I put in my goddamn hearing aid

in order to listen to a bird that sounds

like the side of a drinking glass

struck lightly by a fork

and try not to hate a life

that dips you in Time like a tea bag

over and over and pulls you up

each year a slightly different color.

Yet I like this hour when the air goes soft

and leaves stir with relief at the end

of their labor of being leaves.

“What a piece of work is man,” I say,

forgetting Hamlet said it first-

“how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,

in form and moving how express;

and yet, to me, the quintessence of dust!”

This hour of the evening

with a little infinity inside,

like an amnesty from the interminable

condition of being oneself.

This half-hour when you can look

and see that it is sweet.

Even in my deafness I can hear

the bird whose name I do not know,

speaking to someone in the dusk.

~Tony Hoagland

what is holy is here in the underpinnings of reactivity…..

inquiry for today~   reach into the day and hear the birds as if you knew what they knew….

forget about truth

The act of praying made a difference. It brought a little clarity and a little space into my confusion, and I found a way to continue. By making prayer a part of my daily practice, I discovered a new possibility: faith, a quiet source of strength that became vitally important to me in the years ahead and helped my many times to keep going in difficult situations. This for me, is the essential quality of prayer: a reaching out that moves us beyond our ordinary conceptual mind and our reactive emotional mind. Devotion is closely related to awe, where awe is a feeling of being intimately connected to something that is infinitely greater than you. When the feeling of devotion you engender through prayer is so intense that thinking stops, your heart opens and you have no choice but to trust the utter groundlessness of experience. You rest there speechless and without thought and other possibilities such as insight and direct awareness arise. Devotion is an opening of your heart to the possibilities you seek- the possibilities of peace, freedom, or awakening.

~Ken McLeod