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The Lost Pram
Unprotected Candor
The Sponge of Silence
Nocturnal Omissions
I Don't Recall Asking
Emotional Wetlands
Pigskin
The Ox and the Moron
Fluffy Critiques Her Owner's Poetry
Pock Marks and Nose Hairs
Has anyone seen them?
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
"In those days, God taught me as a school teacher teaches a pupil" (St. Ignatius).
Really? How does that happen, exactly? The best I can figure is this: My immediate surroundings, the world, all of nature, every individual with whom I come into contact, every part of my body, the wealth of knowledge, wisdom and experience available in books, media and the Internet--all of this is my classroom. I open my eyes in the morning and behold God's classroom. Even my dreams the night before--God's classroom.
So it isn't a question of whether or when I'm in school. School's never out.
Is the Teacher present. Yes, or course. God stands ready to teach, always.
It's really me. Am I at this moment--at any moment--teachable?
Back to Ignatius: I suspect Ignatius, for whatever reason, suddenly awoke to the classroom and the presence of the Teacher, and, in the overwhelming, awe-inspiring wonder of that moment, surrendered to instruction, with both joy and humility.
"In those days, God taught me..."
God's laughing with delight!
Step into the classroom. No, look around and realize you've been in the classroom all along.
The bell rings. Let's begin.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
As a child
I danced with angels
around the golden-waxed table
in our dining room,
and in green-washed summer-air
beneath white-barked beeches,
and on a shell-shaped cotton bath mat
behind our closed bathroom door,
and yes,
on the head of a pin.
Do you believe this?
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
God doesn't want us to believe.
God invites us to belove.*
*In the gospels, belief doesn't mean intellectual assent to tenets and propositions, but alignment, orientation, alliance, relationship to/with the Beloved. "Do you believe in me?" means "Are you with me? Are we one?"
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
These words are mine to write.
They are not yours.
They are the clearing in the forest
where I chant and dance and take chances.
These words are mine to write.
Your words are yours to write.
They are not mine.
They are the glass panel in the bottom of your boat
revealing what struggles to surface,
what lies tangled in the weeds.
Your words are yours to write.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
A number of years ago, I imagined what my father (deceased) might say to me about creativity. He was, among other things, a watercolor artist. This is what I wrote at the time:
"Dirk, it was never easy for me to find the time and space to paint. I took care of so many people and worried about them so much--not the least, your sister and her constant illness and pain, and your mother's unending neediness. But I had to paint. I had to try to capture the beauty of the world, the goodness of it, to balance everything else, to remind me that the pain of these I loved most was not the sum total of life, it's only focus and it's source of meaning.
"And so I was forced by some inner understanding and requirement of sanity or wholeness to find my space in the basement, and, at least for a while, to be taken over and away by light and shadow, the interaction of color and water, the texture and truth and blending and contast and illumination of painting.
"I would forget for a while, and while I was forgetting, things inside of me--things I was, without even realizing it, setting aside for a time, would quietly rearrange themselves and settle into place, like furniture in an old study that someone had knocked askew--run rampant over and tossed about uncaring. When I returned to my life, when the time was up or interupted or simply had been enough, I'd realize some inner order had been restored while I was gone. I was able to navigate again, calmer, more trusting. Things were back in place. I could again go upstairs and prepare you mother's dinner, assuage her ego...or drive to Nancy's to rake her leaves or hold her as she was shaking with fear at the thought of the next physical torment, the torture that passed for medical treatment.
"And even for me, I was more present. The answers I demanded from God seemed less pressing. The point of my life was no clearer, but somehow less important to me. The autumn leaves shown more brilliantly. Lake Michigan's blues multiplied. I was, for at least a little while, more here, and more content with it.
"It's not escape, Dirk, it was how I learned, finally, at the end of my life, to be with God. Don't miss this chance. It will heal you."
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
I stand in the pines
a worshipper--
sun-warmed needles my incense,
hum of wind my hymn.
I close my eyes on the past.
I stand endlessly in the pines.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
I tripped over this quote this morning, source unknown:
Trust God to work his life in others as he is working in you.
Okay. Of course. Yes. Wow.
The challenge is to trust in God, not in me, not in you.
And when we do, imagine what we might discover in/with/from each other...
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
I keep searching for manageable definitions of mysticism and descriptions of what it means to be a mystic, a pursuit which, I realize, may be inherently contradictory. Nevertheless, I was happy to come across this challenge from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"Go alone...refuse the good models, even those that are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."
"Love God without mediator or veil": that is my goal--faith beyond faith, the relationship beneath all relationships, the experience transcending experience, the union rendering union unnecessary.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
From time to time
the vehicle of your life--
the one you're driving even as you read this--
disappears from the busy streets you navigate daily
and reappears on some empty, unknown, rural road.
What landscape is this?
Signs point to places you do not know.
People (many faintly familliar) freely offer direction;
they're always wrong.
So you just drive,
turn after bewildering turn,
endlessly "recalculating,"
until, on a long, lonely stretch of rutted interstate
it finally hits you:
there is no way back.
Someone has reprogrammed the GPS.
Wherever this trips ends,
it's not where you started.
From time to time
this is what happens.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
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