Willow's shadowing

Water and the shores

Butterflies

Blue-blue snow

2010-02-16/17 01:17

making christmas presents

My wise mediums in a world of Christmas are three pretty things: writing poems, forgiveness, and pine needles.

Chained

“The Dolls’, the film by Takeshi Kitano, perhaps is my favourite Japanese film. Red and White Seasons of rope, of love - which is either beautiful, or cruel. Or both.

I sought for the way out of this mirror realm,
touching things, later their shadows
and saying farewell to the north and the south.

My peace is yours, oh Lord.
Though I have no peace.

Yo Sakura

The more I trust to God, the more I am surprised…. There’s a deep mystery teeming in all around us indeed… Just a few precious books of Chinese and Japanese poetry on the shelves. I love Wang Wei, Basho, Issa, Li Bai, Du Fu, Kanze Motokiyo, Buson - they all have been for a long time as a rainbow apple of my eye. Though my yo zakura… mostly sinks in endurance, there’s a shimmering light within wet branches…

And Wang Wei, playing musical instruments before moon!

"Sitting alone, in the hush of the bamboo;
I thrum my zither, and whistle lingering notes.
In the secrecy of the wood, no one can hear;
Only the clear moon, comes to shine on me."

Genesis

In the course of your life the sighing butterfly leads you to the
Garden, where children are playing. Are they God's? I believe they are.

At the moment of death you do not remember Aphrodite,
We remember the letters of G and O.
The distance from one god to another one is
Mere One Living One.

Does He bring the silver plate with grapes and apples on it
To your bed balancing accounts?
The dearest gifts from the sea-goddess?

With bated breath we lie in wait for but
Who will come? Clinging for images – one, another -
One hope - HE is not an image and He is coming like a Person.

Blood and bread. Your breath that will be caught in the transmission,
Will speak for all your myths – spiritual and physics - just
Don’t look into the eyes of Death with long-long hair of the curling promises.

Hold carefully your ancient vase of life, and keep it lovingly for
Its yours forever.

Unless, of course, you do prefer the images.
In ancient times the images were reigning in a ball,
The God came here to be born, to save all living fairytale nature.

To Life through Life. Genesis

In water on that day He saw all fairy tales mournings,
And their howl to be revealed, to be fulfilled with Him -
He was the only hope of all myths.

And Fairy became the Truth. Do you believe? I do.

Avenue of limes

I think now this poem is wet by never-ending influence of Ivan Bunin’s lyrics in my life: this sensation of gentle breathing and avenues of limes...

***

I am walking along the garden with sails
Embedded in sky so blue – they thought it was the sea.

The Church of St Mary Magdalena – lime alley under the sun clock,
Leaves are chirring under the feet like dry souls of five o’clock teacups.

Dancing small ones are trying to hold heaven on their palms,
Leaves incurved are kept the prints of sight -
Those dwelling in a shell later unfold in bosom at night…

None is in the room but no limits for ‘might’,
Lady, transformed into waltz, now herself transforms hooks
Into breathing-outs – so silently apples are falling.

And smell of new silk velvet in angel’s grand opera theatre
Reminds me days in May when we were happy – transparent and exceeding.

This Church of May, its subtle columns like notes
For the orchestra, playing its Sunday sacred hymns in the park
With statures of Aphrodite and Dionysus.




René Magritte World

Funny translation to seven languages

George Macdonald the Sufi?

Reading G. MacDonald's The Diary of an Old Soul, wandering across the sea with him and through his passion, his feelings, realations with God, his love appeal and cry, I felt he was a deep mystic, and I remembered one little but pretty good article of R. M. Rilke I came across last year in Internet. Sometimes there's also something they both have from the Sufi:

Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;
Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;
My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think,--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.

(G. Macdonald. The Diary. January, 5)

"Rilke knew the meaning of the hidden heart. I first came across the German poet while i worked at Bookworm in Lampeter, 2003. I had a lot of time to fumble through the titles. “Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, jumped out to me immediately, although it was a good three months later before i opened her. I guess i was little skittish, like a new lover i was somewhat scared of the intensity i felt over a title.

i loved the idea of ‘love poems to god’ - they make god somewhat intimate, secret and close - a picture of the divine or the world i much preferred to the Judaic Patrician

You, God, who live next door-
If at times, through the long night, i trouble you
with my urgent knocking-
this is why; i hear you breathe so seldom..
..As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin, Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily

Rilke the Sufi?

When i first read Rilke i was struck by his emotionally honest descriptions of a spiritual heart. He yearns for God like an ardent lover, and seeks in some of his poems to be overcome by his God like a mystic

..May what i do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children
then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepending tides moving out, returning,
i will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

For me the poet captures the dark twilight world of the heart beautifully: his earlier work is often in the form of metaphors and symbols - which are more like snapshots of memory. The ideas they seek to express are difficult, immense, sometimes contradictory - a lot like the stumbling of our own hearts when trying to feel their way forward. The rhyme and sense of a Rilke poem is consistent with an inner landcape of pictures, which just throw things together, never answering, just questioning what the truth could be in amongst these difficult visions.

Reaching, these hands would pull you out of the sky
as if you had shattered there,
dashed yourself to pieces in some wild impatience.
What is this I feel falling now,
falling on this parched earth,
softly,
like a spring rain?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Intertissued

“Thou shalt love the L-rd thy G-d”



The poem beneath is written just after hearing words from this Messianic Liturgy, words, that I did not understand but I recognized them, letters and sounds, with all my previous lives. But the song, which is in English so beautiful and simple one, like lullaby, music of new age, meditative and comforting, berceuse… it so special feeling, when the Children of God sing for themselves... This way they serve liturgy for themselves in their Church of the Love of God, with their little hands and birds. Everybody around murmurs: "He did not come... Hush!" But they do not believe...

With Thy spear-hand, O Lord Thee created the Universe,
With all your heart, with all your Son,
From obedient and wise letters and sounds
You've made Thy Wor(l)d.

May Thy hand be upon us o Lord?
Like dove may it be?
Intertissued.

Breathing gently and nesting:
“You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.

Or did You forget anything to tell?

Hands, cupped gently, obedient and wise,
fingers whisper: "Adonai…"

And Thy Unutterable name, o Jesus...


The song from video and these words of St. Clement beneath have, as it appears to me, the music of longing, of faith of the same colours, of the same tender high tones … The flight of dove. I love these words from Charles William’s “New Christian Year” and remember them at the threshold of the night:

“God gives us many things in which He has Himself no part: being Himself self-existent, He gives us a beginning of existence; being Himself exempt from want, He gives us nourishment; Himself always the same, He gives us growth; Himself immortal and exempt from old age, He gives us a happy old age, and a happy death”.

St. Clement: Stromata

Mystery of Letters

The intriguing study of the Hebrew letters explores the wondrous
world of hidden meanings in the letters and words of the
Sacred Tongue. The fire which burns in these ancient letters
is a Divine creative force through which G-d reveals Himself to man.
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson takes the reader into this realm of
splendor where even the very form of each letter has profound significance.
The relationships between the letters, their sequence,
the Kabalistic concepts inherit in various words and phrases
are all examined and elucidated in Rabbi Glazerson's books.
Drawing on the precepts of the Holy Torah and on the
wellsprings of the sages teachings throughout the ages,
Rabbi Glazerson brings to the listener and reader the hidden beauty of this world .

Glazerson Matityahu Books

"For the letter kills but the Spirit gives life."

One can see that letters have might and powers we are involved into from this phrase. And we are pushed from all the sides to go to some beyond... and we will be open to some new world... where Spirit gives life through them... Otherwise, is there any other source, giving freedom from the law of gravitation?


Ale אּ, an equestrian and a bird, but also your name rustles in the wind, a flowering tree, yo zakura, shimmering with silence but such A Life within. Unutterable name and breathing…

***

Coffee houses - Italian, American, romantic jaunty cafes and simple
French café, café 'ink' – oh, dwellings of airy souls!
Café where people live, for no any other place to live for them.

Millions of strokes and passages conceal themselves inside of these café-towers:
Towards, along them so many bodies rush, leaving the smoke of cigars on the walls of the tunnels.

Café-tower consists of bodies, sinewy and tender, impetuous and smooth like satin ribbon.
Oh, if only once these chords could cross! Alas.

This coffee cup under my fingers, vibrating with its hospitality, small and open like a shell. I go further. Further and further upright the vertical mines, where nymphs and butterflies are singing their songs by silver and lunar voices.

I see there Maria Magdalena and Beatrice, two girls are playing catch – they vindicate reclaimless ones and they awake.

Life for Adam

There was such a warm and bright afternoon, breezing with some new sparkling Words: future and ... some unutterable name. The day when Adam was lying under the Tree in the Garden teeming with visible and invisible Life, remembering the chasing of stray flames of lights they happily finally caught with Him. Oh He…. Adam dreamt so much to be like Him… His manner of speaking, His silence, His far and always close eyes… Oh how he would like to do something pleasant for him to surprise….

He was lying under the Tree when suddenly he heard some noise between branches… (I need to say that it was not a typical tree we use seeing now, it was big and cosmic tree, and Adam, without any desire to mock, I must say, was much more impressive than his sons nowadays). Thus he lifted up his eyes and saw a great precious stone falling from the top of the Tree. Was it a small planet or some star? They were floating here and there around the universe he was granted by Him… and there was nothing special in that one little stone at the first sight. But now this was lying, shimmering with joy in front of him and without any doubts (though of course Adam didn’t not know any doubts at all) it longed to be revealed and wanted to be disclosed and free from the laws of gravitation.

“Who are you?” there were the words Adam murmured at the first time in the ambience of new magic presence.

“I am Life” , there was an answer, and in the next moment a marvellous Creature appeared before Him. “I am a fruit of the tree of Life, I am your Life, I am Eve”, the sounds teemed like music and Adam stretched his hand to touch the new universe that just had been born upon his hidden desire… Her name itself was like a sweet and magic music.

He suddenly felt that he had been waiting for this meeting as if it was his Life, as if it somehow came from him… from his body…. Oh he should run to Him immediately and tell him about this precious Stone-Eve, about something that was coming from Eve radiated with such a joy! But things and events in the Garden were seen from every corner and for all…So in the glory of the birth of Eve, the angels started singing "Halleluiah", praising Him, wondering and surprising more and more…

“I have also another name, she said. Amidst the crown of the Tree where I lived, they often called me Love playing with letters and meanings. I know who you are. You are the Son of my God, whose name is so marvellous”.

Adam came to Eve and took her hand. That was the meeting of two systems of imagination, when dream of God and Adam was embodied into One.

“I, Love, You too ” said Adam practicing with new combinations of the letters and their positions, and suddenly he was speared by the light of the Precious Stone, Eve was smiling and he recognized the sense of Life.

Genesis

It is a miracle indeed – how the man appeared.

There was no special plan. It was the miracle. God created Adam from a word: first, in the beginning, yes, God was writing some Big and Holy Book (was It Bible? No, I think it was some another Book, but really the Bible is the reflection of that First One), where He described the sky and the earth, the grass and the birds and other poems. He wanted that beautiful Book about trees and stars for Himself/Themselves to be pleased… But suddenly (well, you writers know how characters appear in front of you, on the pages: you don’t expect them at all, or even do not need, whereas Someone else suddenly starts beating a tattoo on the door. You have to stand up and go to open the door to let the visitor come into your space. So that way Adam arrived. Thus from the very beginning it was the Word in the Book, or better to say – alive letters for hol(l)y and blood. (Oh I forgot to say: it was an Alive Book. Because all the God created was alive). But Adam went further on, from the pages into some magic creation unfolded more and more in front of his eyes.

So God allowed life for Adam, the same life God Himself knows. The events, the numbers – all got the power to be real. One mystery upon another. Letters, received mercy, began to play with each other, creating the world we try to perceive.

Now I feel I will be able to write later today about the Fall, but first about Life and Adam...

Litany

Heart of Jesus in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Heart of Jesus, in whom dwells the fullness of divinity.

Jesus, the Son of Virgin Mary...

How beautiful these words, how rainbowling; each is a sparkle ball, I roll and wash over them and they paint themselves in front of my eyes, within, somehow in a new straight-up manner, and finally almost in some feminine manner like the murmuring of the clock as Orwell wrote of clocks, each minute sounds from their clock's mouth alike - but how one minute, hour occurs colored - grievely and oh! sunny - under the same accompaniment of wall type dimmer. Maybe O God, maybe this is the most comfortable instrument for emigrants like we are in your Land in Yours Sion, till we trespass the Kingdom (is it possible?) by our will, like me, for I feel myself an emigrant in Heaven, and these words "Jesus, the Son of Virgin Mary" I dare to leaf as my book-guide.

Even the sparrow has found a house, and the swallow, a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young: Thy altars, o Lord of Hosts, my King and My God. (Ps. 83)

My longing for Your altar brought me here to the threshold of Your House without any hope for surviving in another reality but King David did dream even though of it... it was his despair when he said this, I see it now, for this state of mind is emigration, but being alone its is not pleasant, though all around here are so gentle and kind to you as if it was your family.

And I dive again into these Jesus, the Son of Virgin Mary - I passionately catch these crumbs from your Altar, O Lord, and they move me on.

Intense Patronage

What a liturgy It was today.

I can utter only this - ahh!

The anointment if each succesor to the throne takes place in the Cathedral of Assumption before these sacred images - the Holy Mother and the Christ child.

Thank you for the feather of the Fire bird.

Under Your Wings O Lord I abide and expect

1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5 I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing.
6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.
10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.
11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.

Husbandman - it was a little like a discovery for me as I thought these are the different professions: one is grain-grower and another is the videdresser, as these are given in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible that I read together with the Russian one at home. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser (John, 15-1).

But it is just a headnote because today is very special day for me indeed!..

My own secret Initiation into that is above from Bible, John, 15-1.

Yesterday before writing and sending a letter I had prayed with hot tears asking my Lord to open me the path from that ditch where I was lieing almost really half-dead.

And I started reading all the Liturgy text as it had been my praying rule.

And when I came to the point of reading Gospel - I breathed in sharply as if the next moment I would jump into the deep cold waters of the sea (space).

That act/jump differed from reading Bible at ramdom for a case (maybe this is not a good method at all I think but sometimes when all is well we might do this?) as immediately I caught the tale of the thread between God presence in that moment in the room and myself, praying and needing...

Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.


And having read till up the 11 verse in the15th head, I felt how the breath was interrupted as if it was enough to stay under water without oxygen, and I came up gulping for air. I articulately penetrated the sense of it for me, for us Christians, how it is and could be the message through time (though all things within time from God direct to the main purpose and they, of course, are not separated) before the Last Supper where and when our Lord Jesus Christ first opens the practical meaning and form of what He began to speak in the 15th chapter of the Gospel of St. John.

I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing.


If a man does not abide in me he is cast forth as a branch and withers... If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.


Reading or somehow even listening to these words yesterday I made a rapid question somewhere between the gaps of the full attention and perсeption (how?).

Today I have got already heard (heard - better to say was directed for action)the answer (specially for me as to the stupidest one) - Through Liturgy. Liturgy - this journey to Kingdom is the actualization first and foremost of what how to be administered into the Vine. And the three parts (first 2 and then the 3d, the most inportant where, without any doubts, only baptized elements of the person assist) of the Liturgy are moving towards the final transubstantiation - thus we leave the withered branches in ourselves, the branches that are yet without true Wine and in this manner are fruitless, to those which are baptized in Blood of Christ and abided - thus they become accepted and homologated into/for Kingdom. Waters of Liturgy are washing all, and maybe more those who (which are prepared to be fruitful) are yet without but with hope and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. All the earth is prepared to enter the kingdom, and where the first elements have already being traveled into while the rest are prepared through hope and beauty. All agency is reigned by the Holy Spirit Who presents now outside the Kingdom (I will send the Holy Spirit to help you) to lead the created elements to their fullfiment: that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be perfect.

Though it is just a short description of that comprehension and presence in the air and life of that liturgy leading to the gate of the kingdom, the liturgy of your spirit which you make at and as home prayer is not easy tranferable at all, and I do hope no one finds here elements of magical practice or whatever but only a desire to understand and serve, and be with Christ, inside of Vine, of Church.

May as One, Your Wings o Lord, your Vine and Sacred Blood protect us in the Battle...




Abide in Me and I in You...John 15:4

Fidelity versus imagination

A mirror spumed with Luna’s golden waves. Pieces of paper floating across the big and light room - themselves like rain and birds -

Untamed youth

Frail hand
Confused by strange demand by wind and stone

Mute simplicity of goose

Water

The bell at the strings end of winter is lost
Water on oak, rough gale

Even the notes I made in the end of the book
Have fallen apart

Lost at the end
For memory or reading glass

window is wide open and the wind figures out its never-ceased steps,

Names upon the harp:

Today is Matthew Fluharty and Ted Hughes ‘Birthday Letters’ yesterday and then, its tomorrow – my waves, measuring the depth and longitude direction of sublunar sphere –

black starry nights and crying stones are thawed by the shadows of took off cedars