"The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. The soul has to
proceed rather by unknowing rather than knowing."
~ St. John of the Cross, "On the Journey of the Soul to God by Contemplation"
*
Simple stilt skin, stammered in my name,
when Brother John walked in
on legs so thin, I trembled
beneath the fragility of them…

like Paperwhites’ in a still shot: brightly back-lit
by pre-storm darkened skies;

like a white baby heron, running restless, a heart
ruin-ravaged child, running, running wild
eyed along empty armed beaches
making orphan’d heron cries;

His thin, ivory-mottled matchsticks, thin
like waxed thread…like canvas thread,
spindle-fed, hand-fed fire tinder,
forced through the eyes of stainless needles…

I cannot get the image of John out
of my neti-nitrate’d,
film noir’d, archive’d mind vault.
I feel his yellow’d
leaf hands
fluttering touchingly as he touched
tenderly, desperately, again
and again, his wooden cross
curling him in to the Friend.
Jesus hung Lovingly and fiercely proud
from around John’s triple-echo'd
gekko-skinn'd neck.

It cut me to the quick, the pulp core
of ripe-apple’d empathy
and poignancy
to see
just how sick
John was.

Lucid building blocks
of Lucknow dreaming, dithered flat…

This is where I’m at.

"...He is purging the soul, annihilating it, emptying it or consuming
in it (even as fire consumes the moldiness and the rust of metal) all
the affections and imperfect habits which it has contracted in its
whole life. Since these are deeply rooted in the substance of the
soul, it is won't to suffer great undoing and inward torment, besides
the said poverty and emptiness, natural and spiritual, so that there
may here be fulfilled that passage from Ezechiel which says: "Heap
together the bones and I will burn them in the fire; the flesh shall
be consumed and the whole composition shall be burned and the bones
destroyed."
"...This purgative and loving knowledge or Divine light whereof we
here speak acts upon the soul which it is purging and preparing for
perfect union with it in the same way as fire acts upon a log of wood
in order to transform it into itself...The suffering of the soul now
becomes more intimate, subtle and spiritual, in proportion as the
fire refines away the finer, more intimate and more spiritual
imperfections, and those which are most deeply rooted in its inmost
parts."
~ St. John of the Cross
*

LoveAlways,
Mazie
* ~ Salvator Dali & Spanish School Artists From the hottest toys to
tips on keeping fit this winter, you’ll find a range of helpful
holiday info here.