within your Heart is a bright, ceiling-less place. you can go there, if you like.
is it not sacred, this sweetness you lick from the Earth? and does it not make you so lovely to be so apart of it all: as lovely as the thunder itself, as damp as the grass, as warm as the flame?
dear little voice,
within your Heart is a bright, ceiling-less place. you can go there, if you like.
and you have been there. whether at evening or at dawn, at first star, at last star, at sparrow’s cry or by maples’ draping— I cannot tell you. but you have been there. it is at a height which gives way between one step and the next into amazement.
all of this can mean nothing, or it can mean it all. this mostly depends on how you regard it.
on whether you regard it.
e.e. cummings, from “Song” (in 73 Poems), Complete Poems: 1904-1962
Kierkegaard once wrote that god becomes and god unbecomes ; god is only our name for the centre of things. the closer we move bravely to this centre, the more it ceases to be god, and the more we see this centre for what it is: a singular, clear reflection.
the Greeks, little voice, understood the strange power of this mirroring centre. they gave us the greatest kind of gift: a word for it; a word to carry through years and mouths like fresh fruit; a word that babbles with blossoms as a brook does; a word that springs from holy ground: enthusiasm.
a word that is sensed only clearly; that springs with laurel, olives, and grapes. in the hand it is small enough to be tucked in the pocket; as deep as ocean and as light as air— and, in its heart, listen: yes, nightingales, the rustle of wings… listen now: how, at the Heart of enthusiasm, they’re breaking into song.
enthusiasm. its wings extend from the Greek en theos, meaning: a god within. meaning: the one you carry.
meaning: there is nothing within you that is not you.
meaning: if you carry a god, then you carry the world itself.
the glory of the things we do are measured by the enthusiasm from which they spring. from our devotion. this is how we bear the god within, and how we obey It.
little voice, you do know by now from our letters that it is a precious and important thing to dig up the seeds of our words for re-planting. language is a Garden that must be tended to— it is not still like stone, it requires working, like Earth.
the Greek seed for the word beauty is planted in kalein; meaning: calling.
kalein.
there is a responsibility in carrying something holy.
mostly, little voice, it is to answering what calls to it.
sometimes we name these callings Prayers. a Prayer is a thing that move like sleepless heat at night; like verse and like white Flock and dandelion breath and like eyes, and calls to the god inside of us.
the en theo knows to recognise a Prayer. and you can learn to trust in this:
“I believe in the soul. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can feel it, it’s a sort of a presence and sometimes it vibrates very strongly. Years ago someone told me that Flaubert said the objects we are drawn to are not haphazard, they are material expressions of something intangible but vital that our soul wishes to bring to our attention, they are clues, in other words, and we should decipher them as such.”
- Claire-Louise Bennett, in The Mind in Solitude: An Interview with Claire-Louise Bennett, The Paris Review
it is very easy to know when your en theo has noticed a kalein, because it will dance in its sleep and laugh, noticing that the World, incomplete, has extended yet another wild, shimmering invitation to your devotion.
Logis du Feés, France by Sies Kranen
yes, little voice, the World was created as an incomplete thing.
bread does not grow from the Earth for our palms’ taking.
flower do not begin their lives in Bloom.
wheat grows in firm husks for threshing, kneading, and baking by firm hands, and the lush blossom of a hydrangea begins as a single, delicate seed that calls for the most patient of watering.
like this, there are ordinary things in this Life, too, that are calling: calling for your attention in order to be brought into Being.
and, like this, your en theo is a partner to the World in this work of completing creation; the World that calls out in prayer for your Enthusiasm and Attention.
you are everything you see, little voice. your Enthusiasm is its creator, and now you are in the mountains and they are in you, kindling your devotion, making every nerve quiver, filling your cells with a burning, wild beauty; your Heart a nimbus of light that will carry you through the days: you. an ordinary person who can rise in light, carrying the god within.
marry yourself to amazement, little voice.
this is how you answer the World’s calling.
your devotion to attention is a devotion to completing the world.
it is a reverence for the en theo.
it is a holy thing.
Édouard Boubat · Young couple in devotion to a field of flowers in Sardinia, Italy (1955)
you see, little voice, some time a long time ago we mislead ourselves. we thought life was all brass and hooves’ stampeding; shimmering flag-work and crusade. we thought it was Serious Purpose. some voices called this Success, others Purpose. some called it Heaven, or Glory. but all of these voices made the same mistake. they were all rushing through their own souls.
“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
but all of this living is a musical thing, little voice. and we are supposed to sing and dance while the music is being played.
after all, is it really so small a thing: to have enjoyed the Sun, to have lived lightly in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done? is that not the act of a God: to love the light, and so to bring the world to blossom, to love, to think, and to do?
Simone Weil, “Attention and Will” (trans. Emma Crauford), Simone Weil: An Anthology
to turn the earth over a seed; to make bread or to make love; to pause a moment by a beech tree burdened by Sun or to carefully answer a child’s question; to pick up a shell or to pick up a Heart; when done with care, as answers to the Prayer unfolded, are all to “let love / be the light that shows again / the blossom to the root.”
and is it not sacred, this sweetness you lick from the Earth? and does it not make you so lovely to be so apart of it all: as lovely as the thunder itself, as damp as the grass, as warm as the flame— all that bounty of attention inclining toward the space directly in front of you?
these answerings require no extensive commentary. they need no lucid reasoning. all they require is a little voice willing to bend, dance, move, blush, and bloom with enthusiastic abandon:
“most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. and yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
it is a reminded that a devotion to the world is a way of life. it is an answer to a Prayer much older than your little voice, and one that will stretch out and into places and people that will live far beyond it also. it is an honouring of your en theo.
it is answering Prayer with Prayer, to complete Creation.
A bee-keeper of Valeni village transports his bees in his bee wagon. Romania, Paul Smit.
your en theo is an inner landscape. it is that ceilingless place, lucid and bright with aliveness; a soft, curved universe awaiting your answering.
it has nature, and flowers too, and gods, and longings, and little houses and light-dappled streets, churches and roaming roads, dangled wisteria, warm tears, ripe strawberries and the sea, and fingertips, and an exquisite taste in arranging your gaze.
and, like any god, it is a landscape that requires tending with prayer that worships slowness and Time: a mythical Time of figs’ ripening, of gazelles’ sleeping and children’s innocence; of the centuries-long wallowing of wild plants and willowing of sage’s scent to your nose. a Time of embrace. of Attention.
this is a sacred place. it is a touchstone. it is wild, it is tame. it is a healing world. it is a conversation. it is a compass. it is a teacher and it is a guide. it is wisdom. it is goodness. it is grace. it is a touch across Time. it is still. it is vibrant. it is as clear and as cool as night.
it is the thing you carry that answers the calling.
it is the thing that creates the very Prayer it answers to.
“If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things.”
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
truthfully, little voice, I am not sure you will remember the ambition or the brass.
what you will remember will be what is beautiful. what you will remember is this prayer: a prayer toward love - all love - the music, the love of dirt roads and sunrise, of days by the river, of the reading stranger passed in metro station gloom. yourself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, maybe, if you try very hard.
e.e. cummings, from "(listen)”, in 73 Poems, Complete Poems: 1904-1962
perhaps when a flower next floats to your vision, little voice, you will not pull It from the Earth, but instead you will do as the Ancient Egyptians did, who dedicated and presented their Flowers to the gods not by picking them, but by holding their hands for a time quietly and intently around the living, growing stems.
perhaps you will present It to the god within you.
and, like this, little voice: may your prayers be like little dropped stones everywhere you go, with every inch they cover a quiet record of the Heart’s silver prayer:
“I lived once.
Thank you.
I was here.
Thank you.
I saw, I saw, I saw- yes, I looked-
Thank you.”
thank you.
thank you.
love,
ars poetica
several favorites here... e.e.... little princess... thank you for this journey today
--- Thank you so much for being such a huge little Voice ! !