Hidden lives

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: 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.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Free space

In the moments between the moments that we remember, when our eyes are cast to the sky and not set to purpose, we find a little of that peace and free will that was promised to us but that we often forget we have. The drawings scrawled across the clouds with our fingertips we leave dangling in the air, and seek instead letters stricken in stone, ground with steel and fire into the permanency of memories not our own. The free will we leave behind. In the moments of indecision, the brackets of blue sky between buildings, in the distance from thought to thought. Before the point of the spear, the quivering of its shaft, the arch of the arm or the release of strength: in the sterile stillness of free space where the violence of purpose is born.

Law like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Live love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

_______________
W.H. Auden

The momentum of a moment

You know how glass shatters when it encounters a violence it has no hope of absorbing, how the shards twinkle when the surface erupts in horror as breaking point is reached, how they throw off a sudden confusion of coloured lights that is the trauma of becoming unwhole. It strikes from the darkness, this memory that is not mine but which hurls at my consciousness a force of emotion which must have been yours. It is a living source of hate which has accumulated only density and impermeability through the passage of years, a rock hardening under the weight of time, unable to forget itself into non-existence. It hurtles through the shadows and the the scenery of a past blackening in its wake, and it brings to the surface of my mind a force I cannot withstand. It breaches the back of the mirror with a momentum unchecked by your forgetfulness or my forgiveness, the brutal momentum of a moment that was yours and another's and not mine, and as I look into the mirror my reflection and the calm around me are thrown into motion, a thousand silvery shards throwing the face of my own fear back into my flesh. Perhaps the pain will drain itself out when the blood stops flowing. Perhaps I can wear my broken face into the happiness and the future we imagine. Perhaps not.

Switching sides

I wish I had something more to say but I've already used all the words I know; the problem with me not being a good speaker is that you're not a good listener. You don't have the patience to hear me attempt to attempt to articulate the haziness of my emotions in a vocabulary I am unfamiliar with. You don't have the understanding to see past the own distorted image you have of yourself. You move in a world inhabited only by your own fears and doubts and your warped, overblown sense of pride. When you battle against me you only end up fighting against yourself, because I am always on your side.

Can't you see it? Do not mistake me for one of your shadows and carve away at a dignity that has you as its soul and centre. I fight for you, why do you cut me down?

Liability

How long before long will we learn
that love is a cause and not a consequence
how soon, how often will we teach each other
that love is not a defence but an element of the crime.
How many times will you say I need to know
that love is a lie I don't need to believe in:
how love is your excuse, my justification.

How quickly will I come to admit to myself
that love lies not in the heat nor in the moment
nor the hand bringing down the knife
but in my guilty mind that compels the blade
to darken the night with my heart's bleeding
into a pool so dark I see your reflection:
you walking away, saved by your omission.

You had no duty to care: I had done all the assuming.

Looking forward

When the world my heart is rending
With its heaviest storm of care,
My glad thoughts to heaven ascending,
Find a refuge from despair.

Faith's bright vision shall sustain me
Till life's pilgrimage is past;
Fears may vex and troubles pain me,
I shall reach my home at last.

_______________
Charles H. Spurgeon