“… for dear to our hearts is our home, although it be the humblest cottage, or the scantiest garret; and dearer far is our blessed God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. It is at home that we feel safe: we shut the world out and dwell in quiet security. So when we are with our God we ‘fear no evil.’ He is our shelter and retreat, our abiding refuge. At home, we take our rest; it is there we find repose after the fatigue and toil of the day.”
-C.H. Spurgeon
TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE
I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
-James Elroy Flecker
It’s still raining here, but it’s not hailing, and the air is warmer. So it’s a day when I can imagine spending time in the elements with someone you love, and this poem I’ve been wanting to share finally fits the mood of the season, and the current weather. On our honeymoon in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, my beloved and I walked in rain under redwood trees, and it wasn’t the last time. Here’s to all the rainy days when we’ve been in love with somebody and with life.
ANNIVERSARY POEM
Remember that day in the rain
at the park where we used to meet,
how we took and we gave,
and what couldn’t be spoken
was nevertheless contained
in what we were able to say,
well, it’s raining again
and it’s the body, I realize,
that stores memory
and sends it, when keyed,
to those long unvisited
regions of the brain – remember
that steady collision
of rain and branch and leaf,
a hundred connections
happening at once,
long before I said I do.
I was saying I will and Let’s.
-Stephen Dunn
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
-Salmon Rushdie
Addendum from Vicky’s comment below, which helpfully develops Rushdie’s thought for those who want to deliberately cultivate “certain crops”:
Beautiful… as well as quite the vivid warning.
Matthew 6:22-23
“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Commentary from the Orthodox Study Bible:
“The mind (Gr. nous) is the spiritual eye of the soul; it illuminates the inner man and governs the will. Keeping the mind wholesome and pure is fundamental to the Christian life.“
Gladsome Lights 