So...Absence can be experienced as prelude to Presence
(yesterday's post).
Mindfulness practice helps tune our receivers to Presence.
As we faithfully, skillfully, lovingly do the work of paying attention and
letting go we begin to make space and capacity for perceiving what the
Buddhists speak of as 'The One Who Knows.'
Jesus promised us the Spirit of Truth would guide us
into all that is true. Many years earlier, Jewish writers were proclaiming that
Wisdom (Sophia) calls aloud from the gateways and doorways and marketplaces.
Wisdom, lucky for us, is both all the wise things our
forbears passed on to us AND the ability to know truth from untruth. Wisdom is
completely intertwined with The One Who Knows.
Back to poetry.
Mary Oliver works with the same materials R. S. Thomas
worked with (yesterday's poem). But her point of view and tone are (to say the
least) distinctly different.
Consider...
Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
She suggests a lot is possible with a little, yes? The verb
'patch' is helpful. And the words 'doorway' and 'thanks' can encourage us to
work with the words 'vacant' and 'silence' more expectantly, yes again?
Absence and Presence are intertwined.
So friends, the preacher intoned, don't let Absence put you
off your game. Work with it as the gift it can be.
