Sunday, March 29, 2009
LET SOMETHING ESSENTIAL HAPPEN TO ME
O God,
Let something essential happen to me,
something more than interesting
or entertaining,
or thoughtful.
O God,
Let something essential happen to me,
something awesome,
something real.
Speak to my condition Lord,
and change me somewhere inside where it matters,
a change that will burn and tremble and heal
and explode me into tears
or laughter
or love that throbs or screams
or keeps a terrible, cleansing silence
and dares the dangerous deeds...
Let something happen in me
which is my real self.
O God,
let something essential and passionate happen in me now.
Strip me of my illusions of self-sufficiency,
of my proud sophistications,
of my inflated assumptions of knowledge
and leave me shivering as Adam or Eve before the miracle of the natural -
the miracle of this earth
that nurtures me as a mother
and delights me as a lover;
the miracle of my body
that breathes and moves,
hungers and digests,
sees and hears,
that is creased and wrinkled and sexual,
shrinks in hurt,
and swells in pleasure;
that works by the most amazing messages
of what and when and how,
coded and curled in every
cell and that dares to speak the confronting
word.
O God,
Let something essential and joyful happen in me now.
Something like the blooming of hope and faith,
like a grateful heart,
like a surge of awareness
of how precious each moment is,
that now, not next time,
now is the occasion
to take off my shoes,
to see every bush fire,
to leap and whirl with neighbour,
to gulp the air as sweet as
wine
until I've drunk enough
to dare to speak the tender word:
"Thank you"
"I love you"
"You're beautiful";
"Let's live forever beginning now";
and "I'm a fool for Christ's
sake."
- Ted Loder
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
Kahlil Gibran
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Remember:
when you remember me, it means you have carried something of who i am with you, that i must have left some mark of who i am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we ever meet again, you will know me. It means that even after i die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, i am never entirely lost. When i am feeling most ghost-like, it's your remembering me that helps remind me that i actually exist. When i'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When i'm feeling happy, it's part of the way i feel.
If you forget me, one of the ways i remember who i am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who i am will be gone.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
from
ts eliot: east coker.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
sometimes the only thing you would hope for is failure
because you'll truly savour that happiness success could have brought,
but no we expect too much for a victory, awaiting for its warmth
only to be thrown down and drowned harshly by the icy embrace of rejection and compromise.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Disappeared by boey kim cheng
It happens that friends drop out of your life;
each year a face, a voice, lost, quietly gone
into a far country, each finding a way to survive.
You wonder about the few, whether they are alive,
the ones who matter, the maimed, the forlorn.
It happens that the angels slip unnoticed out of your life.
You dig up the letters and cards to revive
the smile, the touch of a hand, the lone
moment together, finding a way that will survive
the distance. Then you count the years, five,
ten, the absences, tes the defunct number, the wrong
address, the silence of the ones who drop out of your life.
You replay the scenes of love and strife,
remember the shared books, the loved song,
the souvenirs of friendship that will survive
the vanishing. You know that memory can thrive
on loss, and give them the lives you long to share,
the news of the dear ones who have dropped out of your life.
Yet you wonder, wonder, whether any of these will survive.
