Poems can be a doorway into another world. Each one, a simple arrangement of otherwise ordinary words, that together evoke presence, wonder, possibility. So here is an invitation to pause, let the words wash over you and glimpse the world they offer you…
It’s a growing collection, and we’d love to hear which ones resonate with you and why, and find out about your favourites. Here is an index of our Words of Wonder.
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day… It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. by…
You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One. You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel, to have ever neared God’s Heart at all. Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even His best musicians are not always easy to hear. So what if…
I want to give you something necessary as rain and lasting as honey, something useful as a spoon, something helpful as wheels. Sometimes it feels so inadequate to offer you a poem, a prayer, the small light of a candle, a hammock woven only of blessings. Still, as you meet these difficult hours I wish…
I had this idea and imagining it and building it brought me alive. I was never as engaged as when it was half-built. I’d read the blueprint in my heart and carve another piece. Once finished, I lived in it. It was where I’d go to look out on the world. For years it was…
I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you’re in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over. And to write music or poems about. Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the…
Make a nesting now, a place to which the birds can come, think of Kevin’s prayerful palm holding the blackbird’s egg and be the one, looking out from this place who warms interior forms into light. Feel the way the cliff at your back gives shelter to your outward view and then bring in from…
Let me be an apprentice to stillness. Let me be an open vessel filling with the vastness of each moment overflowing with every loving grieving lustful painful ecstatic aching raw sensation. Moments that birth and die contract and expand arise and dissolve. Let me embody exquisite gentleness and the strength to soften with my tendrils…
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer…
You know so very well the edge of darkness you have always carried with you. And you know too well by now the body’s hesitation at the invitation to undo everything others seemed to want to make you learn. But your edge of darkness has always made its own definition secretly as an edge of…