October 22, 2011

To Give Ourselves Fully

Chestnut Trees in Blossom

We do not have to build a church. Let us be complete in ourselves. Let us drink ourselves empty, give ourselves fully, extend ourselves outward—until, at last, the waving treetops are our own gestures and our laughter is resurrected in the children who play beneath them...

Early Journals

4 comments:

  1. sometimes I wish one of the poets just came out and said that their is no church (as a building) that can hold it. There is no enclosure, natural nor man made that can house it and not crumble, lest they be careful with their voices.

    I can't remember where I read it, but I may have read somewhere or another that no building, no cave and no pit can hold the voice of seventy-two women and seventy-two men when all sing togather together all their voices sung as one.

    when the voice is joyous

    and children I've heard can do it alone, as they are sometimes joyful for the most peculiar reason

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  2. hallelujah and amen!

    but for the song, can there not be a gathering for the song? this i'd like to see. i'd like to see a church of poetry and i'd like us all to sing hymns of gratitude.

    xo
    erin

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  3. perhaps that is what we are doing (?)

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  4. it is I think, the work that has to go into it anyway. And don't mean to knock on churches or chapels, many of them are some of the nicest buildings ever designed and built. And the craftsmanship, works of art. I guess that is why so much of it is done, for art. It's just sometimes when I visit tiny towns in Oregon and find some large Church built in the early 1900's out of huge pieces of stone I almost get confused.

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"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Go ahead, bloom recklessly!