winter

If you creep out down to the river in the light of a full moon, you'll see her there, Old Crane Woman. She'll be standing on one leg, still as can be, and you'll know her by her frayed grey and white dress and her long, thin arms with the sharp, sticking-out elbows. She'll be staring into the river, for Old Crane Woman knows that inspiration comes always at the side of the water, there on the edge, in that troubling threshold place between one element and another.

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change...

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Inner light is not hidden/
Myriad openings lead to it.
In passing from darkness to light,
One moves freely between eternity
and now.

If this be but true,
I have no fear.
Yet myriad seem the hazards
of the journey.

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door.

Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.

winter rain
the warmth of your hand
in my hand

In the absence of other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.

All the powers of the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.

Of my hands I give to you, O Lord
Of my hands I give to you.
I give to you as you gave to me
Of my hands I give to you.

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess.