Rhythms Of Renewal Quotes

When we live without listening to the timing of things, when we live and work in twenty-four-hour shifts without rest – we are on war time, mobilized for battle. Yes, we are strong and capable people, we can work without stopping, faster and faster, electric lights making artificial day so the whole machine can labor without ceasing. But remember: No living thing lives like this. There are greater rhythms, seasons and hormonal cycles and sunsets and moonrises and great movements of seas and stars. We are part of the creation story, subject to all its laws and rhythms.

The earth is still turning... The seasons enter, play their part, bow and move on every year, one to the next, never overstaying their welcome but always always returning. There is great comfort in that.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.

When you and your opponent are fighting and nothing is going right, nor is there progress, be of a mind to throw off your former intention and start entirely anew. Take on another rhythm and see your way to victory. With Renewal, whenever you think that you and your opponent are just grating along, you should change your mind on the spot and take the victory by using another tactic.

There was some rhythm, some ecstasy in this dance of flight that expressed the fact that happiness which touches depths and rises beyond physical confines is as old as consciousness, yet ever renewed, and is like the glorying flight of the birds

Nothing changed, in the aftermath of loss. Songs kept getting written. Books kept getting read. Wars didn't stop....Life renewed itself, over and over, without sympathy. Time surged on in its usual rhythms, those comings and goings, beginnings and ends, sensible progressions that fixed things in place, without a thought to the whistling in the woods on the outskirts of town....

One of the greatest gifts for my life as one who serves God is observing the Sabbath. Celebrating a holy day and living in God's rhythm for six days of work and one of rest is the best way I know to learn the sense of our call - the way in which God's Kingdom reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us so that it can reign through us. Before we can engage in the practice of our call, we need to be captured afresh by grace, carried by it, and cared for.

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bug opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges. The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

Life in extremity reveals itself in its movement a definite rhythm of decline and renewal. The state of wakefulness is essential, but in actual experience it is less an unwavering hardness of spirit than a tenuous achievement with periods of weakness and strength. Survivors not only wake, but reawaken, fall low and begin to die, and then turn back to life.

The unexamined life is not worth living. —SOCRATES

A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like a summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week. —HENRY WARD BEECHER

I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected in the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, or decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain.

Nature maintains the same rhythm of birth and death in metals as in vegetables and animals. For, as Bernard Palissy writes in....(long french title of a book I don't feel like repeating here) 'God did not create all these things in order to leave them idle. The stars and the planets are not idle...the sea is in constant motion...the earth likewise is not idle...what is naturally consumed within her, she renews and refashions forthwith, if not in one way then in another. Everything, including the exterior of the Earth, exerts itself to bring something forth; likewise, the interior and matrix strains itself in order to reproduce.

Later, after we’d brought her home, after we’d settled into all the new rhythms of a family of four, Meg and I were skin to skin and she said: I’ve never been more in love with you than in that moment. Really? Really. She jotted some thoughts in a kind of journal. Which she shared. I read them as a love poem. I read them as a testament, a renewal of our vows. I read them as a citation, a remembrance, a proclamation. I read them as a decree. She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.

The laughter or the tears break out in the vacuum of thought created by their object in the mind. But these moments, like the deeply rhythmed movements of poetry, of music, of love, of dance, have the power - to capture - and endlessly recapture the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure. As if we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs. The miraculous moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on which we were groveling, in the concatenation of useful activity

The laughter or the tears break out in the vacuum of thought created by their object in the mind. But these moments, like the deeply rhythmed movements of poetry, of music, of love, of dance, have the power - to capture - and endlessly recapture the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure. As if we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs. The miraculous moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on which we were groveling, in the concatenation of useful activity

when we are fighting with the enemy, and an entangled spirit arises where there is no possible resolution. We must abandon our efforts, think of the situation in a fresh spirit then win in the new rhythm. To renew, when we are deadlocked with the enemy, means that without changing our circumstance we change our spirit and win through a different technique

You don’t have to be a black-flag-waving anarchist to be outraged by this shortsightedness. Anyone who loves capitalism should be especially maddened—-because solutions and alternative sources of energy do exist that could enable us to transition swiftly from our fossil-fuel-based economy to one that runs on clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming.

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-empty bottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down the different levels of the enormous room, snoring and wheezing at many rhythms, in self-renewing chorus, as London light, winter and elastic light, grows between the faces of the mullioned windows, grows among the strata of last night’s smoke still hung, fading, from the waxed beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their certain resurrection in the next few minutes.

The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here—and—now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew—laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” (Ps 90:5), or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do. It is this God who speaks to us through the psalmist as he wakes from sleep, amazed, to declare, “I will bless you, Lord, you give me counsel, and even at night direct my heart” (Ps 16:7, GR). It is this God who speaks to us through the prophets, reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation. When it comes to the nitty—gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation, a concept that is beautifully summed up in an ancient saying from the monastic tradition: “Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Pior that every day he made a new beginning.

We must learn to modulate our exposure, allowing things to ripen and mature in the container of the heart before revealing our secret inside flesh to others. In so doing, we will be better able to hear the subtle character and nuanced complexities of our inner life. This is delicate work, requiring a watchful attention to the rhythms of the soul. It is important to distinguish it from isolation and withholding—those are strategies devised early in our lives to keep hidden what had been shamed or wounded. Many of us had our expressions of suffering silenced. We heard the voices of those we looked to for comfort saying, “We’ve heard you say this all before. Stop repeating yourself.” “Get over it! Stop whining.” Or we heard nothing at all. Rarely did we find a refuge for our grief. Similarly, many of us found ourselves isolated in times of loss, shamed by the absence of someone who cared.

Sin matters, and forgiveness of sins matters, but they matter because sin, flowing from idolatry, corrupts, distorts, and disables the image-bearing vocation, which is much more than simply “getting ready for heaven.” An overconcentration on “sin” and how God deals with it means that we see things only with regard to “works,” even if we confess that we have no “works” of our own and that we have to rely on Jesus to supply them for us. (Equally, an underemphasis on “sin” and how God deals with it is an attempt to claim some kind of victory without seeing the heart of the problem.) The biblical vision of what it means to be human, the “royal priesthood” vocation, is more multidimensional than either of the regular alternatives. To reflect the divine image means standing between heaven and earth, even in the present time, adoring the Creator and bringing his purposes into reality on earth, ahead of the time when God completes the task and makes all things new. The “royal priesthood” is the company of rescued humans who, being part of “earth,” worship the God of heaven and are thereby equipped, with the breath of heaven in their renewed lungs, to work for his kingdom on earth. The revolution of the cross sets us free to be in-between people, caught up in the rhythm of worship and mission.

To not be cut off, however, we need to be moving in a rhythm that is syncopated with that of the oaks and willows, heartbeats and touch. We must recall the original cadence of the soul. One of my most memorable teachings about slowing down came from my mentor, Clarke Berry, a Jungian analyst with whom I apprenticed, following licensure. I was young, and I knew I was in need of a mentor, someone who could teach me the art of sitting with others in therapy. The Jung Institute in San Francisco referred me to Clarke along with other analysts, but when I met him, I knew I was in the right place. Our first meeting, over thirty years ago, was unforgettable. When we sat down, Clarke reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, “This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.” Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, “It hates this.” What an amazing thing to tell this young therapist. It is the single most important thing I ever learned about therapy, about working with the soul. I share this story with every person I work with; I use it as a means of calming the urgency to change and helping patients return to a rhythm that enables them to listen once again to their own soul.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 169 The thick, frosty rain had long since subsided. A thin, fur clad figure peered through the thick, rain soaked foliage, just outside the army's encampment. The old Wizard's raspy whisper suddenly broke the silence. He shivered against the cold and swore to himself, as no eyes peered back at him from the forest. "Damnable rabbits!" He shook both stiff, old legs from the bitter cold of the forest night and from the puddle he had been standing in. The half-asleep guard paid no attention or tribute to the thin, fur clad bearer of wood, as he trudged through the camp's outer perimeter with a load of firewood in his arms. Slumber played a barbaric tune to the rhythms of the wind through the trees, while the army slept. Arkin readjusted the stack of wood held precariously in his arms, as he walked through the center of camp. His steady, silent pace took him around large mud puddles and before a roaring fire built beneath a rocky shelf. The large bonfire spit colorful sparks into the blackness and the cold of the night. His thin arms let fall the wood he had gathered, while he surveyed the camp. A long, walking stick suddenly appeared in his hand, as if by magic, while his senses took in all around him. The small, white haired Wizard leaned lazily on his heavy staff for a thoughtful moment, while his calculating eye took in the figures huddled on the ground around the small campfires. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 170 In the forest, two sets of eyes suddenly blinked their timidity at Arkin and then disappeared. "Dull witted rabbits to save a future King," he grumbled. "Will wonders never cease." From an ancient leather pouch, old weathered hands drew a sparkling dust that seemed to be alive in its’ every glimmer. The old man watched its’ mesmerizing glow for a moment. Then, as if youth possessed his body once again, Arkin began dancing like a misguided wood nymph through the camp, sprinkling the powder on the slumbering figures. The old Wizard's ritualistic dance took him the complete circumference of the camp. An old Wizard smiled broadly, as he danced by the giant, blond Nobleman chained helplessly to a tree. Their eyes met in an exchanged mischievous greeting. Garish beamed his roguish smile at him, hope renewed once more. The blond, captive Nobleman had to fight back the mounting laughter in his throat, from the comforting sight of his mentor and the queer fairy dance he was performing. His gaze followed the little man's every step with pure delight. The little Grand Master Wizard slowed his mischievous fairy dance only long enough to retrieve the glimmering Sword of Damen from the pile of weapons in the center of the camp. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 171 The Old Man carefully concealed the sword under his cloak and continued his fairy dance, while sprinkling the sparkling powder over the sleeping figures. Stooping low, he picked up a shield and flung it over his shoulder. Once again the old, fur clad Wizard’s movements brought him to where he had first entered the camp, through the forest. The half-asleep guard awakened faintly, to watch the little man in his queer dance, as he moved towards him. He made no effort to detain the Old One but merely stared in disbelief, as Arkin vanished into the forest once again. The guard stood dazed in disbelief at the sight and then rubbed away the sleep from his eyes, uncertain if he had been daydreaming.

Lord, as the seasons turn, creation teaches us of grief, patience, and renewal. Make us good students of these rhythms that we might not hurry the work of grief but receive the gift of your presence in our time of need. Amen.

There’s no rush to hold on to what is falling away...!! . It's ok to embrace the lingering serenity of autumn, where the air grows heavier with the scent of decaying leaves. In that stillness, a slow acceptance unfolds, reminding us that fading is not the same as loss...it is a quiet renewal. A pause before the next rhythm of life. It's ok to feel the weight of nostalgia as the days shorten. The sun dipping lower, casting shadows that stretch like memories. These moments of reflection are part of the season’s gift, allowing us to trace the path we’ve walked without the urgency to move forward. It's ok to let the world around you slow down, as the trees shed their leaves in deliberate surrender. There’s no rush to hold on to what is falling away. In this surrender, there’s a percipience. It tells us everything has its time, and to release is to make space for what’s to come. It's ok to sit with the quiet ache of autumn evenings, where the chill in the air finds its way to your bones. That cold is a reminder of the inevitable cycles we are bound to. Of growth, decay, and the beauty that lies in the in-between moments of transition.

The sooner you can begin working with a team, the sooner your “I” can become a “we” of an organization. You can structure a regular rhythm of meeting, decision-making, accountability, and learning that enables real progress. No one can build a real organization of five hundred people by recruiting them all on their own. Instead, you build it by recruiting people willing and able to commit to building it with you. If you can’t recruit them, it may be that they don’t need you.

Noah, who remained innocent and just, God decided to open a path of salvation. In this way he gave humanity the chance of a new beginning. All it takes is one good person to restore hope! The biblical tradition clearly shows that this renewal entails recovering and respecting the rhythms inscribed in nature by the hand of the Creator. We see this, for example, in the law of the Sabbath. On the seventh day, God rested from all his work. He commanded Israel to set aside each seventh day as a day of rest, a Sabbath,

In my heart, we’re four. Day to day, there are only three of us. I feel so close to the kids, closer than ever; I know their rhythms and what they need. But part of me realizes that if I do my job right, some day they’ll grow up and leave. They’ll marry and belong to someone else. It’s not easy to accept, but it’s something all parents deal with.

Worship in the local church (and the whole of the Christian life) exists between two worlds. We live in the light of the resurrection, but we live in a darkened world that awaits its fullest renewal in the return of Jesus and the restoration of all things. In the “already” of redemption and the “not yet” of consummation.

Nature paces its change in gradual steps, and in this time of renewal, I danced in sync to the rhythm of life.

Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye, it struck me that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people mad about renewables: even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom. They demand that we adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will with brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources are NFL football players, bashing away at the earth, then renewables are surfers, riding the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way.

The number that governs the whole is seven; in the scheme of seven days it permeates the whole in a way that cannot be overlooked. This is the number of a phase of the moon, and thus we are told throughout this account that the rhythm of our heavenly neighbor also sounds the rhythm of our human life.

This rhythm is itself at the service of a still deeper meaning: Creation is oriented to the sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind

In the Bible this thought goes still further. It lets us know that the rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, more profoundly, a way of expressing the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of God’s love, which manifests itself there.

I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid.”6

Rest precedes blessing. We don’t have to run to earn rest; we run fueled by a posture of rest.

In the coming weeks, I added chamomile tea, Epsom salt baths, and lavender essential oils. These homey remedies were also backed by science as having anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety properties, along with low-risk profiles and long traditions of use. The combination of melatonin, magnesium, and the day-night hygiene measures was the start of regulating my body’s rhythms and easing inflammation. Beyond the physical, I felt a hint of mental renewal: empowerment.

Inhale: You fill my life Exhale: with good things. (From Philippians 4:7)

For years and years my pupils gave me the illusion that my age did not alter: at the beginning of each school year I found them there again, as young as ever; and I adapted myself to this unchanging state. In the great sea of time I was a rock beaten by waves that were continually renewed—a rock that neither moved nor crumbled. And all at once the tide was carrying me away, and would go on carrying me until I ran aground in death. My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.

For years and years my pupils gave me the illusion that my age did not alter: at the beginning of each school year I found them there again, as young as ever; and I adapted myself to this unchanging state. In the great sea of time I was a rock beaten by waves that were continually renewed—a rock that neither moved nor crumbled. And all at once the tide was carrying me away, and would go on carrying me until I ran aground in death. My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.

You are as free as the wind that blows wildly across the plains of envy. Releasing you of all the chains that trap you with the pain, that can be… Released… by tuning into Universal pulse and synchronicity of the soul… in ways that only you can know. Embrace your natural rhythm that vibrates both you and the heavens together – renewing your spirit. You are the energy whose positive force echoes ‘cross the cosmos. This imprints your powerful inner being among the stars that receive them. All you have to do is realize… You are magnificent!

Nothing changed, in the aftermath of loss. Songs kept getting written. Books kept getting read. Wars didn’t stop. You saw a couple arguing by the trolleys at Tesco before getting in the car and slamming the door. Life renewed itself, over and over, without sympathy. Time surged on in its usual rhythms, those comings and goings, beginnings and ends, sensible progressions that fixed things in place, without a thought to the whistling in the woods on the outskirts of town. It began as a whistle, expelled from dry lips. Over the years it sharpened to a bright, continual note.

The enemy of our souls wants us to be isolated and alone. He knows that when we're isolated, we're easy prey. Why? When we're alone and vulnerable, we feel afraid. When we're together and vulnerable, we become brave. A brave group of vulnerable people acting together in faith is not easily overcome by anxiety and stress.

Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past. The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer. It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius. To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer. Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms. But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.

Watching Japan plunge headlong into the delight of the sakura was a reminder that while the fluctuations of joy in our lives can be unpredictable, our planet has rhythms of renewal that regularly bring joy back to us.

Staring into a mirror might show us what we look like in the moment, but it cannot show us who we are or where we’re going.

We are restless when we rest less.

WE CANNOT RUN IF WE CANNOT REST.

PRAYER GRANTS ME ACCESS TO THE HOLY SPIRIT’S COMFORT, A BALM THAT TRANSCENDS TIME AND SPACE, REPUTATION AND RACE.

And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened. And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker. Death and renewal when the wave arrives. The gathering of white birds grew: gulls dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships but stained by vapors from forbidden shores. The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back. In closeup like a snowed-in hull with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm. His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars. Footless hanging in the wind he dreams his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot.

I looked again at the photo of me, hair wild, rumpled sweatshirt, typing away, all in the name of being diligent. What other moments had I missed, head buried in my work? Year after year, I couldn’t possibly be present for everyone. But this felt different. I hadn’t felt the weight of missing out until I saw it in retrospect, in vivid color from a long-past October day. Until you get quiet, you can’t know what your heart needs to confess.

When I stay in prayer long enough, I am surprised by the level of emotion I inevitably encounter within myself. The stillness brings the weight, the sadness, and the freedom it always has, and a profound sense for me of what is true.

These days when I pray, I send all of my hopes and fears into the air over the Hudson River, trying to remain long enough for the language of praise to come to me naturally