to the core in ways we
would
rather not experience. Growing with our bodies, all of
us
find ourselves at one time violated or wounded by this
world in difficult ways, and still we live and breathe
in this
touchable, sensual world, and through trauma, through
grief,
through recovery, we heal in order to be touched again
in
the right way, as the physical consecration of a
mutual,
trusted invitation.
Nothing stops the
body’s arrival in each new present,
except death itself, which is intuited in all cultures
as
another, ultimate form of meeting. Nothing stops our
ageing
nor our witness to time, asking us again and again to
be
present to each different present, to be touchable and
findable, to be one who is living up to the very
fierce
consequences of being bodily present in the world.
To forge an
untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a
sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign
of fear
rather than strength and betrays a strange
misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and
necessary
reality: that untouched, we disappear.
© - David Whyte from
Readers' Circle Essay, ‘Touch’
©2013
