The rain surrounded the cabin- with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen…..Thomas Merton

that tiny little voice that whispers, echoing our inner knowing if only we could trust the deep pool of humanity…..no answers, just a fluid and light-filled saunter of grace…..

W. B. Yeats tells the story of a Japanese artist who painted horses on a temple wall. Her work was so vivid, so complete, that one of the horses slipped down in the night and galloped off across a neighbor’s rice field. Next morning, a pilgrim came very early to the temple, and was startled by a shower of water drops. Looking up, he saw the horse still wet with dew, still ‘trembling into stillness.’ That shift between the real and the imagined, that magical vivacity, is what inspires us to return to those ancient paintings, nourishing our fretful, anxious spirits, steadying our gaze. ‘It is our slowness I love,’ says the poet Jorie Graham, ‘growing slower, tapping the paintbrush against the visible, tapping the mind.’…….Christian McEwen

beneath our layers

As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!…Virginia Woolf