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Let's say you have the flu
and a fever of 104:
While you sleep, fitfully,
twisting and sweating,
an angel appears
and unravels visions
patched together from your past
and borrowed from your future.
Who's to say whether your illness
provides a doorway to truthful, hidden depths
or simply messes with your poor brain's synapses,
giving you a glimpse of madness?
Who's to say?
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
If he's just arrived,
isn't this when he needs us most--
this neonate, this babe,
so fragile, so absolutely dependent?
Shouldn't we get the place ready,
clean things up a bit,
replace alienation with reconciliation,
suspicion with trust,
and greed with grace?
He came in 2009,
and we couldn't pull it together,
and then again in 2010.
Still nothing.
How about now?
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
This very day
all the forces of heaven and earth
align within you
to aurify the world.
You are their holy verge, their sacred scepter.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Pick four spiritual qualities or life attributes
that you highly value, for example:
peace, wonder, love and delight
or hope, compassion, joy and contentment.
Write these down.
Now combine these four qualities
into a simple prayer/intention for yourself:
"May I know peace, wonder, love and delight."
Repeat this many times in the next few days
(dozens of times, hundreds of times).
Then, when you discover (as you will)
that you are experiencing more
peace, wonder, love and delight,
replace the "I" in your prayer/intention
with the name of a family member or friend
(or even someone you really don't like much):
"May Joyce know peace, wonder, love and delight."
Again, repeat this many times for several days.
After that,
try substituting additional names
in your prayer/intention.
And in a few weeks,
broaden your prayer/intention
to include everyone:
"May all people everywhere
know peace, wonder, love and delight."
And eventually broaden it even further:
"May all of creation
know peace, wonder, love and delight."
Here's a gutsy guarantee:
If you do this,
you (and the world) will change.
Let us know how it goes...
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Now that we've moved beyond the frenetic shopping, wrapping, baking, partying and family obligations--the general holiday hype--we have the opportunity to truly celebrate Christmas. It only began two days ago, on Sunday, the "First Day of Christmas," as the song goes.
Now we have the time to put on that CD of carols, sit by ourselves, and fully, attentively listen to the lyrics. Ask, "What meaning do these have for me, right now, at this point in my life and the lives of those I love?"
Now we have a moment to light the candles and consider the sources of light and warmth in our world and how we might be light and warmth for others in the weeks ahead.
Now is the time to kneel before our family Nativity set and listen to these silent, still figures: What would Mary like to tell us about our lives this week? What's Joseph saying about the circumstance he faces? What are the shepherds really thinking? And do the wise ones believe their long journey worth the trouble?
Christmas has just begun, and, with a bit of breathing room, let's finally allow ourselves to savor it. It's only day three, with nine to go.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved. (detail of "Madonna and Child with Bird," Ignacio Chacón, Peru, 1745, digitally altered)
Photographer Robert Adams
encourages us to walk
at "a pace that allows regard
for the least conspicuous miracles."
He urges us to develop
"a kind of friendship with things."
I wish I'd written those lines;
I hear the poet within the photographer.
And indeed, Adam's photography
captures those least conspicuous miracles
and his friendship with the ordinary,
that which most of us overlook or even discard.
Adams succeeds at what I feebly attempt
(with both word and image):
to apprehend and hold the spirit
that lurks within the dailiness of things--
this world in which we embed our lives.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved. (The Denver Art Musuem currently has a temporary exhibit of the photography of Robert Adams.)
At the museum,
a pensive Joseph
gazes down at his infant son,
father's soft, brown beard
against the baby's cheek,
their skin impossibly smooth and porcelain fragile.
Joseph's brocaded, burgundy robe
embraces them both.
Thin lines of gold radiate outward
from behind their heads,
and they are framed by a rectangle of pink and white flowers--
tulips, roses and peonies.
The painting also offers a spray of weakly blooming lilies,
held in Joseph's left hand,
the same hand with which he cradles the child's neck and head.
The baby smiles out at us,
unaware of the lily's many meanings--
purity, Trinity, joy,
separation, loss and sorrow...
It is an image of unbearable tenderness.
(St. Joseph and the Christ Child, artist unknown, Peru, early 1700s) Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Late Christmas Eve
and, by the light of the tree,
I sit in the living room writing.
The final CD ends;
quiet settles about me like an old wool afghan.
So this is actually it--
that about which we've endlessly sung--
the silent night.
I stop writing to await what certainly must follow--
the holy night.
Will I recognize its arrival?
Will the candles flare? the tree lights brighten?
golden fog flow under the door,
seep in around the windows?
Or does holiness roar in like an ocean wave,
sweeping up the hallway,
stripping bare the walls,
lifting me from my chair?
Or is it born somewhere within,
conceived in the womb of a middle-aged man's heart,
spreading outward on boulevards of blood,
on an internet of nerves?
I close my eyes.
I hold my breath.
I wait.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
My soul
is a temple in ruins.
Where thousands once worshipped
only the common starlings--
black against the cracked white marble--
pace and peck for seeds.
Only a soul in ruins
allows in, without constraint,
the sun, rain and wind,
the incense of pines,
the glow of yellow daffodils,
the occasional weary stumbler seeking solitude.
Do not grieve my ruined soul;
it is, finally,
home for what is real.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Every Christmas
the angel Gabriel
returns to earth
bringing a revelatory vision
to another of earth's wanderers.
As with Mary,
he hopes for brave surrender,
for another holy "Yes."
What if this Christmas
he chooses you?
From what fearful depth
will you answer?
And how?
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
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