Author: Ian Trimnell

You who want knowledge, see the Oneness within. There you will find the clear mirror already waiting. Hadewijch II (Antwerp, 13th century) [translated by Jane Hirshfield] Good evening and welcome to Evening Prayers That this evening may be holy, good and peaceful, let us pray with one heart and mind. Silence is kept.  As our evening...

Che Fece… Il Gran Refiuto For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d...

Already I By Choi Seungja  Translated from the Korean by Won-Chung Kim & Cathy Park Hong  Already I was nothing: mold formed on stale bread, trail of piss stains on the wall, a maggot-covered corpse a thousand years old. Nobody raised me. I was nothing from the beginning, sleeping in a rat’s hole, nibbling on the...

Afternoon in the House By Jane Kenyon  It’s quiet here. The cats sprawl, each in a favored place. The geranium leans this way to see if I’m writing about her: head all petals, brown stalks, and those green fans. So you see, I am writing about you. I turn on the radio. Wrong. Let’s not have...

A  Familiar  Silence … Harlon Rivers  The hollow wind funneled the voice of the distant night-train crossings, awakening  a  familiar  silence hanging from the vast wilderness sky A restless heart hearkening the echoes, imagining  a  runaway  Pullman flew away off the rails,    airborne on the winged wind headed north Winter  pausing  for a moment in  the  shadows  of  familiarity, as if parsing the unspoken breathings in an  echoless  surrendered sigh; uncertain...

A Vision By Wendell Berry  If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live...

Awakening By Christi Michaels Moon Flower  I have traveled this road. I have traveled this road since first I came to be here. This journey was my awakening to the new existence I would step into. Foreign to me the illustrious homes. Dripping willows, old oaks, poplars… Perfectly kept grounds. Checkerboard patterns carved into lush grass....

WHEN WAS THE AWAKENING? by Amy Perry The freest we can be Is between our Mentality. Fiends try to ween us From seeking the unseen. Heed what we need from those Who lead with dishonorable greed. We are a tough breed And we’re planting the seed For a new Mentality. The history that we read Is...

GLIMPSE Chase Twichell It was as if a window suddenly blew open and the sky outside the mind came flooding in. My childhood shriveled to a close, thread of smoke that rose and touched a cloud — or the cloud’s replica adrift on the slow river of thinking — and disappeared inside it. In that dark...

Be open to the night… Pray with open hand, not with clenched fist… Shapes loom out of the darkness, uncertain and unclear: but the hooded stranger on horseback emerging from the mist need not be assumed to be the bearer of ill… The night is large and full of wonders… Lord Dunsany Good evening and welcome...

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is...

Simple joys are holy By Donovan Leitch  If you want your dream to be Take your time, go slowly Do few things but do them well Heartfelt work grows purely If you want to live life free Take your, time go slowly Do few things but do them well Heartfelt work grows purely Day by day,...

Georgic By Michael Prior  This is the landscape I was made for, where the work is a word half-recalled, unpronounceable without practice, or a story in which my great-grandfather tends a strawberry farm in a small town beside the Pacific: the rotting mulch, the suck of mud on a boot, vines’ frost-stunted fruit; the way the...