melted into the landscape

Last might when I cycled home from S., I poured out all my tenderness,
all the tenderness one cannot express for a man even when one loves him very,
very much, I poured it all out into the great, all-embracing spring night. I stood
on the little bridge and looked across the water; I melted into the landscape and
offered all my tenderness up to the sky and the stars and the water and to the
little bridge.  And that was the best moment of the day.

... And I felt this was the only way of transforming all the many deep and
tender feelings one carries for another into deeds: to entrust them to nature, to let
them stream out under the open spring sky, and to realize that there is no other
way of letting them go.




~ Etty Hillesum
from An Interrupted Life
story and art from Love and Gratitude
by Roderick Maclver



   

when one gave oneself to them

Near the end of the war, he was injured in an explosion which 

seriously impaired his vision. Told that his loss of sight would eventually

be total, he decided to return to more familiar surroundings in France to

continue his study of music and to prepare himself to leave the world of 

the sighted. "The sight of a pin," he wrote, "a hair, a leaf, a glass of

water - these filled me with tremendous excitement. The plants

 in the courtyards, the cobblestones, the lamp posts, the faces of strangers. I no

longer took them in and bound them up in me, they retained their values,

their identities. I went out to them, immersed myself in them and found

them more beautiful than I ever dreamed they could be. They tought,

they nourished when one gave oneself to them."

~ Robert Ellsberg

from a profile of John Howard Griffin

in The Catholic Worker

 found here in The Heron Dance Book of

Love and Gratitude

by Roderick Maclver

art by Mr. Maclver