… watching for the brushstrokes of God
Abandoned buildings, torn spiderwebs, the world falling apart. The end! Or is it the beginning? A threshold, a vision, a dream... “Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43:19
How do we transcend the cycles of violence while still living in them? What do we behold?
One day when Bashó and one of his 10 disciples, Kikaku, were going through a rice field, Kikaku composed a haiku on a red dragonfly that caught his fancy. He showed it to Basho
Take a pair of wings
From a dragonfly, you would
Make a pepper pod.
No, said Bashó. “that is not a haiku. You kill the dragonfly. If you want to compose a haiku and give life to it, you must say:
Add a pair of wings
To a pepper pod, you would
Make a dragonfly.
Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku
Adding wings…giving life…A subtle shift changes the whole picture. What does it take in our thinking? In our world today?
“Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.” Francis of Assisi
How do you find inner peace?
“We are, all of us, engaged in priestly work, the work of transformation. But it may be work that is deemed useless by the standards of the world.” Kathleen Norris
How do we decide what is useful?
Imagination is the ability to see beyond what is and sense the almost imperceptible gentle breezes of the spirit. The artist sees a painting where there is only an empty canvas, a sculpture where there is only a stone. The prophet imagines a world not yet visible, naming truth to live into God’s fullness.
How do you develop your imagination? What do you imagine?
“The greatest capacity of spiders, I have come to believe, is their intuition about space, their knack for seeing and understanding the nature of their environment, the contours and potentialities of a given place. Spiders must think strategically about space, how to cover it and how to create cross-linkages that stitch locations together into a net. And they must do this time and again, always at considerable risk and vulnerability to themselves.“ John Paul Lederach, Moral Imagination
What can we learn as we navigate current spaces?
With the Eyes of the Heart 