Saturday, April 02, 2005

"He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind..."

I am reading the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Have you read it?

Entering its world intensifies a longing I'd forgotten I had, one I didn't know how to voice. It's a longing for life to be this way, for people to see this way and speak this way -- slow and wondering. The world my heart sees and rejoices to be alive in is the world she is writing about. It stands at odds with the world we've built, of busyness and titles and papers and 'success'.

It's a longing for other people to see the existing marvelous, to help me live there by joining in. I still hope and plan to live seeing this world of bizarre and uncountable Created wonders as the real one. Partly because I just don't have it in me to live in the busyworld.

While watching Tinker creek on a sunny evening when the sunlight would suddenly catch the scales of a fish and flash, while petals float along the creek surface...she writes,
" So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water
... When I see this way I see truly.

I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth-- Ailinon, allelulia! "

What a world of unwordable wonders we live in, and how often I stumble through it without seeing.

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