So easy to talk to you, @benleemusic, and lay my heart bare! Thank you, intimate stranger, for this opportunity to have a real conversation, and exchange of ideas. Hopefully, it might whet curiosity of others, or even soften hearts, to explore a culture that they're not familiar with. (Who was it that said: mystics agree, but the theologians argue... Meister Eckhart)?
Anyhow, hope it was not too heavy -- after all, poetry is how I pray, so not pushing any dogma, here. Pleasure to connect with a fellow artist & questing human being. Much Love _/|\_
PS -- And the short answer (that I never gave you) regarding which of my books would be the best point of entry to my work is, my forthcoming, Where Epics Fail :D
Thank you for the collaboration!
It was fun! And, I'm glad to see it doing so well :)
“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
― Meister Eckhart
Thank you for reminding me that the exchange of ideas (words! words!) is such a great thing, I'd be short-sighted to think "no more will I go there."
But words, if they matter, are marinated, first, in silence, my dear... Thinking of you, this morning (seconds before reading this) and wanted to share some words and an image:
“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.”
—Thomas Merton from Thoughts In Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956).
Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US
Oh, I love Thomas Merton, and this image is haunting, and compelling! Thanks, Yahia!
My pleasure <3