go annie dillard
Posted on Aug 14th, 2007
by 
jhalifax
jhalifax
Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious , so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Access: Public
annie dillard
July 2008
we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.
Indeed!
Thank You, Roshi Joan!
Beautiful Joan. There is so much to experience there in the gaps. Abide and pay attention. Thank you.
This has a very hip feeling to it. .
many thanks. I was reading one of Merton's journals last night and felt such a sense of reverence for how he attended to his gaps. It's the journal where he writes of his love affair and his struggles with that particular gap. such a grace of attention he gave his world.
am grateful to stuart carduner who sent me the quote. just rang utterly true. glad it did for you too. rj
Reading this I was given a glimps of one of the many ways I content myself with “raising tomatoes”. Like when I turned Myotai Sensei onto Annie Dillard and then heard Myo quote Annie in a few talks a year for years.
Memory, for me, is full of instances of a 'johnny appleseed” role that I fall into from time to time. I'm smug and proud about it. Yet it's the cheap work of a middleman. Sensei breathed new life into Dillard's work, through Dillard into her students… and here I am a long time later taking a piece of credit that was never mine.
While the mention of something to someone might come straight from out of the blue of a gap, that I reach back like a 'stump watcher' clearly pegs me as a tomatoe raiser. “They shift and vanish, too.” So, true.
Jikishin
Something must have been in the air….I have almost the same exact quote on my pod (Inspiring and Motivating You)….It is a beautiful passage indeed. I had heard about the book Pilgrim At Tinker Creek for many years now and only recently picked up a copy from the library… This passage reminds me of a camping/canoe trip that I went on down in Gunnison, Colorado- it was with Naropa University and was rightly named “Journey to the Source”- we faced many reflections of ourselves in nature on this journey…..anyway…it is wonderful to share with you. Allison