For the Vernal Equinox

“O Sacred Balance, poised at true,
in this season when night and day are equal,
by moonlight and sunlight,
come with your holy searchlight
as I survey the different calls on my life.
Be in my discernment of time as I go between world and home today.
Help me to discover my need
for busyness and rest,
for solitude and togetherness,
for self and other.
Be the deep well within me
fluidly moving between discipline and mercy,
that I might live in the ebb and flow of your rhythms
knowing that there is a time for all things.
Make me steady in my day as I set forth this morning.”

From The Celtic Wheel of the Year: Celtic and Christian Seasonal Prayers by Tess Ward

“I’ve found something so rare,
So miraculous,
No-one can assess
How much it is worth.

It is colourless and One;
It is eternal and indivisible;
The waves of change never break over it;
It fills every vessel.

It has no weight; it has no price;
No-one can ever measure it;
No-one can count it;
It cannot be known
Through talk or erudition.
It isn’t heavy and it isn’t light.
There isn’t a touchstone in any world
That can reveal its worth.

I live in it; it lives in me
And we are one, like water
Mingled with water.
The one who knows it
Can never die –
The one who doesn’t know it
Dies again and again.”

Kabir, 15th century India

Image: Am I a Drop or the Ocean? by Kamran Khavarani

For International Women’s Day

“Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!”

Now I Become Myself by May Sarton (1912 – 1995)

For Lent

“To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering,
for trusting the breaking,
for tracing the rupture
that will return you

to the One who waits,
who watches,
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.”

Rend Your Heart by Jan Richardson

Ramadan begins

“The wakened lover speaks directly to the beloved,
“You are the sky my spirit circles in,
the love inside love,
the resurrection-place.

Let this window be your ear.
I have lost consciousness many times
with longing for your listening silence,
and your life-quickening smile.

You give attention to the smallest matters,
my suspicious doubts, and to the greatest.

You know my coins are counterfeit,
but you accept them anyway,
my impudence and my pretending!

I have five things to say,
five fingers to give
into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist,
nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for
was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,
and this is for someone else.
Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?
Is weeping speech?
What shall I do, my love?”

So he speaks, and everyone around
begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,
moaning in the spreading union
of lover and beloved.

This is the true religion. All others
are thrown-away bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery
dancing together. This is not-being.

Neither words, nor any natural fact
can express this.

I know these dancers.
Day and night I sing their songs
in this phenomenal cage.

My soul, don’t try to answer now!
Find a friend, and hide.

But what can stay hidden?
Love’s secret is always lifting its head
out from under the covers,
“Here I am!””

Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273)

“You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”

From The Color Purple by Alice Walker, born on this day in 1944

Feast of Candlemas

“God of life,
there are days when the burdens we carry
chafe our shoulders and wear us down;
when the road seems dreary and endless,
the skies gray and threatening;
when our lives have no music in them
and our hearts are lonely,
and our souls have lost their courage.
Flood the path with light, we beseech you;
turn our eyes to where the skies are full of promise.”

Saint Augustine (354 – 430)

“Under pine trees in the snow,
the chickadees around my head,
I wept for the will of God,
this hungry woman fed.
All the shadows shifted
while my back was turned.
Once and always on my finger
one soft and small gray bird.
Not a twisting
due to prayer,
but all its own,
and mine together.
And so I bear the gift,
carry it through time—
this deepest darkness,
astonishing grace.”

Magnificat by Mary Pratt

“Summoned from sleep
in the heart of night
my name is called
and, like Samuel,
I rise from my bed
seeking the caller.
Summoned from sleep
I am drawn into
the beating heart
of the One
who called me.
The angel of night
lights a candle in my soul
inviting me to listen
to the wordless song
of Divine Union.
Deep healing.
Deep listening.
Deep waiting.
Deep watching.
All of these become
a part of my night watch.
In the heart of the night
you prepare me to be
your deep healing
for all who watch
through the night
of their fears.”

Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB (1939 – 2020)

“I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences —
great suffering, great fear —

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery.”

Of Being by Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)