Learn to deny God for the sake of God—the hidden God for the sake of the unveiled God. Be willing to lose a copper coin so that you may find a golden one. Pour out water so that you may draw wine instead.

From an anonymous fifteenth century German mystic text, in The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance by Dorothee Soelle

het nageslacht staat hijgend op de drempel en wil van je weten waarom je deed wat je deed. ze hebben de lichamen gezien, en het bloed is in hun ogen getrokken. ze hebben redenen gehoord. dit is je zonde: dat je ook zult doen waar je geen weet van hebt. dat je gevolgen je altijd nog zullen ontstijgen - geen god die ze bewaart. dit is je zonde: dat je zieke, hongerende lichaam leeft van goedheid die het nooit genoeg weet terug te geven. je zonde is dat je in leven blijft ten koste van alles, en jij jezelf maar niet weet weg te nemen

Roelof ten Napel, “psalm (ik zal een snelle getuige zijn)”, in Het woedeboek

And I am with you. I’m the interminable fields you can’t see, the little lights off in the distance (in one of those rooms we are living) and I am the rain and the others all around you, and the loneliness you love, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe.

Franz Wright, from ‘To Myself’ (via soracities)

for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot, Middlemarch in A Hidden Life (2019), dir. Terrence Malick

Cause I know this is not hell cause I am intrigued not hopeless and cause I am surely put here for some good use albeit mysterious : in hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope

Ali Smith, How to be both

bluets, maggie nelson

Perspective. Sami Uçan, in Turkey.

the 'attention as prayer' think you're tagging is super interesting. where does the idea come from? what sort of stuff have you read about it? i'm actually thinking of writing something in that sort of area so it would be really helpful. i don't currently post things i write online but if i do i could send you a link/give you credit too?

it’s a very old idea, but that particular formulation comes from simone weil:

attention, taken to its highest degree, is thesame thing as prayer. it presupposes faith andlove. 

absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. {x}

she talks about attention as “inner supplication” – as a letting go of self, of will, of ego. “that attention which is so fullthat the ‘I’ disappears.” to be fully attentive to let go of yourself and your judgements. it means listening without thinking about what you’re going to say next, or adding additional meaning to what you’re hearing, but emptying yourself to be open to the whole truth of another person. rowan williams puts it like this:

involvement may be a less dramatic, if not less costly, matter, of learning to listen: to listen to the silence in the voices of others, to watch the spaces in their actions. to attend to them in self-forgetfulness. {x}

it’s what the early christian monks were doing in the third century egyptian desert. it’s what asceticism has always been about: the ability to renounce the self so that you can share more fully in the lives of others and cross the barriers of self-consciousness and self-absorption which cut us off from each other. the desert fathers were particularly concerned with “inattention, the failure to see what is truly there in front of us – because our own vision is clouded by self-obsession and self-satisfaction.” {x}

asceticism is a difficult thing to talk about because we see it inevitably through the lens of anorexia, which is an asceticism which pushes us further into ourselves, away from the world and other people. but when the desert fathers fasted (and when simone weil did), they were trying to strip away the aspects of self which prevented full and loving life with others. in prayer, you do the same thing: you make yourself (or rather ask to be made) quiet, attentive, receptive, so that the “still small voice” of God may be heard. attention of this sort, focused entirely beyond yourself, is complete openness to the other: a willingness to let them be completely as they are, without interpretation. and this is love.

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Margaret Atwood, ‘A Sunday Drive’

“Soms voelt het goed om de langste weg naar huis te nemen.”

— (via kletsmajoor)

Nikola Sarić, “The Prayer”

www.nikolasaric.de 

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Opération terrestre - Estelle Chrétien.

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “Admonitions to a Special Person,”

Louise Glück, “Vita Nova”

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Olive Garden”