From Parabola Magazine:
Wishing You A Blessed Holiday Season
Ansel Adams, Branches in Snow (Yosemite National Park), c. 1932
Adolph Fassbender, b.1884-1980, Snow Caps, 1937
"Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough."
—Thomas Merton, prayer before midnight mass at Christmas, 1941
“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
—Peter Muryo Matthiessen
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Tree in snow, near Saint-Mortiz, Switzerland, 1947
“When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out of the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.”
—Wendell Berry, Those Awake
Ray Morimura, Hatsuyuki First Snow, 2005
The Snowfall Is So Silent
The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake.
It covers the fields gently
while frost attacks them
with its sudden flashes of white;
covers everything with its pure
and silent covering;
not one thing on the ground
anywhere escapes it.
And wherever it falls it stays,
content and gay,
for snow does not slip off
as rain does,
but it stays and sinks in.
The flakes are skyflowers,
pale lilies from the clouds,
that wither on earth.
They come down blossoming
but then so quickly
they are gone;
they bloom only on the peak,
above the mountains,
and make the earth feel heavier
when they die inside.
Snow, delicate snow,
that falls with such lightness
on the head,
on the feelings,
come and cover over the sadness
that lies always in my reason.
—Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Robert Bly.
Wishing You A Blessed Holiday Season
Ansel Adams, Branches in Snow (Yosemite National Park), c. 1932
Adolph Fassbender, b.1884-1980, Snow Caps, 1937
"Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough."
—Thomas Merton, prayer before midnight mass at Christmas, 1941
“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
—Peter Muryo Matthiessen
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Tree in snow, near Saint-Mortiz, Switzerland, 1947
“When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out of the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.”
—Wendell Berry, Those Awake
Ray Morimura, Hatsuyuki First Snow, 2005
The Snowfall Is So Silent
The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake.
It covers the fields gently
while frost attacks them
with its sudden flashes of white;
covers everything with its pure
and silent covering;
not one thing on the ground
anywhere escapes it.
And wherever it falls it stays,
content and gay,
for snow does not slip off
as rain does,
but it stays and sinks in.
The flakes are skyflowers,
pale lilies from the clouds,
that wither on earth.
They come down blossoming
but then so quickly
they are gone;
they bloom only on the peak,
above the mountains,
and make the earth feel heavier
when they die inside.
Snow, delicate snow,
that falls with such lightness
on the head,
on the feelings,
come and cover over the sadness
that lies always in my reason.
—Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Robert Bly.
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