on a sunny winter day, in march

flowers! for you

"the encounter"

"every morning"

"Every morning

I shall concern myself anew about the boundary

Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No

And pressing forward honor reality.

We cannot avoid

Using power,

Cannot escape the compulsion

To afflict the world,

So let us, cautious in diction

And mighty in contradiction,

Love powerfully."

― Martin Buber, Power and Love (1926)

Stained Glass

"The Thou encounters me by grace — it cannot be found by seeking. 

But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed."

― Martin Buber

Spring in the city

in-verted
upside-down s/tree/t
an ominous sky gripped
in the barest
arms of a tree

vert-tical cliffs
dust glass steel
three subterranean limbs
webbing in
a piece of heaven?

that, too
is not what it seems
but a palimpsest of spring
in an intro-vert self-
absorbed city

I cross blindfolded

_ _ _

"To speak is to not see. 

So all speech is to some extend blind."

― Jacques Derrida

The Starry Sky . . . (Lars Gustafsson)

The starred sky, the fixed stare of the galaxies.

The universe stubbornly upholding enormous distances

against our just-as-eager strivings to see the world as small,

possible to survey, trafficable for signals and observations.

Quantum logic in physics and chemistry.

The same thing: matter's obstinate refusal to be 

       anything but probabilities,

shadows that sweep over distant cliffs at sunset,

sudden gusts that run through a single aspen in the grove

   and leave it almost still.

And our stubborn eager battle for a substance,

for particles, individualities, things that refuse to 

        exist in the physical world.

This world of distances and shadows

and random leaps between the spectral lines,

this frighteningly still dance

is what I mean

by the world's stillness before Bach.

― Lars Gustafsson, from The Stillness of the World Before Bach

(1936 - 2016)

_ _ _ 

Sunday sermon

Bare tree

In the bare limbs of a tree

there is certain irrefutable
[and deceptive] clarity ―

the eye piercing the stark
crisp-clear scenery

supposedly defeating blindness
believing in seizing the s/tree/t view

in its entirety ― free
of the exuberant burst of spring
lush blossoms, birds and bees
the idle chatter of summer leaves
eager butterfly wings
ripeness that swell
bejewelling the branches in gold,
soon to be stripped down
by the first frost, vanish in a blast
of a sudden winter squall, as if
nothing . ever . existed ―
if not for this inseparable
frame-sequence along the blue 

string of seasons ―
[incessant ancient love]
by which we live

upside-down s/tree/t (2)