Weekly Inspiration (12/21/22)

Presume that your soul mirrors the sky: there is both day and night. If you are in the dark, the light will dawn on you as you are able to bear it. We call this “enlightenment.” The dawn will come, when you are ready, or when you are readied. You can’t force the light.  

Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of St. John the Evangelist 

Poem of the Week

Yes, I who stir the star-whirls with a finger
have considered, I have pondered well
what it might be to plunge into not just
the human form but substance, single life:

risk being lost, alone, abandoned (me!)
feel loss or guilt, or suffer being wrong,
betray and be betrayed, with shame and grief,
to hurt, to doubt, and not to know—not know!—

to try and fail to understand myself,
to feel and sometimes fear it, and to find
myself undone, unable to go on.
To weep. To love so hard it wounds.... To die.

I know this. Yet a life removed from life
I will renounce to feel the touch of you, 
and wonder, and the miracle of love
unearned but given and received in joy.

I forfeit my defense, surrender all, 
and fragile now, as if a newborn child,
stripped bare and swaddled only in my love,
I seek you.
                   I am coming. 
                                           I am here.  

-Steve Garnass-Holmes