Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

39. AS RESIDUE THEY COME FOR ME:

1. GET UP FOR I KNEEL BESIDE YOU:

I am (do you see Dr. Matterschnict?) intensely dreadfully tired and I have forgotten some million things and the shadows ! even them I can no longer read - for I have surely reached a time of something : something special - ('there is no PARTIAL sensitivity - either it is the state of one's whole being...or it is not there at all') and they WILL be heard in the middle of the night saying nothing and everybody will come to their senses.
'Bene fundata est Domus Domini / supra firmam petram'
'The house of the Lord is well founded - on a strong rock'
For many years I had been fixated on Thomas Merton for no real reason I could fathom other than some attraction of willed seclusion and the contemplation which a 'life alone' can bring - but Merton in living as he did did not consider himself a 'model' hermit in ways which to me now seem odd - for what he meant was that he was not 'strictly' isolationist and dour for although there was something 'remote' in him he was also gregarious funny and a good companion and although there was within him what he called 'the one thing needful' - which I suppose was his need for contemplation and seclusion and silence with his God - he was also a writer teeming with ideas and images and as a practitioner of the 'strait' way of contemplation and a scholar of same within his own Christian tradition and yet one who venerated ones whom he claimed as teachers belonging to many traditions : Chuang Tzu Hui Neng Basho al-Hallj fourth and fifth century Christian hermits St. John of the Cross Julian of Norwich D. T. Suzuki : and his eventual separation from the rest of his Cistercian community came from his own having found a deeper vocation within his first vocation - he'd uncovered a vocation to Solitude and the lost Cistercian practice of the hermetic life - in 1965 he was finally granted a place apart 'the hermitage' - a small cabin on the edge of a woods in Kentucky - and was gradually permitted to spend full days there until in 1965 being granted authority to take up sole residence therein with much reduced obligations to the rest of the community.
['That is where the silence of the woods comes in...trees are sufficient exclamations of silence...this is religion and the further one gets AWAY from this the MORE one sinks in the mud of words and gestures - the flies gather.']
SOLITUDE : 'Awareness consists of 'bare attention' which simply sees what is right there and does not add any comment any interpretation any judgment any conclusion - IT JUST SEES - and learning to see in this manner IS the basic and fundamental exercise of Buddhist meditation - IT IS not the eye that sees - not the eye only - it is the whole.'
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HOW I PRAY IS BREATHE.
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Whenever I think of oneness and the solitude which goes with certain states of 'grace' I think of Merton kneeling in the dirt and letting a fistful of it slowly fall through his fingers his out-stretched fist his hand in the light of day as the rich dark soil silently makes its own way downward BACK to where it came EARTH and EARTH alone from where he took it and it sense itself deftly handled light but heavy dark and moist as it falls back downward and I think of the toil of the world and of other people who do the same with money and the illusions money brings and the everything else of matter and moment and I see : 'the end of illusion is another illusion' : and can almost understand what it is YET I go on simple and determined to make what I can of the places I am in - the tiny visitations of self both here and there the light crawling across windows and glass the moving clouds within the sky the sketch of shadow as it plays with the shadings within the eye and all of this TOO is seen and witnessed and grasped through a silence of a time and a location where people are not normally found and learning to see in this manner is AGAIN basic and fundamental - the great work of a sunrise the awful solemnity of it : 'Put everything else aside and SEE what is happening.'

2. LOOK AT THE WORLD THROUGH HOPKINS' EYES:
'The world is charged with the grandeur of God....it will flame out like shining from shook foil.'

3. LET ME SAY A FEW FAVORED WORDS:
The body leaves its trailings - they are there upon the ground and within it : a pile of whitened bones withering and fallen-in and taut dry leathery skin peeled off and cracked as it flakes from skull and chest the grimace of the spread mouth the deadness of the eyes now gone the stiffness of hands holding nothing and the withering too of the dirty old cloth - that is all that is left beneath the ground silent bereft with nothing to claim and nothing to claim it - the dim scene of visitors above making no reckoning now and nothing is done with nothing to do - helpless and hopeless and silent (we too) and the painful definiteness of what can be seen - the long forward-creeping curls of newly-leaved trees (it is Spring after all and Spring has its own shade of green) in sweeps and rows all lodged one with the other down the meadow edge - beautiful - but distraction and the want of a canon only makes these shapes in the keen seasonal air carved out of one's thought grow deeper and sadder and more profound the more that is seen : the Meadow bears its maker's handlings the thin air is crisp blue with meadowlark and bunting whirling with a noise and the small face of nature here meets the large.
['Hopkins thought that humans were created with one purpose - to praise and glorify God and there are myriad ways to praise : a man with a dung fork in his hand a woman with a slop pail give Him glory too''].