The Crystalline

"The Crystalline know how to remain the center.
Between shifting worlds and strange times.
They tread the nameless path without
naming the narrowness.
They squeeze through the eye of the needle
with naked faith and raw trust.
They are the conquerors of the inertia of history.
They have found the secret gate.
Regenerated by their own tongues.
They speak only what is glorious.
Their minds dwell on Rainbow Light.
direct discovery
silent rapture
Nothing else exists
but this..."

(Author unknown)

Sudden Light

We have been here before,         
But when or how I cannot tell:     
I know the grass beyond the door,         
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound,
the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before, -         
How long ago I may not know:     
But just when at that swallow's soar         
Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall, -
I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?         
And shall not thus time's eddying flight     
Still with our lives our love restore         
In death's despite,
And day and night yield
one delight once more?

~Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The Walk

"My eyes already touch the
sunny hill
going far ahead of the road
I have begun.
So we are grasped by what
we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even
from a distance.

And changes us, even if we
do not reach it,
into something else,
which hardly sensing it,
we already are;
a gesture waves us on,
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind
in our faces."

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Reach just a little bit higher...

"Child, child,
Do you not see?
For each of us comes a time
When we must be more than what we are."

~Lloyd Alexander

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.


We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.


Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.


This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

*Theodore Roethke

A Hymn to the Night

I heard the trailing garments of the Night

Sweep through the marble halls!

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light

From the celestial walls!


I felt her presence, by its spell of might,

Stoop o'er me from above;

The calm, majestic presence of the Night

As of the one I love.


I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,

The manifold, soft chimes,

That fill the haunted chambers of the Night,

Like some old poet's rhymes.


From the cool cisterns of the midnight air

My spirit drank repose;

The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,--

From those deep cisterns flows.


Oh holy Night, from thee I learn to bear

What man has borne before!

Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care

And they complain no more.


Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer!

Descend with broad-winged flight,

The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair,

The best-beloved Night!


*Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

Again and Again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.


*Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)