There is news that will enrage your mind and raise your cortisol, leave you limp as a doll while you lower your face into your open hands; and everything within you calls you to retreat from the world, and you do, and it’s good, and the healing in that hour, steadies, readies you to reenter.
There are centering moments when Love floods and breaches the barriers of the mind, encompassing the body; and the body, with its demands, and betrayals, large and small, are suspended, then held, then released to the wash.
There are minutes that stretch to hours when Love drifts like the laziest river, and you in your canoe, overcome with an abundance of time, break free of your plans and rest in the light, kindness, and shade of your own heart. A Christic gift — so not of your own making — but of your availing.
There are horizons so vivid, so overwhelmingly blue, as to take your hand and walk you back into the world, so near as to arrest your weariness and awaken tenderness: a compassion for self, and compassion for others — two sides of the same manifestation.
There is a Love so embodied as to move you to ever-moving stillness, so connected as to dismantle any egoistic motive — which calls you to charity, for both neighbour and enemy. This fearless Love, that without hesitation yet aware of the cost, compels you to stand and call out the cruel rot of injustice.
Faith is about fanning the embers of a childlike perception.
The individual is a phantom; in wonder and blunder we receive our selves through the eyes of others. Meaning, dear reader, my personal fulfillment is in your flourishing.
The first half of life is spent anchoring ourselves; the second half is spent unmooring ourselves.
The heart is a spotted pear — there’s no getting through without some bruising.
The mind is a sea star — moving its brilliant purple rays in multidirectional ways, and clinging, so often, to the same facade.
The soul at peace is paradise.
Beneath the surface of an ordinary day lies an infinite wellspring of meaning — this untold depth is what many call God.
Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you desire meaning, learn to love the earth and her array of inhabitants.
There are 25 flowers that symbolize peace, but only the Brown-eyed Susan symbolizes justice. Tend all of them well.
Tempting, in this climate, to trade the callus-building requirements of reality for the passive comfort of hoping.
Our favoured assumptions and cherished certainties should routinely be set on fire to see what rises from the ashes.
A tincture of cynicism is emancipating, but a full meal is constipating.
To laugh at yourself is to deinstitutionalize your ego.
The crushed grapes of relinquishment can sometimes be Beaujolais for the soul.
Press your face against your keyboard, canvas, or soapstone, it will open a door.
What seemed unthinkable is now obvious — both science and religion are converging on the essential fire. It’s time they had a heart-to-heart.
Every birdcall beckons, “Unveil your hearts!” “All creation cries for love!” is every cricket’s song.
Of course, we are falling; let us pray for companionship in the descent.
Death and dying — hard, hard, hard — and any kind of bromide is unfitting.
To counsel hope can sometimes be malpractice; to discount hope is spiritual dereliction.
The twin sister of praise is grief.
Aging changes chores into privileges and anxieties into prayers.
Despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our deepest longing is to be each other’s joy.
The Big Bang is God’s dancing body. The shimmering fallout is yours.
Put-your-love-where-there-is-no-love-and-you-will-find-love — is the only religion worth practicing.
Heaven, if we have the eyes for it, is us, in our unfolding inclusiveness.
A flash of insight can skyrocket your life, but don’t go publish a creed.
A glib apology creates another wound; an honest one is ointment.
Friendship is a full-bodied Cabernet; an acquaintance is only the label.
Pavement, like a hard heart, longs to be pierced by grass.
A side dish of skepticism is good for you, but a main course will give you gas.
Truth languishes in the theatres of politics, flourishes in the cries of children.
God is a verb, Jesus, the expositive. God is haiku, Jesus is free verse.
It’s time to let chrysanthemums weigh in on climate change.
Don’t drag around what’s perished — everything you need you’ll find along the way.
Don’t vomit outright — let the poison pass through and teach you, what to hate, what to tolerate.
Theology says I come from the heavens, poetry says I come from Springside, Saskatchewan.
Fame is tinsel, intelligence is a window, kindness is a cathedral.
Gender is both river and riverbed, and as enigmatic.
Don’t scold yourself; worry is a form of prayer.
Faith is about fanning the embers of a childlike perception.
Distressingly, it’s taken me this long to see that my privilege is also my particular blindness.
A cultural obsession with sex is a sign of deep loneliness, lost intimacy.
We are lonely pilgrims, bottles in smoke — when finally our obsessions and addictions are spent — we discover that what is most alive is what we already had.
Beauty is a basket of grapes, happiness is champagne, and laughter the bubbles.
Poetry liberates paradox — reanimates a capacity for insight.
Art enlarges our being, cultivates imagination, which is why despots defund it.
Science and religion are humble in theory, but not when monetized.
Time is a tide that winds, folds, bends and swirls — vain to clutch it or try to stop it — but you already knew that.
Love, that embattled radiant thing — sometimes a gleaming gem, more often: arms that reach for us through the grief-fractured layers of our lives.
Our inner void — that canyon that yawns open when we’re alone and still — must not be skipped over, but leapt into.
You can love the earth and not love God, but you can’t love God without loving the earth.
Quantum entanglement may be one more name for God;
Snowflakes are the ghosts of fallen leaves.
Should you get anything absolutely right in life, it is critical you go back and correct it.
When we come into our beauty, we’ll admire acts of kindness over feats of cleverness.
To pray for the peace of our troubled world may or may not add a spark of hope to this flickering new year, but it’ll bolster your soul.
When we finally meet, I’m fine with a hug, if you are.
Wishing you a beautiful New Year with rivers of awe and eddies of joy!
A note: I’m not done yet, but over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and responding.
I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.
It’s early. It’s dark. In the south-east, there is a place where the sun will come up, should it choose. Indications are good. So I wait for the first signs of brightening behind the cityscape.
I wait. Winter waits. The soil of summer-fallow waits. Bulbs wait; bamboo is excellent at waiting; geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, awaiting its equinox.
But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait, will never care to wait; AI is the antithesis of waiting, while selling our ever-reductive, repackaged creativity back to ourselves, and training the waiting out of our lives.
The world of commerce is bent on bringing patience to an end. Industry keeps company with the future. Corporations race each other to see how far they can project themselves into next month, or how much of it they can drag into the present, which debases both.
We’ve surrendered the sanctity of now, and so betrayed this life, our second womb, which is about waiting. Waiting, not like Estragon and Vladimir; instead, like the chefs in Love Sarah, carefully harmonizing ingredients, preparing the pastries and letting them rest.
Advent is the season of expectation. It’s a storied rendezvous with a knowing midwife. A time for rekindled waiting — the flowering of patience. For in Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of one already here, and always present.
We are people of the paschal mystery, actively tending the earth, caring and delighting in others, while always anticipating some kind of birth, some kind of resurrection. So we watch, as one waits for morning.
I can’t see it yet, but soon enough, the east will grow orange. Beyond the berm of buildings, high on the banks of the Bow River, the trees will turn skeletal as the light of dawn strengthens behind them.
Often, I find myself thinking of Len, his sweet spirit, his buoyant soul, his soft and kind presence; then, immediately, I think of Rianne, his partner, her sorrow, a hole of inconsolable depth, then later I wonder, perhaps some memory is flooding her, recalling for her the gift of intimate friendship, companionship, partnership with Len, only she had. The other morning, I read this line in a poem: “All things are eternally present in time and nature,” and remembered how soon — in a dream or otherwise — Len came to comfort Rianne, and is “eternally present” with her. In her ocean of grief, her sea of memories, images, scenes, “all things,” enveloped by the deep love they both shared, still share.
The following is a poem from several years ago that Len liked: He wrote to tell me, “Love this quiet reflection…carried me back to similar memories of a childhood long forgotten.”
Recorded in a Haze of Aspen Saplings
Above the cliffs along the Jaun de Fuca strait are patches of prairie, and when you walk beside the Meadow barley, Nodding onion, and Nootka rose, you nod to the spirits within, in recognition of a bone-deep bond with the grasses, forbs and shrubs, that still green your prairie blood, where as a boy, you ran, arms outstretched, through shoulder-high wild rye.
You were called into the silver tunnels of willow and buffaloberry, knelt, as one knighted at the Indigo Milk Caps, sailed a scrap-lumber frigate, held fast by spike and rope, through battalions of bullrush, their velvet heads bursting up small clouds of down. Coyotes held your head above sleep in windless nights, and tri-toned trains poured songs into sedge-lined skylines.
Your birth is recorded in a haze of aspen saplings, near a bend on the Battle River, where swallows of mercy inhabit a mud-chinked log house that stands as a cenotaph to the mothers and fathers, their hard long hours, where windrows of scrub brush burned far into winter, where moldboard and share, cut sod, bled summerfallow, and bouts of drought and blankets of hail gave way to a red barn, white chickens, and bins of barley, where a pine-trimmed home saw the coming and parting of children, all dreaming of voyages beyond the bush-belted yard, where now, through some trick of time, you walk among the bright spirits of goldenrod, blue stem and sagebrush, listening to the drumming angels of the great plains, radiant with a joy you can’t name, and a peace in full bloom.
