Sunday, January 13, 2008

Silent

Bro. Bartleby has been silent all week. We think he is thinking. About what?
Shalom,
Bro. Juniper

Addendum:
At the break fast table I broke the silence when I asked Bro. Bartleby what he was musing about all week, he replied, "Nothing."
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2 comments:

  1. jzr7:49 AM, January 14, 2008

    I think this might be apt:

    The Snowman
    by Wallace Stevens

    One must have a mind of winter
    To regard the frost and the boughs
    Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

    And have been cold a long time
    To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
    The spruces rough in the distant glitter

    Of the January sun; and not to think
    Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
    In the sound of a few leaves,

    Which is the sound of the land
    Full of the same wind
    That is blowing in the same bare place

    For the listener, who listens in the snow,
    And, nothing himself, beholds
    Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

    --from Harmonium, 1923

    this poem was shared with participants this weekend at the end of an Insight Dialogue Retreat that I attended ...

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  2. Bro. Bartleby6:58 PM, January 16, 2008

    Sounds like a fun retreat, especially anytime Wallace Stevens arrives on the scene.

    Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
      
    Light the first light of evening
    In which we rest and, for small reason, think
    The world imagined is the ultimate good.

    This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
    It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
    Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

    Within a single thing, a single shawl
    Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
    A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

    Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
    We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
    A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

    Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
    We say God and the imagination are one...
    How high that highest candle lights the dark.

    Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
    We make a dwelling in the evening air,
    In which being there together is enough.

    --Wallace Stevens

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