Ruah Bull - Spiritual Director

                                          A heaven of each moment   Each day that passes, the sage discards another useless weight. Finally all the accumulated burden of a life spent seeking something is gone. In its place is a lightness of being and a clarity of seeing that makes a heaven of each moment. ~

 We are emptiness like hollow in the reed, the narrow riftless emptiness which can have only one destiny: to  utter the song that is in the piper's heart. ... The reed grows by the stream. It is the simplest of things, but it must be cut by a sharp knife, hollowed out, stops put in it. It must be shaped and pierced before it can utter the shepherd's song. It is the narrowest emptiness in the world, but the little reed utters God's infinite music. We are lifted up and carved out, formed and shaped and filled with all the music of the earth.

 To live in this world you must be able to  to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it  against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

 At the monastic center is always a cloister, an orchestrated emptiness, a place of light, a fountain to feed the heart's garden. Give me this life: a center empty of all but light, the stillness of Eden before fruit was plucked, my heart a spring of living water.

Barn burned down-    Now I can see the moon