Who still remains

I wonder who it was,

Whether you or me or the weather

Who sat first on that mountain and listened.

Mountain leaves sifted

Among the poplar and alder,

And rain funneled from the clouds

In long silvery strings. It spoke of dreams, and maple leaves

Bent in the fall.

And cabins call,

And a bubbling brook, and the book

I’ve tried writing you, the one

About the children, the fox and the color blue.

And though I’m headed north again, and we live suspended

In forts we cannot reach, you teach me patience,

And humility.

No more goals, only writing and giving thanks

For this weather that is in front of me.

There’s a poem

Wrapped inside me like coiled rope,

Or a winding river,

Or a mountain slope.

And though I pack my canvas bag

With icons and books, and my sleeping bag, I am not sad.

I have tasted sap

On toast, I have walked the warm mountains

Of my heart.

Perhaps I dream more than most.

But now that I think of it, and that is just the trick of it,

It was the weather who first sat on that mountain

And listened, calling our names.

It is He who still remains.

For the creator of water

You circled the island of my heart twice,

And though no two movements of the seasons are the same,

Maps from histories long ago speak of Your life,

You, explorer of deep and shallow waters.

~

Twice I moved from my mountain in Alaska, to the

Same ocean stormed in the winter and summer seasons.

Life is devoid of maps, histories have no use here:

Waters lap and recede, exploring the need to return.

~

The mountain moves off my heart when I listen to Your voice, and

Seasons rattle the oceans around me both autumn and spring.

Here with You, nothing is devoid, and a desire to return

Recedes, the thought of leaving You impossible.

~

Twice the same, returning to spring,

The seasons of water

Remind me how much I love You.

 

The Door of Pascha

So then I entered the mountains.

It is here I first found Christ, or should I write, Christ found me, huddled inside the stomach of the Himalayas.

I experienced a sort of cleansing inside there, a window opened inside me which I hadn’t known existed, or had been sealed shut.

But the way of the pilgrim, – which I’m re-reading now, for the hundredth time – is really the way of every man, woman, and child, and the path onto which we enter the love which fills all things.

This love is not dependent upon geography, time, sex, money, there is no condition to which true Love is bound because Love is eternal, and that’s a qualifier for Truth, and Life, and so anything else is death and a lie, which is why, I think, that without this Love who is a Person, I grow anxious, I grow sad, and maybe more reticent to find that which lasts and satisfies. But really, how can I find it in a culture which seals God up in a tomb and NEVER rolls away the door?

Easy.

God cannot be bound to a tomb, or any container society attempts to fit Him into, because while society is mostly silent about the Orthodox God, it is through silence and stillness we experience Him, because silence is His language, everything else is a translation.

And THEN we find Him in the city, in the eyes of those who, like me, easily break and wonder, is this all worth it? Is there an end? Is there a meaning? What is it?

Well, WHO is it?

This meaning is a Person, in Christ, who enters into His creation through a fabric of particles and atoms and trees and rivers; the Tao, the Logos, inserting into our world, and we experience Him through…well, how can God NOT reveal Himself?

Every mountain cave, whale, Lazarus tomb and Golgotha is a door through the Door Who is Christ, a ‘little death’ by which we taste love, because it is a reunion, a wedding day with our Beloved.

The tomb door finally rolls  off our hearts, and we buoy to the surface like little Jonahs, landing in Jerusalem through the Door of Pascha.

Friday

At a cafe in Port Townsend

Watching waves roll over the harbor,

Elbows on a wooden table.

Friends, and old coffee cups. The lost sounds

Of wind on the horizon. Observing the tides

Of people lift and recede.

Perceiving again

This longing in our hearts;

To be with Christ.

The heart is no longer a quiet passenger

It was a pleasure walking the seagull-lined shores

Where Napoleon is said to have strolled,

Those rolls in the waves dark, purple and white

As I sipped from a bottle of wine.

~

Watching sunsets

Rinse into the steamy Mediterranean,

I felt like the last of the great painters

In my mind, the awesome hues,

The yellow, gold and blue.

 ~

Though in silence I held no brush,

The memory of a forest thrush

Lingered in my brain,

And the snow, and again,

The seclusion of a mountain range.

 ~

The sound of a cricket.

The gold of a honeycomb

Collected in wooden bowls.

 ~

When our lives are shown

To us

And the heart

Is no longer a quiet passenger, will we be guided

Through a forest of conscience,

Will the meaning we’ve given our lives

Suddenly become clear?

 ~

I fear yes, I will say so,

The days I have roamed
Apart from the people I love.

The things I have or would not do,

The soul’s attachments, whether too much

Or too few.

 ~

Yes,

Perhaps death really is a sunset,

After all. A springtime

After the Fall.

 

On prayer…

Writing this poem

Tonight, but by candle light

Can’t think of anything but this winter darkness

Settling around me like snow.

~

I know, poems aren’t supposed

To begin like this,

They ought to contain roses, or a bird

Rising from the branches in spring.

~

But I’m thinking of spruce trees

And a skete in Alaska,

Where the winter darkness radiates

From a wood stove.

~

The heart is the window

Of a furnace, keeping watch

Over the nervous relationships

It remembers.

~

And I suppose, now that I think of it,

Prayers are logs

Waiting to be chopped

For a very cold evening.

A flame of the heart

Near the window at  a cafe in Port Townsend, I sip smokey, black tea listening  to ocean foaming over the shoreline. Seated by the sea, I remember mornings and evenings at the Mediterranean, living in Italy, studying culture and language.

I explored islands and alleyways, churches, cemeteries and train stations.

It was a very sensual trip in that I tasted warm wine, pasta, and pastries and snorkeled, smoked and sang. But it was never enough. The beautiful red fish, the steak, the glowing frames of Botticelli could never fulfill my soul’s hunger to know their true Author.

So I hungered after God not through things but in things. When we make idols of art, music, poetry, people – anything – the heart ceases growing as a sanctified forest where the stream of prayer springs forth. Instead, our soul resembles a river I visited many years after my travels through Italy – - the Ganges.

While the Himalaya mountain range clearly isn’t divine, nor is any ‘holier’ than any other mountain range, it does feed much of the subcontinent with clear, fresh and even beautiful water. I remember bathing in it high in the town where I met Christ – in Gangotri – very cold. But descend a little further and the same water has become polluted, undrinkable, some it even oily and afire.

What really matters I think is how we prepare this space inside us. Through prayer, even when we don’t want to – when I’d rather go out and watch a movie, or read a book, or read a poem. It is actually this fact, – when I desire something more than prayer, – that somewhere, someplace inside me – perhaps it is my guardian angel – or my saint – or Christ Himself – that something says, wordlessly, ‘you have constructed an idol.’

I am lazy.

How many times do I intend to keep vigil in the Gethsemane of my heart only to fall asleep and wake to thieves stealing the presence of Christ from me? Countless times, and daily. These thieves are passions I myself have invited into the Lord’s garden only for a cheap, selfish and even fleeting, pleasure.

Can you imagine it?

Choosing a fleeting pleasure of the flesh over eternity with the Author of that flesh? The true Friend of the heart? And yet I do, again and again. I pray God takes me at my best – which even then will only be due to His mercy, grace and His strength.

But the Lord created and put us in the garden “to dress it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). And this is where grace flows, this is the bottomless well. Through this well, – brought up to the surface by prayer, fasting, and the sacraments – God is knowable and present.

How marvelous!

Life apart from Christ is not life, it is death.

Passions are afflictions, no matter how we might justify or ignore them. Food, wine and art – really, anything, for that matter – needn’t be an idol. It is not riches we must despise but what we do with them, and our attachments.

So with vigilant thankfulness, in keeping sight of Christ present in all things, we can actually taste our God and even see His mountains, rivers and brooks, His singing birds and children as beautiful shadows of His light.

I just saw something by St Theophan that I want to share, it’s really great: he says that what is spiritual is born when we are born, and grows as we grow.  In other words, it is integral for us, a part of us – yet somehow, we overlook and are blind to who we truly are – a union of both flesh, blood and spirit. Know this, I think, and fear of death raises another question: have we warmed the place within us and within other people, or are we hardened? Do we neglect others?

Humility is acquired by acts of humility, love by acts of love.We must acquire a constant feeling of love for God, and then the Flame will become manifest.

Glory to God for all things.