The Sowing of Meanings

by Thomas Merton

See the high birds! Is theirs the song

That flies among the wood-light

Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?

Or do they play in wheeling silences

Defining in the perfect sky

The bounds of (here below) our solitude,

Where spring has generated lights of green

To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?

Ponds full of sky and stillness

What heavy summer songs still sleep

Under the tawny rushes at your brim?

More than a season will be born here, nature,

In your world of gravid mirrors!

The quiet air awaits one note,

One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring:

One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then

Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!

For, like a grain of fire

Smouldering in the heart of every living essence

God plants His undivided power--

Buries His thoughts too vast for worlds

In seed and root and blade and flower.

Until, in the amazing light of April,

Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,

Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret

Too terrible to bear.

Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees

Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament

And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,

While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,

Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,

The deep united threeness printed in our being,

Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an institution, turns within,

And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,

Dives after, and discovers flame.

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Thought of Something Else

by Wendell Berry

1.

A spring wind blowing

the smell of the ground

through the intersections of traffic,

the mind turn, seeks a new

nativity--another place,

simpler, less weighted

by what has already been.

Another place!

it's enough to grieve me--

that old dream of going,

of becoming a better man

just by getting up and going to a better place.

2.

The mystery. The old

unaccountable folding.

The iron trees in the park

suddenly remember forests.

It becomes possible to think of going.

3.

--a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be

safely without thought

--see the day begin

and lean back,

a simple wakefulness filling

perfectly

the spaces among the leaves.

Seed

by Luci Shaw

God dug his seed

into dry dark earth.

After a pushing up

in hopeful birth

and healing bloom

and garland grace

he buried it again

in a darker place

Twice rudely-planted seed,

root, rise in me

and grow your green again,

your fruited tree

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.