What shall I do
with this quiet joy?
It calls forth the expanse
of my soul, calls
it forth to go singing
through the world...
to collect the rain
in my hands
and spill it
like laughter...
to bear into this world
a place where light will glisten
the edge of every wing
and blade of grass,
shine along every hair on every head,
gleam among the turnings of every wave,
glorify
the turning open of each life,
each human hand.
CALCUTTA: A beggar, half-conscious, is lying on a mat in a home for the dying. A nun is kneeling by his side, her delicate fingers wiping his forehead with a washcloth. She is a peasant whose eyes shine like the wings of a heron flying around the sun, a silence whose light soars through the darkness.
How can I describe the beggar's eyes as he summons all his strength to motion her to draw close? She obeys.
It takes the beggar a long time to whisper something in her ears: "I have lived . . . like an animal. Now I will die . . . like an angel." The beggar's final words.
SILENCE: an energy which extends beyond the furthest reaches of the universe — and never vanishes, a quiet which pervades every particle of this world, and glides through the blackness of the great harbor by night, and speaks differently by day. Speech is the body of silence: the word floats up from silence; it flows back into silence. The word of relationship and the quiet of the heart are inseparable — like love and the silence from which it is born, and the rest to which it returns, unceasingly.
Last night, after praying Compline in the darkness, the final verse of the last Psalm began to move around inside me, like the Spanish canto hondo -- deep song. I found myself cooperating with this music, leaning into it, knowing that when its last note vanished into the silence, another leaf would be living in the tree I call "myself".
