when you're broken open

Dance, when you're broken open.

Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance, when you're perfectly free.

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door.  It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside!

Something opens our wings.  Something

makes boredom and hurt disappear.

Someone fills the cup in front of us.

We taste only sacredness.

No better love than love with no object,

no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.

If you could give up tricks and cleverness,

that would be the cleverest trick!

Some nights stay up till dawn,

as the moon sometimes does for the sun.

Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way

of a well, then lifted out into light.

~ Rumi

.

St. Francis and the sow

.

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

~ Galway Kinnell

epiphany

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race ... there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. 

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed...

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

detachment

When I preach, I usually speak of detachment and

 say that a man should be empty of self and all things;

 and secondly, that he should be reconstructed in the simplicity
  beyond all words and beyond all understanding that God is;

 and thirdly, that he should consider the great longing

 which God has set up in the soul, such that by means of it 

man may wonderfully attain to God; and fourthly, 

of the purity of the divine nature.

~ Meister Eckhart

the woodcarver

Kling, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded.  They said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

"What is your secret?"

Kling replied: " I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten praise or criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs."

"By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand."

"Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand 

And begin."

"If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been 

No bell stand at all."

"What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits."

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton