The Altar of this Moment

Place everything you can perceive—

Everything you can

see, hear, smell,taste, or touch,

Upon the altar of this moment

and give thanks.

It is over so soon—

This expression,

This single moment of your precious life,

This one heart

pounding itself open

with fear or wild joy,

This one breath rising

in the cold winter air

smoothly and gently

or coughing and sputtering,

Bow, while you can, before

This one taste

Of afternoon tea

Warming its way to your belly,

Or the fragrant orange

exploding its sweet juice

in your grateful mouth.

You have to love

The antics of your mind,

Imagining life should only be sweet.

The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.

It is whole, like you,

Before you think yourself to pieces.

Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,

And give special thanks for such grace

That wakes you up from sleeping through your life.

Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,

yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.

In this one moment,

Your eyes meet mine and there is

a single looking.

What is peering from behind our masks?

Can it touch itself across the room?

Place your palms together;

Touch your holy skin.

In another moment it will shed itself.

What will you be then?

What were you before you had two hands?

What are you now?

You cannot capture That

and place It on the altar of this moment.

It is the altar,

And this moment’s infinite expressions,

And the Seeing,

And its own devotion to itself.

You are That.

Dorothy S. Hunt

Nass River

Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can't remember who I am supposed to be.

I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to snow pulse, ruminating
ungulating, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things,
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slimemold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
inside out, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasseled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather's enough
to fly.

~ by Robert MacLean

The Love of God

The love of God, unutterable and perfect,
flows into a pure soul
the way that light rushes into a transparent object.
The more love that it finds,
the more it gives itself;
so that, as we grow clear and open,
the more complete the joy of heaven is.
And the more souls who resonate together,
the greater the intensity of their love,
and, mirror-like, each soul reflects the other.
- Dante