Rawness is ripeness

and ripeness is juicy.

Ascetic solitude is difficult. You withdrawl from the world to get a clear glipse of who you are, what you are doing and where life is taking you. The people who do this in a very committed way are contemplatives. When you visit someone at a home, the door to their house, the threshold, is rich with the textures of presence from all the welcomes and valedictions that have occured at that threshold. When you visit a contemplative convent, no one meets you at the door. You go in, ring a bell and a person arrives behind the grille to meet you. These are special houses that hold the survivors of solitude. They have exiled themselves from the outside worship of the earth to risk themselves in the interior space, where the senses have nothing to celebrate.

Real conversation has an unpredictability, danger and resonance. It can take a turn anywhere and constantly borders on the unexpected and the unknown. Real conversation is not a construct of the individual ego, it creates community. So much of our modern talk is like spider weaving web of language manically outside itself. Our parlell monlouges with their stacato stutter only reinforce our isolation. There is so littel patience for the silence that is between words and within them. When we forget or neglect this silence, we empty our world of its secrets and subtle presences. We can no longer converse with the absent.

no solution

just the transmission of a vision

Pieceing together a puzzle with words like: heartnership. just heartnership, isnt that juicy enough?

Love cannot be learned, it cannot be cultivated. Cultivated love will not be love at all. It will not be a real rose, it will be a plastic flower. When you learn something, it means it comes from outside, it is not an inner growth. And love has to be your inner growth if it is to be authentic and real.