Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
Just as we cannot stop the movements of the heavens, revolving as they do with such speed, so we cannot stop the movement of our thought. And then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost, and have misused the time that we are spending in the presence of God.
Galway Kinnell, "Saint Francis and the Sow"
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Hear the poet Galway Kinnell read his poem.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Love is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls. Texas: Praxis, 2007, 186.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not higher but aliver; it is right here, just on the other side of that “terror we can just scarcely bear”’; the only thing lacking to embrace it is the depth of our hearts.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Ballantine 1996, p. 468
What it is we are hungering for can never be fulfilled by a mate, a job, money, a new this or that. What we hunger for is of the other world, the world that sustains our lives as women. And this child-Self we are awaiting is brought forth by just this means - by waiting. As time passes in our lives and our work in the underworld, the child develops and will be born. In most cases, a woman’s nightdreams will presage the birth; women literally dream of a new baby, a new home, a new life.
Gerald May, Wisdom of Wilderness. New York: HarperCollins 2009, xiii-ix.
Oh my divine love, never again reassure me. I do not want to know everything will be all right. I never want to be secure again as long as I live. Give me no safety. Only give me this livingness forever, this power-of-being, though I know I will die of it, of love exploding.
Exodus 3:11-14
Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
