The heart is a wineskin that can accommodate any authentic shape: grief or ecstasy, even despair gets a hammock, as joy gets an astral chamber.
The heart is a spotted fruit — there’s no getting through without some bruising.
The heart is a full moon, beautiful, haunted, magnetic.
Despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our screwy, clingy, messed-up lives, our deepest desire is to be each other’s joy.
Grass pierces pavement at its own peril — still it grows on;
A flash of insight, some clearing suddenly lit up by love or beauty or forgiveness can rocket your life, then flop back down like an expired fish. Faith is simply (simply?) about fanning the embers of that first flash.
I’ve had intellectual convictions overturned by spiritual experience, but I don’t go slagging science.
Why has it taken so long to see how my privilege is also my particular blindness?
Individual is a phantom: for in wonder and blunder we receive our selves through the eyes of others.
We are lonely pilgrims, bottles in smoke — proven by our obsessions and addictions — we search, we travel, only to discover that what is most alive is in our own home (an ancient story).
Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you want to find meaning, love the earth and her array of inhabitants.
Gender is both river and riverbed, and as enigmatic.
Beauty is a basket of grapes, happiness is champagne and laughter the bubbles.
Our favoured certainties should routinely be set on the sill of an open window.
A tincture of cynicism is good for you but a full-meal is constipating; doubt is a red-apple-daily but the spell of skepticism is a hospital bed.
Poetry liberates paradox — that bright burning tiger of insight.
Theology attempts an ocean while poetry is content with a boxfish yawing through coral.
Art enlarges our existence, cultivates imagination, which is why despots of commerce and public affairs de-fund it.
Science, religion, technology, are humble in theory, but never when monetized.
Things repair themselves if they are unplugged for a while, including humans.
God, like love, like dance, is a verb; Jesus the singer, painter; and the Spirit a poet of the divine feminine.
Time is a line that winds, folds, bends and swirls — vain to clutch it or try to stop it.
Death is hard, hard, hard and every explanation unfitting.
And love? that embattled radiant thing: sometimes a gleaming gem summoning from the crown of a mountain, sometimes arms that reach for us through the grief-fractured layers of our lives.
Yesterday I knew a few lauded maxims of life; today all I know is that kindness heals and mercy is a hug from a friend.
Happy New Year! and always, Thank You for stopping by!
It is the end of a year, and a time of reflecting upon all the joy, beauty and victories of the past. Unlike the 9 lepers who ran into the future without stopping to be grateful, I just wanted to say ‘thank you’. God has gifted you with a beautiful gift and I am privileged to sit at a digital footstool to listen.
Thank you for your kind and gracious words Kellie.
¡Feliz Año Nuevo amigx!
Thanks Adela! Happy New Year to you as well!
More wonderful observations, contemplations. Thank you.
Happy New year.
Thanks Joanne! Happy New Year to you as well!
Wow Stephen! Your words never cease to enrich us.
I’m not overly literate or well-read, but your insights and observations you manage to convey are in a class of their own.
They say good art makes you feel something. No doubt about it… proof is in your pudding 🙂 Thank you my friend and all the best in 2020!
Thank you for such kind and gracious words Doug! Wishing you warmth, inspiration, and happiness in the new year.
Yes, thank you Stephen. I will take all three of those!
If ‘mercy is a hug’, ‘being each other’s joy’ requires a visit!
Exactly true Ike! Hopefully in a few months. 🙂
The action version of the Trinity is a warm glow amid the clamour of commerce and the distraction of doctrine that surrounds the season’s celebrations.
Thank you Ray! And thank you for the insightful trajectory.
“Death is hard, hard, hard and every explanation unfitting.”
This is by far the best sentence on this brutal topic. On a related (somewhat) note, Connie would have loved “this year end list”!
Peace and best wishes in 2020.
Thank you Kathi. I so miss Connie’s keen eye and analysis (on so many things) and so I’m buoyed by your thought. May the New Year be a thriving garden for you.
Steve, thank you for gifting us these words to enter the new year with. I’ll be pondering and steeping myself in this one for a while.
Thank you Mel!
“Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you want to find meaning, love the earth and her array of inhabitants.” Great exposition of 1 John 4:20 – “for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
I enjoyed every line, Steve…thanks.
Thank you Sam!
I love how different reader of your writing are touched by different lines. For me, it was “The heart is a spotted fruit — there’s no getting through without some bruising.” What a wonderful metaphor for life, for risk taking, and for acceptance of the imperfect, but oh so sweet, people who enrich our lives. (But then again, I could be interpreting this all so incorrectly!)
Happy New Year Stephen.
Not at all Diane. Your interpretation is salient and insightful. Thank you so much for reading and adding to the connections.
Thank you for sharing your propositions and confessions. So many of them resonate with me; 2019 was a year of grief, but also of kindness and mercy. May 2020 see more of the latter for you and yours.
Thank you Corinne! Wishing you an inspiring 2020!
It is those favoured certainties….time to open several windows…wide. And keep pushing the edges….”a tincture of cynicism”!
As always….with thanks….
Lou
Thank you for reading and responding Lou! All my best for the new year!