not in my own strength

In the dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.

~Denise Levertov

VIII (from Sonnets to Orpheus) Rilke

Where praise already is is the only place Grief
ought to go, that water spirit of the pools of tears;
she watches over our defeats to make sure
the water rises clear from the same rock

that holds up the huge doors and the alters.
You can see, around her motionless shoulders, a feeling
dawns--we sense more and more that she
is the youngest of the three sisters we have inside.

Rejoicing has lost her doubts, and longing broods on her error,
Only grief still learns: she spends the whole night
counting up our evil inheritance with her small hands.

She is awkward, but all at once
she makes our voice rise, sideways, like a constellation
into the sky, not troubled by her breath.

dreams

a hymn

Psalm 114

1 When Israel came out of Egypt,

the house of Jacob from a people of

foreign tongue,

2 Judah became God's sanctuary,

Israel his dominion.

3 The sea looked and fled,

the Jordan turned back;

4 the mountains skipped like rams,

the hills like lambs.

5 Why was it, O sea, that you fled,

O Jordan, that you turned back,

6 you mountains, that you skipped like rams,

you hills, like lambs?

7 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the

Lord,

at the presence of the God of Jacob,

8 who turned the rock into a pool,

the hard rock into springs of water.

words of a yeoman, a tenant farmer from tennessee

(speaking with Robert Coles)

...I talk to my land, you know. I ask it to be good; each year at the start I do. And each year at the end I say, thank you and amen...

...But I've always believed that when we leave our house and start in out there on the land, we're meeting God and doing all we can to show Him we can hear Him and we can believe in Him; and the proof is that He's there, helping us with the gift of His land, you see, and His sun you see, and His good, good rain, His precious rain that He sends us just when we need it and sometimes in between and to spare. It's up to us to go out and do our best by Him...

...There are times when I wish the good Lord would say to Himself that He should treat us all like we're in His Garden, and He should help the good people along, and take up the bad people, the weeds, and put them someplace else -- maybe up on one of the stars, way away. Then the weeds could have another chance there, to start over and not turn into weeds, you might say. I don't want people to be killed, as if they could only be weeds and nothing else!"

on being a metaphor to a child

Integrative Project Presentations 2011 - Abigail Vizcarra Perez from Mars Hill Graduate School on Vimeo.

from Annie Dillard

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly will be lost to you."