For it is not knowing much, but realising
and relishing things interiorly, that contents
and satisfies the soul.
―Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
You might approach the Jerusalem of the heart.
—Scott Cairns, “Hidden City”
This is my Church.
—John Anderson, Mohawk, overlooking Sequatchie Valley
Still, the opossum climbs the gnarled tree at my approach.
The racoon follows its worn slender path through the weeds.
Under the footbridge, the insects walk on the water as if
they wanted entrance.
Jesus Bugs we called them as boys.
Spirits,John would say.
Once in a while a trout rejects them.
It is easy to make up parables about this rather than letting it
settle on you like the spreading ground fog.
The early crickets’
hymn grows silent at my approach, but others far afield fill the air
with responses.
Actually, there’s more space between molecules
of air than what the atoms take up.
It was Aristotle who wrote: “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
Black holes emit as much energy as they destroy.
They waver like psalms between retribution and love.
Deep inside the tree, black ants are burrowing a vertical shaft
that will fell it.
For years, the miners’ only warning was
a canary they kept caged.
In the distance, dry lightning
signals nothing at all.
Ignatius hoped his method would
lead to truth.
For Huxley, everything was true and false.
Why does your generation require signs, Jesus asked.
Blake thought his scattered aphorisms would show that
everything possible was an image of truth.
The spirit dwells
in you,wrote Paul.
A child asked if the soul lives in any
special organ.
Someone claimed it weighs a certain number
of grams.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Ask the
philosophers.
Is dark matter there to explain what we fear is
our own emptiness?
Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent
person,” wrote Freud.
Helium-3 leaking from deep inside the
core shows earth formed inside a solar nebula from the big bang.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time, wrote Blake.
It took nearly half a century to find the “god particle.”
We think to tame Time by caging it in zones.
Its frantic eyes
pace back and forth.
The melting glaciers reveal a history
we denied for so long.
The wind brings its history with it,
maybe prophecy.
It is throat literally but breath, and so soul,
in translation.
The Japanese maple has suddenly revealed
its leaves.
It has started to color the air red around it.
This must be the way the soul awakens after its sleep.
In a few months it will sit like a star, a red giant.
What are those dogwood blooms waiting for?
The mockingbird that flew against the window chased
its own image into the dogwood’s reflection.
Aren’t we all
seeking a true image of ourselves?
In your image
the text says, as our own souls begin to bud like
the supernova galaxy G299 flowering light years ago.
Every star has its own sound.
The wind chimes add
their own sacred passages.
Everything we say
needs some further explanation.
Like what it takes
to turn a rock into a pool of water, the sparks from flint
into a waterfall?
Here it is all rosebay, catawba rhododendron
and mountain laurel.
Mt. Pisgah looms at the end of the trail.
It means a mystery we can’t attain.
Now, a far campfire light
from a place we’ve never been?
Like the light that escapes
from a black hole.
Maybe a searcher’s flashlights, the distant
headlights on a country road.
The light from invisible stars
that have yet to reach us.
This will-o’-the-wisp hovering over
the glade, as if signaling the way to some other world.
How can I not kneel down at this altar of creation in prayer?