the rest is prayer

Lola Nampijinpa Brown, Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming) 

.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The sea has many voices….
the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. 

Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual….
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised….
The life of significant soil.


—T.S. Eliot
No. 3 of Four Quartets, excerpts

 

.

Once

a single cell

found that it was full of light

and for the first time there was seeing

when

I was a bird

I could see where the stars had turned

and I set out on my journey

high

in the head of a mountain goat

I could see across a valley

under the shining trees something moving

deep

in the green sea

I saw the two sides of the water

and swam between them

I

look at you

in the first light of the morning

for as long as I can

—W. S. Merwin
sight

.