your questioning eyes

Your questioning eyes are sad.
They seek to know my meaning
as the moon would fathom the sea.

I would have bared my life before your eyes from end to end,
with nothing hidden or held back.
That is why you know me not.

If it were only a gem, I could break
it into a hundred pieces and string them into a chain
to put on your neck.
If it were only a flower, round and small and sweet,
I could pluck it from its stem to set it in your hair.

But it is a heart, my beloved.
Where are its shores and its bottom?
You know the limits of this kingdom,
still you are its queen.
If it were only a moment of pleasure
it would flower in an easy smile,
and you could see it and read it in a moment.
If it were merely a pain
it would melt in limpid tears,
reflecting its inmost secret without a word.

But it is love, my beloved.
Its pleasure and pain are boundless,
and endless its wants and wealth.
It is as near to you as your life,
but you can never wholly know it.

R. Tagore


Picture: All Rights Reserved ® aml

doubt

"Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction?

What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? What do you want? Yours answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another YOU. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consiousness has no choice but to give way.

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way and you're lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.

There is an uneasy time when belief has begun to slip, but hypocrisy has yet to take hold, when the consciousness is disturbed but not yet altered. It is the most dangerous, important and ongoing experience of life. The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a life.


Preface of "Doubt", a play by John Patrick Shanley

Available at: Amazon

Picture: All Rights Reserved ® aml.2008

wish we were heroes

Somewhere down the line
We found the riddle and the rhyme
Like two notes fade out of time
Now we don't feel as whole... no no

Somehow through the years
We let the laughter turn to tears
And all those feelings weren't so clear
Just aren't here anymore... anymore
And sometimes, I...

Wish we were heroes in the setting sun
Ride off together when the story's done
No sad goodbyes, no alibis... just
Two heroes waving from the back of a train
Two heroes never feeling all of the pain
Heartbreak in rending
Of knowing the ending is here
And it's time for goodbye

But so much for heroes
We could never be heroes
Because heroes don't cry

evanescence

"What is your life? It is even as a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."

98. I suppose few people reach the middle or latter period of their age, without having, at some moment of change or disappointment, felt the truth of those bitter words; and been startled by the fading of the sunshine from the cloud of their life, into the sudden agony of the knowledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a dream, and the endurance of it as transient as the dew. But it is not always that, even at such times of melancholy surprise, we can enter into any true perception that this human life shares, in the nature of it, not only the evanescence, but the mystery of the cloud; that its avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its forms and courses no less fantastic, than spectral and obscure; so that not only in the vanity which we cannot grasp, but in the shadow which we cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy life of ours, that "man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain."

Sesame and Lilies, John Ruskin

Picture: All Rights Reserved ® aml.2008

it always comes back to you

"If you become a fisherman," said the little bunny, "I will be a bird and fly away from you."

"If you become a bird and fly away from me," said his mother, "I will be a tree that you come home to."


The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown

Picture: All Rights Reserved ® aml.2007