a season of smallness

Christmas is coming. I’m not feeling it. It’s been years since a truly childlike joy has pervaded my experience of Christmas, but this year there is an emptiness that frightens me. A few months ago I wrote about the “experience” of emptiness that I had at Arabia Mountain in June. It was really more of an experience of joy at being opened up. This is not like that. This is scary. There isn’t the whisper of silence to comfort me. The breath, the textures of the silence I’ve known of late aren't exactly those I associate with "true" silence but of a defiant,willful, stubborn wall. It feels alive almost at times. Right now when I write poetry, or try to, I struggle immensely with the words. The tenderness I have felt so strongly for God these past two years is reluctant to help me. Indeed it almost isn’t there. Being in the woods, alone with my camera and notebook, is a way of being with that tenderness. It doesn’t mean I feel it. The closest I do come to feeling it right now is when I’m teaching. Last week my students turned in the poems they wrote. Found poems, like the ones on my blog, and metaphor poems. “this mountain, this fire, this pencil, this song.” The poems shout and murmur with beauty. With the unexpected. Their courage takes my breath away. That is the closest I am coming to praying right now. Reading those and feeling gratitude that I helped birth them. I do say “thank you” many times a day, and I mean it. I don’t think I am angry at God. Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t feel like an explanation for this flatness. I know there is so much grief still there in my heart, mostly for my beloved and complicated mother, who died in 2004, but also for the failure of love. For my inability to love a man as I have wanted to. I don’t seem to be cut out for living into that love. I suppose part of what that’s about is that I am too selfish. But it is also beginning to be about thoughts of the frightening but sometimes compelling possibility of some sort of solitude in a protracted, long-term way. Still, I try to live in the moment, to be present to it, and when I can that is a grace. I wrote something years ago about wanting to be with a man who could “endure my solitude,” as the singer Nanci Griffith put it. I have yet to find this person. And I have put some energy into yearning and search. So possibly that is part of the hollowness this winter.

At any rate, what I do with this wall is what seems to be important. I think it is crucial that I do not pound my fists angrily on it. I can even name it. I have at times called my longing for God, for Christ, for Spirit, into it. I did that tonight driving home down the mountain in the rain. I thought about the cinnamon color of the sky around the browning forest’s top and I loved it. I felt a pang of passionate love for God just watching the rain fall on my pickup truck’s windshield. And then it went away and I began to cry. I found myself wanting the cheer and the abundant spirit of Christmas. The celebratory largesse of it. In truth I don’t want that, though. I suppose I think I should want it. But really what I love on Christmas is silence. Simplicity. Last year I went to the monastery for Christmas Eve and spent the night there. I put my bag down in the little room where I slept and loved its smallness. It felt so right. Little, austere, humble. Almost vulnerable somehow. Christmas felt then like a wreath of simple winter branches unadorned, like the receptivity and yearning of my favorite Christmas carol (actually an Advent song): O come O come Emmanuel. O come, thou Day-spring, come and cheer our spirits by Thine Advent here. I loved Christmas in the slowness of those syllables and of their dance with Advent candles in the secret part of the night. I have felt such resistance to the glitter and pomp of Christmas. For me the time is more about smallness, longing, hunger, emptiness, vulnerability, simplicity. Receptivity. Waiting. The love that has yet to be born, or borne. The child. Incapable of celebration in human terms. Naked, probably, or close to it. Just present in the human world, incarnate, hungry, breathing.

the patience of the Guest

How does this Feast
always turn
annihilation into
origin? The patience
of the Guest dances
in that eddy of love. Forever
new, the friendship
between
unsayableness and
music trembles like
the skin of a pond,
entered.
-----©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

Watching the light in
a summer garden, I notice
how a cathedral of unexpected
geometry reflects its
living heart.
Without everything here,
(and elsewhere)
the improvisation of reverence
would be lost.
What other weather
is there?

©Laura Sorrells 2012
some rights reserved


I wrote this found poem using Nicholas Harberd's book Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants.

shine and crackle

The dark slope of lawn did not catch, did not need to catch the yellow light of the full Easter moon or the orange glow of the pinwheel sparks ascending skyward from the little pyramid of lumber smolder on the grass. Things were already burning when I got there. The peaks of monks' hoods seemed to hold all the secret energy of the world. The candle they lit for me singed my knuckles with its crooked tumble of white wax. I didn't give it room enough above the sphere of paper and it became a truncated stub too soon. Still it flickered beautifully for awhile in the brightness of the church. The heat within moved outwards and I stood with its scorch until I could not any longer, weak in the knees and dizzy with strange light. No one else seemed heatstruck, lightstruck, candlestruck, or stuck in any way. They stood and sang and held their candles easy: calm and fresh, clean, awake, uncluttered or confused. I wanted the wood of a choir stall to cling to, to lean against, but only air was there. A negative space peopled with shine and crackle, ache and arch. My candle died and I did not know what was happening when someone offered me a flame to wake it up. The light above me was very bright and I tasted salt the way you do with nausea but no nausea came. My heart warmed on into my throat and kept me upright. Warmed and cooled simultaneously. Synesthesia at play in the fields of the Lord. Dizzy but strong, I listened to the blue air come alive, watched the psalmody sing itself into the morning, tasted the scent of myrrh in the swing of the censer, dreamt the cold metal sides of the folding chair my fingers clutched was a cradle, an empty tomb, a big stone rolled away from a space no longer needed.

A Window

Here,
beyond the tossing dispossession
the world's blue furnace
teaches,
we taste the strange and unutterable
bread of Silence.
A river of emptiness,
original and deep,
descends into our country
like a blade.
Beyond names
and secrets,
a window waits,
in love with the foolish poverty
of forever.

--lks 4/5/12
I put together this found poem from Thomas Merton's Book of Hours while I was on retreat this past Thursday at the Trappist monastery with which I am becoming affiliated as a lay ecumenical oblate.

this vigil

Follow this powerful silence
faithfully.
Wherever you listen,
your receptive heart
will always find
the persistent disciple this
vigil reveals:
love, holy in its
blush of perfect
humility,
a psalm of ordinary
reverence,
translating grace into
a gentle, compassionate
feast.

I got this found poem from the Rule of Benedict. I make lists of words that speak to me from these sources and then pull them together. I put this one together yesterday while sitting by Talking Rock Creek.

a habit of vision

This is a found poem I put together today from John McQuiston's book Always We Begin Again.

Every mystery we seek
carries a ruthlessly patient
habit of vision.
A compass of fire
refines our sacred work.
Something infinite and vast
gently pursues us,
an affinity for praise,
a currency of mercy,
insatiable and healing.

--lks 2/17/2012
©Laura Sorrells
some rights reserved