"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
A member of our local Buddhist meditation center shared this wonderful poem at the center's winter solstice party. I wrote to Stephen Philbrick, who lives nearby in Cummington, and he's kindly given me permission to reprint it below.
Don't Try So Hard
It comes in a shiver sometimes, Sometimes in a winter windowpane Wild with the unseeable frozen there: The shapes above clouds, The score of wind and the words, too; The plot of waves and the brain that lays and abandons them: Don't try so hard.
Sometimes it falls, A flake at a time, Into your life when you're asleep. Sometimes it comes as a winter blankness, Waiting for storm, or ice, or thaw, or even wind. And then the air by itself groans And the trees speak out of themselves; The swamp shudders and the woods come to. Sometimes it comes when you least expect it; And sometimes it doesn't. Quiet, still, no voice (not even small), No whirlwind, no reply, no burning. Just a bare winter bush.
The space between stars, Where noise goes to die; And the space between atoms, Where the charges thin out: These are places, too. The moment in the movement of the soul When it all seems to stop, seized up. This is true, too. Ice is, also. And dormancy. I don't mean the stirring of seeds beneath the snow, But the place between and the moment before. And I don't mean a lightning bolt, But what it passes through. I don't mean a dream, but dumb sleep. After the end and before the beginning Is time, too. Let it alone, don't try so hard. This is God, too, All of you is.
**** Stephen Philbrick has been the minister of the
West Cummington Church for the past 15 years. Before this he raised
sheep in Cummington for many years. His books include: No Goodbye (The Smith); Up To The Elbow (Adastra Press); THREE (Adastra Press, 2003); and Backyard Lumberjack (Storey Publishing, 2006) a prose collection co-authored with his son, Frank.
