dogwood

Sunday light inside the shadow

If you blindfold me and chain my hands around a stick, this stick separates me from things, but through it I explore them. I only feel the stick, I only perceive the wall. Created things are like this for the faculty of love. Supernatural love touches only the creatures around one but goes toward God. We love these creatures (what else is there to love?), but as intermediaries. In this way, we love all creatures, including ourselves. Loving a stranger like oneself implies this corollary: love yourself like a stranger.

--Simone Weil

Saturday the brush of other wings

Nonattachment: no longer wishing that your loved ones be immortal.

--Simone Weil

Friday desire without object

Perfect joy excludes even the feeling of joy -- for when the soul is completely full, no corner is available for saying "me".

-- Simone Weil

Thursday silence in the breath

Saying that this world is worth nothing, that this life is worth nothing, and giving evil as proof, is absurd -- for if it is worthless, what does evil take from it? Thus suffering in sorrow and compassion for others are all the purer and more intense the better we understand the fullness of joy.

One must have through joy the revelation of reality in order to find reality in suffering. Else, life is only a more or less bad dream. One must come to find a yet fuller reality in suffering that is nothingness and void. In the same way, one must love life in order to love death yet more.

--Simone Weil

Wednesday zero at the bone

In order to attain non-attachment, sorrow is not enough. There must be sorrow with no consolation.... One must accept the past, without asking compensation from the future. Stop time in this moment. It is, thus, the acceptance of death.... Reduce oneself to the point one occupies in space and time. To nothing. Strip oneself of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute loneliness. Then one has the truth of the world.

--Simone Weil

Tuesday broken in the garden

We are that which is farthest from God, at the extreme limit where it is still not absolutely impossible to return to him. In our being, God is torn. We are the crucifixion. God's love for us is torment. How could good love evil without suffering? And evil suffers as well in loving good. The mutual love of God and humanity is suffering.

--Simone Weil

Monday morning sermon

We must renounce everything that is not grace, even the longing for grace.

--Simone Weil

if i remembered a story about rain

Hard Rain Behind a Screen of Thistles

If I remembered a story about rain, would that be a way back?
It was not this mean spring cold seeping under the doors
but a summer cloudburst when we stopped the car,
obeying the ache that twisted through our nerves that year,
and touched naked on the rich grass, secret
behind a row of thistle and clotted blackberry.
Rainwater was the taste of July sky licked from your thighs,
sopping our hair, streaming off your breasts, off my shoulders.

Later, in the afternoon, after watching more rain fall,
I think I should have said it was like a baptism.
Seeing us there, discovering those two hidden in the long grass,
would it seem that our whole bodies were weeping
the fat warm rain, movements tensing fast to a shared cry
lost in thunder, our bellies together, as slick as newborns?

we dreamed these colors were Nineveh

Photograph by Roxana Ghita

A poem, "Things the Blue Turtle Spoke to Her," is online at quantum poetry

For other photographs in this series, go to The Floating Bridge of Dreams