Help me to hear the song brokenness sings on its way to hope. Help me to grasp the hand loneliness offers on its way to union. Help me to trust the tears loss releases on its way to peace. Help me to be the tunnel grief travels on its way to love.
Peace
Grant Me the Faith
Grant me the faith to believe that Life is stronger than death, and Love deeper than hate. Let me never abdicate my house to the hungry thieves that would rob each room of its particular treasure, and curse the one who lives inside as worthless, no more than an empty purse, a justly abandoned figure on a severed fragment of scorched earth. Let the figure refuse the facile fabrication of an identity based on feelings of uselessness and ugliness, but rather let these feelings pass. Let them move through the physical body like a river, however muddied, moves through a canyon, rather than harden into a dam of mind-made steel. O God, Creator of all that is good and real, without whom there can be no unity, let the faint beginnings of light seep through the cracks of my divided self and thaw the ice congealing in my heart. Bring me back continually to the depths of your peace in the present moment, and do not let your sun come up over the hill to shine through my window while I am lost in a state of war, with myself or with the world. Let me face each state, whether familiar and painful or strange and painless, with courage and compassion. Do not let me act from an unconsidered sense of lack, but let me look directly through that hole, like one whose right eye through the tiny lens of a telescope sees with a jolt the vast sky lit up at night, limitless and unimaginable.
“Where Are You In This Darkness”
Are you here in this darkness?
I don’t hear you.
You are silent, just like me,
but my silence knows no peace,
and in your silence, I hear,
I know, there is nothing else.
The peace of your silence
would shatter my nature.
Half-formed vestiges shatter;
I grow deaf in the silence after.
Shards are strewn on the ground,
my feet bleed from the glass.
I look down and see my nature
reflected in the fragments.
I do not see you there.
Where are you in this darkness?
I do not see you,
I do not hear you,
and I cannot touch you,
but I can speak you,
so soundlessly I murmur your name.
Arrow Of Longing; Walking Into and Out Of Distinction; Dual Solitude and Mutual Aloneness; The Preventers Of Life; The Straighteners Of Souls; Toil Without End or Purpose
I do not fear the glory of the morning. No, nor the arrow of longing that flies from me throughout the day.
I do not fear the red color of the dirt I grab ahold of as I walk east into the magnificent golden sunrise. I know I must walk through all colors until I become a color myself, distinct from all other colors. I will walk until I have become a distinct presence and then I will walk on until I have become indistinct and unrecognizable, until I have become desert-colored, red and brown and orange and gold, and yet somehow without manifest form or hue. Until I have become like one who does not need to advertise his own becoming. Until I have become like one who drinks of the fountain that does not stop flowing with soul-water or flaming with passion-fire. I yearn for terrible fires to chase me out of my home and isolate me from all others. I yearn for flash floods to rush through the dry creeks of my thirst so that I must find the power within me to withstand them.
Come stand with me or go stand alone. Either way only if we are alone can we stand together. Only if you have stood alone can you sit with me here in dual solitude. Only if you know your aloneness will I feel your friendship.
Do not expect me to maintain your illusions for you, or your truths. Do not expect me to maintain you at all. Am I your maintainer? Am I the container for your falseness? Am I the retainer you shove into your soul to straighten it? I do not claim to be a straightener of souls. Find someone else to straighten your soul, though you might only find greater soul-sickness. I do not want your soul to be any particular way. Would you have me particularize your soul? Would you have me shape you? To shape you is to distort you, how could I distort you and then look you in the eye? Would I not see my own distorted shape? To try and shape into life is to prevent life from shaping itself into form and into formlessness. I do not wish to be a preventer of life; I will allow life to be itself.
The preventers of life—I see them everywhere. I see people not allowing life to unfold. I see the folders wherein lie the trees of life and I see those who fold themselves in on what they strive after, which is not life. I see those who strive for death in the name of life; it nearly kills me, but I will not die at their hands. I will not die at the hands of those whose hands are useless, though they might toil in the world, without end. They toil for futility; they are in the viciously vacuous hands of chance and do not even know it. Often I do not know what I toil after, but I know at least that I do not toil with indifference in the name of peace.
There are those who toil quite indifferently, all in the name of peace, indifferent to what they are doing and most indifferent to themselves. I do not toil in this way. How could I be indifferent to my toil? How could I be indifferent to myself? I am indifferent only to those who are indifferent to themselves. I do not care for their apathy. Could I ever have a peace that does not go through toil rather than come about through useless toil? Could I ever have peace at all? When I toil I use more than my hands. If toil with the hands spurs on the mind to thought and the heart to passion and the spirit to elevation and the soul to depth, then this toil serves a purpose beyond itself. If toil does not serve a purpose beyond itself, it serves no purpose at all.
Brian Leibold 