sAyings

Snow is just nature's way of allowing you, too, to walk on water.

*
We do not give birth to children; they give us our own birth.

*
We have a lot to forgive and a lot to imagine yet.
We don't need arts teachers; we need arts preachers.
Teach us what to do with our minds besides thinking.
Teach us that we are not our thinking.
Show us how to listen to what has no voice.
Teach us to witness, then teach us to celebrate.

*
Make your life a testament to beauty.

*

There was no Big Bang
there was a Great Shout
and the word was
the world was
what the world is
in that moment, is
in this moment
unfurled
what in the word is
begging
for grace
peace
namaste

*****

"Gods come and go, but prayer is forever."
— Yehuda Amichai


What can we offer to god, who has everything, knows everything?
What can we offer that is not superfluous, uninspired, is not
a lie?
"We offer the sighs of the heart."
— St. Gregory


3 poems by Yehuda Amichai

I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.
*


The sea and the shore are always next to each other.
Both want to learn to speak, to learn to say
one word only. The sea wants to say "shore"
and the shore "sea." They draw closer,
millions of years, to speech, to saying
that single word. When the sea says "shore"
and the shore "sea,"
redemption will come to the world,
the world will return to chaos.
*


Here in this wadi we lived during the war.
Many years have passed since then, many victories
and many defeats. I have gathered many consolations in my life
and squandered them, many sorrows
that I spilled in vain. I've said many things, like the waves
of the sea at Ashkelon in the West
that always keep saying the same thing.
But as long as I live, my soul remembers
and my body slowly ripens in the fires of its life story.

The evening sky lowers like a bugle call over us,
and our lips move like the lips of men in prayer
before there was a god in the world.

Here we would lie by day, and at night
we would go to battle.
The smell of the sand is as it was, and the smell
of the eucalyptus leaves
and the smell of the wind.

And I do now what any memory dog does:
I howl quietly
and piss a boundary of remembrance around me
so no one else can enter.

— Yehuda Amichai