Time

From Song of a Hidden God (1944)

Shores of Silence

In such silence I hide,

A leaf released from the wind,

No longer anxious for the days that fall.

They must all fall, I know

Meditation on Death (1975)

Thoughts on Maturing

Maturity: a descent into a hidden core,

layers fall from the imagination

like leaves once locked in the trunk of their tree;

the cells grow calm – though their sensitivity still stirs;

the body in its own fullness

reaches the shores of autumn.

Maturity: the surface meets the depth;

maturity: penetrating the depth,

the soul more reconciled with the body,

but more opposed to death,

uneasy about the resurrection.

Maturing towards difficult encounters.

*

Maturity is also fear;

the end of cultivation is already its beginning,

the beginning of wisdom is fear,

based on a different layer of the same soil

where there is no need to escape,

only space with which we measure grandeur.

We enter this space,

we depart from that beginning,

and so we slowly return:

for maturity is within love,

transforming fear.
*

When we find ourselves at the shores of autumn,

fear and love explode their contrary desires:
fear desiring the return to what was already existence,

and still is –

love desiring the departure to the One

in whom existence finds all its future.

As we look toward the autumn shores,

the struggle in us runs along

the same divide

which every man carries in him,

when his body is the past of his own future –

every man

if he cannot link his future

with his body.
*

You cannot stop the passing currents. They are many. The world grows on, reaching towards each human death, entering the orbit of thought, of unrepeatable atoms.

(From Mysterium Paschale)

Sliding into death I unveil the awaiting, my eyes
fixed on one place, one resurrection.
Yet I close the lid of my body, and the certainty

of its decay I entrust to the earth …
Allow the mystery to work in me,

teach me to act within my body
suffused with weakness like a herald prophesying death,

Like a cock crowing -

Allow the mystery to work in me, teach me to act in my soul

Which intercepts the body’s fear
(From Fear Which Is at the Beginning)

Hope rises in time

from all places subject to death –

hope is its counterweight …
I wander on the narrow pavement of this earth,

not turning aside from Your countenance

unrevealed to me by the world …
I wrestle with myself,

with so many others I wrestle
for my hope …

And so I am inscribed in You 

by hope.
Outside You I cannot exist …

That wind stirred by Your hand now becomes Silence.
(From Hope Reaching Beyond the Limit)