The festive clothing of Autumn

In the mailbox this Tew's day . .

Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.” – Ida Tarbell, the journalist was born this past Sunday...on a 1857 farm in Erie County, Pennsylvania

We know poetry plays a part in healing . . . Gloria Mindock (my soon to be publisher) is surely playing her part with her new book "Grief Touched the Sky at Night" just published by Glass Lyre Press. Check it out.

. . . many people think religion has to do with ideas and concepts and formulas from books. That’s how clergy and theologians were trained for years. Many of us went away, not into a world of nature and silence and primal relationships, but into a world of books . . . and that’s not where religion begins. It begins in observing “what is.” The term in Buddhism is Tathātā, referring to “suchness” – the nature of reality free from conceptual elaborations and the subject–object distinction – encountered in meditation. Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr calls it “contemplation – meeting reality in its most simple and direct form unjudged, unexplained, and uncontrolled. . . . .it’s all gift, and it’s all free, and we already have it, and all we can do is learn to enjoy it. ”

In autumn, folded like festive clothing

in the memories of poets,

lovers of one brief hour

awaken desire, making

a place where pain can enter

… inheriting the love to which

they gave themselves so blindly,

as in a sleep. – Rainer Maria Rilke (adapted) from The Book of Hours, transl. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Riverhead Books.1996