Showing posts with label Annie Dillard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Annie Dillard. Show all posts

Thursday, February 17, 2022

we open time

 
 
 

 
I saw to the south a man walking.
 He was breaking ground in perfect silence.
 He wore a harness and pulled a plow. 
His feet trod his figure's blue shadow,
 and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. 
He turned back as if to check the furrow, 
or as if he heard a call. 
 
Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. 
This man walked slowly with a spade, 
and turned the green ground under.
 
Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking,
 the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season,
 peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under,
 and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. 
No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. 
The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings.
 Our generations overlap like shingles.
 We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall.
 Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe,
 most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time
 like a path in the grass. 
 
We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.
 
There were no formerly heroic times, 
and there was no formerly pure generation. 
There is no one here but us chickens, 
and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful,
 knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful,
 and self-aware: a people who scheme, promote, 
deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones,
 and long to flee misery and skip death. 
 
It is a weakening and discolouring idea,
 that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time –
 or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – 
but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available
 to everyone in every age. 
 
There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
 
 
 
 
~ Annie Dillard
from For the Time Being 
 
 
 

Saturday, January 2, 2021

seeing and letting go






But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied... But I can't
go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do
is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless
interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a
lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints
and monks of every order East and West…


The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally
 that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow 
of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, 
and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort 
that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded
 in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights;
 you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence
 without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real
 where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.





~ Annie Dillard 
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
art by Van Gogh







Wednesday, November 4, 2020

the waiting






The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. 

It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll.
 It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: 
it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. 

The waiting itself is the thing.




- Annie Dillard
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek





Tuesday, May 12, 2020

the present






The present is the wave that explodes over my head,
flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll;
it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources
the freshest news, renewed and renewing,
world without end.




~ Annie Dillard



Wednesday, March 27, 2019

the pearl and the muddy river











The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price.
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever
I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts
after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found,
it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all:
although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always,
even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise…

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave,
has force: you rig a giant sail and go.

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail,
whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.






~ Annie Dillard
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
art by Peter Jendro
with thanks to Love is a Place
 
 
 
 

Monday, March 15, 2010

gaps






The gaps are the thing. 
The gaps are the spirit's one home,
 the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that 
the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. 
The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; 
they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through,
 the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 
Go up into the gaps.
 If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. 
Stalk the gaps. 
Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -
 more than a maple - a universe.




~ Annie Dillard