Feeling Yourself Disintegrate – The Flaming Lips
January 19, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Oh, to realize
something is ending
within us
Scholastica
January 17, 2012 § Leave a Comment
One winter night, Benedict’s sister, Scholastica, was awakened by a song bird. How can this be, she thought, and she looked out the window of her cell. Three naked men were dancing in the monastery garden by the light of the moon. One whistled like a bird and made her laugh. The men were fair to look at, Scholastica thought, but she knew she needed more rest before the first prayers of the day.
Kneeling by her bed, she closed her eyes and sleepily said a prayer for the men – if they were men – that they might find shelter, clothing, and rest for their dancing feet, and if (as she suspected) they were demons, that they might return to from whence they came.
When she awoke, her cell was filled with the scent of roses. Where the men had been dancing, a rose bush had sprung up and was blooming in the snow. It bloomed all that winter, and it blooms to this day.
–Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk
2012 In Review: Intimacy and the Word
January 16, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Because after a little more than two weeks in, I’ve noticed The Change. Change as a concept is something I wrote briefly about last year, when I said, “The New Year has rarely felt as new as this one does to me,” and then again after I moved to DC, in a post where I wondered if “uncertainty is the rigor, if being thrown is the routine.” But in each post, both of which were more journal-y than I think mine tend to be, I missed the point, I think. I missed the point that I’m feeling the edges of, seeing the contours of, now, in 2012.
Is it surprising anymore that the grounds of truth, the place where meaning springs up from and lives project themselves off of, is located in another person? This is the reality I saw glimpses of every couple of months for the last year – last years even – but it wasn’t until 2012 that it hit me, that it ran me through and made me know it.
What I mean is something like this: the way we move about this world, the way we understand it and communicate it, the way change occurs – which is an internal, rather than external thing, always, I’m convinced – all of it, all of this that means anything at all, that is meaningful, it happens through intimacy. « Read the rest of this entry »
