Living Tree Poetry

“Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.”
Peter Heller

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and overwork…To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.  The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness… because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
Thomas Merton

Inside

After Psalm 73

Inside a place
of quiet and solitude
only here is clarity
eyes opened
mind opened
heart opened
soul cleansed
we see the obvious
so disguised outside

the door opens
we walk across fields
and valleys, plains
toward a holy place
in the cleft of the rock

Written by my friend Glynn Young (Tweetspeak Poetry)

My Prayer today is for inner wisdom.  Found as my friend Glynn reminds us ‘in the cleft of the rock’.  This inner place, disguised to even our own eyes, in the midst of our hurry and pace, is the source of the wisdom that sustains us, in our work and in our recreation, in our loving and our living.  Clarity, like a still pool, shows us what we have been missing in our hurry.  Once we have taken the time to slow down, ‘rested in green pastures’ and ‘by the still waters’, lo our souls find their restoration, and we go back to work seeking means to take this sense of rest with us.  Our work must grow out of peace, Peter Heller claims.  Out of a stillness that surrounds us.  Thomas Merton reminds us that our fruitfulness depends upon it.

These are drawn from daily reflections and prayers which I write for my Chaplaincy colleagues.