The Unclad Soul

Playwright and screenwriter, Robert Ardrey, once wrote, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Which is to say, our acts of benevolence, kindness, love and generosity transcend our acts of terror, barbarity, murder, and mayhem. The unimaginable carnage, cowardly and beyond any possible reason, carried out Sunday by Devin Kelley, takes us to our knees. We collapse under the weight of such a beastly crime. How does anyone human carry out such an inhuman atrocity? Details are murky. The answers we need and want, and what will finally be revealed, if any at all, will not be sufficient. Whatever the motive or mental defect may have been, all we will be left with is that the depths of our individual capacity for evil and harm know no limits. Monstrous crimes are not new. But what seems to be dramatically different these days is the frequency of them, so that they are becoming not an aberration but a common reality. There is without question a poiso...

Emerson, the brilliant essayist, philosopher, and poet, started his long and productive career initially as an ordained minister. When his young wife died of tuberculosis he was devastated. He questioned his faith and the simple beliefs he thought as a minister should be accepted unconditionally and believed by everyone. He left the ministry, went to Europe, met with towering people in literature like William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he returned to America he was transformed and began a series of lectures on spirituality and ethical living.  In one of his many books, he wrote, “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” It is a beautiful and profound statement and one I fully embrace. And it is a part of a personal religious search I started years ago. As a young minister I struggled with biblical texts that I could not make sense of, thing...

In the name of the daybreak and the eyelids of the morning and the wayfaring moon and the night when it departs, I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors and the day that embraces it and the cloud veils drawn over it and the uttermost night and the male and the female and the plants bursting with seed and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life —wherever and in whatever form it may dwell—on Earth my home, and in the mansions of the stars. ~ Diane Ackerman

The Layers By Stanley Kunitz I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? .... Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my...

After the red leaf and the gold have gone, Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain Bruised and discolored, when October’s flame Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade. There is a knowledge in the look of things, The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. Now I can see certain simplicities In the darkening rust and tarnish of time, And say over the certain simplicities, The running water and the standing stone, The yellow haze of the willow and the black Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall, The sumac’s candelabrum darkly flames. And I speak to you now with the land’s voice, It is the cold, wild land that says to you A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things: The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. ~ Howard Nemerov, American Poet There is so much beauty in the language of this poem. The words carry such solid wisdom. We are in this seas...