This Nest

This nest is a shadow slipping away from itself into the body of the world.

This nest is the back of a pirate’s head, stern and foolish in its seadrenched tousle of cloth.

This nest is the wing of a raptor, tipped with sky and the shouts of smaller creatures on the forest floor below.

This nest is the punctuation of weather.

This nest is a whirlwind, mute but full of consequence.

This nest is an acclamation, a bow to the magic of work in the night.

This nest is a cave, silent until you go deep enough to hear the sound of waterfalls.

This nest is a knot in the archetypal tree of life, puzzled by its own antiquity and size.

This nest is the way a well looks suspended in air and soft with the deficit of shallow mud.

This nest is a big velvet curtain with a heavy tasseled cord to make it move.

This nest is a wooden barrel waiting for the warm rain of April.

This nest is the head of a bear, asleep in a place no one knows to look for.

This nest has the bold but fragile determination of wax across the lip of an envelope, waiting to be disturbed and even broken.

This nest is a witness to the work of dry days in midwinter.

This nest is the shift of a clenched fist into an outstretched palm, offered sideways as a salutation and a nod.

This nest wants to be a bonfire but settles for claiming the bodies of fierce and dangerous creatures who carry the sting of flame.

This nest is a saint, a relic of patience.

This nest is the cousin of the mountaintop it frames against the silver winter sky.

This nest is some kind of promise, a paradox of stillness hoarding strength.

This nest is a cloud heavy with repentance and ready to shed its burdens into the waiting boughs of leafless trees in Lent.

This nest has a language made of scents and shapes, of the flavors of treebark and basil, of the song that the eaves sing in high winds.

This nest knows things about the land that no one else does. It might be waiting for the question that will make it hum like a harp or a banjo.

This nest is the cape of a journeying hero, ragged from the clutch of foreign caverns.

This nest is a sheet of lightning, waiting for the chance to be a fork.

This nest is a boulder stuck in the cleft of a rushing river, eager to make friends with stranded paddlers.

This nest is the head of a giant, used to the way things look in thinning air.

This nest claims its own sovereignty but still does what the stormwinds say it should.

This nest knows the syllables of three seasons and hopes to learn the language of the fourth.

This nest is not a compromise or a loss. It lives with being torn apart and shredded. A little bit of its sleeping heart will hang around like a hologram in the space above the forest when it falls, even if the textures of its walls have long since crumbled. Its brokenness is part of the horizon’s memory palace forever, one of those subtle claims that nature has on time, a bookmark inserted in between the pages of an empty wordless book shaped like a circle.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

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The Testament of Dom Christian de Cherge

If it should happen one day, and it could be today, that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country. I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. I would ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering? I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value either. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who will strike me down. I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called the "grace of martyrdom" to owe this to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam. 
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately. I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters. It is too easy to soothe one's conscience by identify this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists. For me, Algerian and Islam are not that, but rather a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it. I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church, precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic: "Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!" But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free. This is what I shall be able to do, please God: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything. In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families. You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not have known what you were doing: 
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this "A-DIEU" to be for you, too, because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. AMEN! IN SH'ALLAH!

 -----Christian de Cherge

Tibhirine, 1994

a single dream

A single dream
can last
forever. Here,
your only
companion
is the patient
light that makes
you into
a constant,
living
devotion.

----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

feast and fidelity

Everyone here is waiting
for the audacious touch
of your fire. Our only
words are songs.
We hear your longing
and return it,
a courageous trust,
a fidelity,
a proclamation,
a feast.
We are ready
for your unruly
tenderness. We beg
for the dangerous
encounter we were
born to affirm.
Somewhere, someone
is already remembering
the child's obedient
poverty, the wild
and willing freedom
every birth invites.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

one edge of things

This part of the woods is unfamiliar. Its edge is the kind of place that looks like it’s going to open up into a strange city, with light the color of another world entirely. I wonder if you know what I mean. I can remember another such place, a woods of pine trees in symmetry and then---expansion. Or what felt like it was going to be. In reality a little clearing existed there, and within it a small grotto that seemed to belong in a fairy tale. I could sometimes hear water running there if I paid attention and we weren’t in the middle of a dry spell.

The edges of this place claim a part of my soul that is afraid to step into its light. I’ve been told there is a river just beyond the sweep of trees. Not a city but running water, alive and wild. Dizzy with imagined possibility, I hang around in hiking boots, feet clad in leather watertight and unsuitable for toeing the edges of rivers. I keep thinking I’ll go beyond the place where I always stop, someday. I’ll just keep walking over the little ridge and there will be the moving water that will tell me something I’ve always needed to know. It will want me to learn its language. It won’t be scared, even though I might be. I’ll be wearing tough-girl Tevas and I will sit on the bank of the river and let my feet find the flowing coolness below me. I’ll sit there with the eddies of the river around my toes and the tops of my feet, remembering the pine-woods grotto and its delicate underwater voice, tracing new places in clay. 

the rhetoric of silence

The burning cure
of sacramental encounter
is calling me out
of my stillness.
The rhetoric of silence
is teaching me how
to ask, how to
worship. How to
confess the petty
troubles of my
willingness. How,
finally, to remain,
despite the pull
of the world's
safe and stifling
strangeness.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

approaching the blaze

Remembering
the shy dream
of your Presence,
I savor a tender
spinning, which
keeps your obscurity
distant, your response
an imagined
shiver. How can I
approach the abiding
blaze of your Body?
Only in a secret
life of abandonment
and love. Only the
speechless for-
ever of your
absence can make
me whole.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved