faithful return

"the sea at pourville" Claude Monet

“the sea at pourville”
Claude Monet

where are you?
peering deep into
shrouded nights
where a faint glow gives
a veiled glimpse of a recent memory.

upon a slowly passing
vessel i scarcely see
the soulful eyes
which have always
held my heart.

they seem sad,
those eyes, but
actually, they mirror mine –

“…for on the left shines love’s light
and the right, truth’s delight”

your eyes:
both never sad –
alas only mine forgetting…

so there you are
calling my name
bidding me welcome
from across the sea
where it is so calm

and willing
to accept my first step.
And I walk to you
upon the water

my eyes fixed upon
eyes that swallow all light
and are ever-knowing.

I come to you
I am home..

again.

(c) 2014 Rick Stassi

pilgrimage

"A Pathway in Monet's Garden at Giverny" Claude Monet

“A Pathway in Monet’s Garden at Giverny”
Claude Monet

O aching heart
cleaves to dust,
sorrowful soul
soon must trust.

For I alone
can see a light
that prepares my steps
and gives keen sight.

I see your eyes
we walk along
for two now trust
a new sweet song.

then we three
cast off all weight
listening we tarry
eternal time ne’er late

see the fourth
downcast eyes
“come along!”
our deadened cries.

for they alone
must see a light
preparing a path
to know what’s right

O aching heart
cleaves to dust
sorrowful souls
soon must trust.

(c) 2014 Rick Stassi

Psalm 119

Eternally God’s

lillies

…and what would a man profit in gaining the world? Sadly he will realize that material gain is equated to spiritual loss especially when the former is adhered to and covetously held close to one’s heart. It is the loss of life to place focus on the things current. There is wisdom to be found differentiating between contrasting thought. Shallow and deep, infinite and finite.

What purpose is there holding on to grains of sand that only slip through our fingers. The inability for sand to coalesce is likened to our thoughts and our ways. The rigid and hardened fragments of our life with their resistance to bond into a tangible mass, translate into the visible path we walk. This walk is a display of the shallowness and temporal nature of a futile , fragmented, life.  Just as a path is walked in sure straightness by fixing our eyes on a point above the horizon, conversely, looking at our feet as we walk causes meandering steps. Thus is the fallacy and the dilemma of self-sustainability.

As much as the free-thinker believes in the infinite vision of our mind, he is really a blind man who is caged inside himself. With his bitter protest, he becomes more the fool as one man’s clamoring nonsense will certainly drown out the whispers of eternal wisdom. Listen – there is truth in seeking a higher focal point. At the time when you decide this will be your path, listen ever more acutely. For settling on any god is short-sighted to resting on the one true God. Know Him, know about Him, and know why belief in God is rational. For as consciousness and submitting souls meet a welcoming God, a new reverence is born. In this reverence is wisdom and even as there are those who will say we are blind, the blindness is really the inability to understand His spirit upon the believer’s heart. This is our way and it can only be known by a leap. A grace filled leap of faith.

The modern man in his finite idealism based on a contrived reality, cannot see the line that separates absolute thought from relative thought. One  choice we have is to allow our self to listen for His whisper from the span of eternity. Another, is to boorishly shout our foolish opinions creating a cacophonous din as billions of others, with their varying degrees of truth, also shout simultaneously. If nothing else the free-thinker should stop and listen to this for it is rational that opinions, no matter how astute, exude uniquely from each mind of all existence – most with a paltry amount of sense. They just do not coalesce into one basis for existence. They form a mass of invented and wishful hope based really on nothing except stubborn disagreement with the idea there is a God, or a stubborn refusal to seek Him. It is foolish, finite, and shallow thought.

There is a God who loves. He lays way the path to the infinite onto which we must walk upon. Tender and poetic is He. But, also, He is righteous. In His righteousness, it is misconstrued by some, that He is not good. Shallowness must be abandoned to overcome this misconstrued thought. Further and deeper, our self must be abandoned because it is a vessel that holds tools to chip at stone walls rather than move a mountain. View this as literal or figurative, it hardly matters. It is all in infinite perspective that eclipses the limited depth of what we possess without God. Claim the offer He has given. Come to Him and see eternity from within your heart. Therein exists truth in depth. We are eternally God’s.

(c) 2014 rick stassi

the new times

chrysanthemums-1897

“O hardened heart!” cries the stone,
Alas, failing beauty, the flowers bemoan.
Green to brown, grasses sad fanfare,
Breeze entwined in thistle, cool respite rare.

For man alone awaits those days –
“The new times, better times”, he vacantly prays.
Impatiently wringing, hands gnarly worn.
Overtly succumbed, contrived and forlorn.

New softening light eases the stone’s point of view.
Layered fragrance for a flower so sweet and new.
Brown to green, the grasses joyfully rave,
Breeze envelops the thistle to a blissful new wave.

For man among men sees this day,
With dove and cross, O death’s dismay.
Dreamily gazing at time beyond,
The grass, the flower, the stone shall bond.

(c) 2014 rick stassi