Dusty Bookshelves

Tag: Marriage

  • What about myself?

    “If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God, a new and better faith, you will surely realize, in your present loneliness and despair, that this time you must not look to external, official sources, to Bibles, pulpits, or thrones, for enlightenment. Nor to me. You can find it only in yourself. And there it is, there dwells the God who is higher and more selfless… The sages of all time have proclaimed him, but he does not come to us from books, he lives within us, and all our knowledge of him is worthless unless he opens our inner eye. This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing… Search where you may, no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within… Don’t confine yourself… to any other prophet or guide. Our mission is not to instruct you, to make things easier for you, to show you the way. Our mission is solely to remind you that there is a God and only one God; he dwells in your hearts, and it is there that you must seek him out and speak with him.”

     

  • Kindness

    Kindness

    by Naomi Shihab Nye

    Before you know what kindness really is
    you must lose things,
    feel the future dissolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between the regions of kindness.
    How you ride and ride
    thinking the bus will never stop,
    the passengers eating maize and chicken
    will stare out the window forever.

    Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
    you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
    lies dead by the side of the road.
    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

    Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
    you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wake up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice
    catches the thread of all sorrows
    and you see the size of the cloth.
    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd of the world to say
    It is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or a friend.

  • The ground is changing beneath our feet.

  • The Sunshine I Stand In

  • I don’t know what to do with what I see.

  • The Calm Slow Journey Toward My Redemption

  • My pulse in a ripple of water

  • OPP: Catullus I

    Catullus I
    BY DAVID FERRY

    To Cornelius Nepos

    Who is it I should give my little book to,
    So pretty in its pumice-polished covers?

    Cornelius, I’ll give my book to you:
    Because you used to think my nothings somethings,

    At the time when you were the first in Italy
    To dare to write our whole long history,

    Three volumes, under the sign of Jupiter,
    Heroically achieved; so take this little

    Book of mine for what it’s worth; whatever;
    And oh, patroness Virgin, grant that it shall

    Live and survive beyond the century.

  • Our maps will be our children.