Welcome

What the Years Have Covered

If you go down deep enough you’ll find 

the first sketchmarks of a life. It’s not beautiful,

down there, but it was clear. The higher you got

to the top, the less sure you felt of the beginning. 

It’s only when the final layers come 

that all the light and darkness will be coaxed 

out of hiding, and meant to speak

the language they know. But the greatest shock

will be the faces. From dull blankness they will

suddenly shine. Everything before is as dim

as that first sketch, as if you’d gone 

from a world of marble statues to a bright sky, 

a parade of comets in the park. 

The Prayer of St. Brendan

Every true prayer 

contains the seed 

of an unanswerable

question 

which is why

it begins and ends 

with silence

for You yourself

are the question 

and in asking

we clothe our tongues

with You -

You beyond our

answering 

You the answer -

it could be 

why St. Brendan

on setting forth

in his coracle

did not press

for miracles

he merely asked

O King of the Glorious Heaven, 

shall I go of my own choice upon the sea?

and in asking

was satisfied

and embarked.

Fogline

We walked the shore under a full sun, 

a low fog having settled below our knees. 

You spoke of islands far in miles and years,

their white seas shrouded in mist and gull

of stones which were formed of salt and blood.

Every day I promise to return to the prayer.

Every day, I say I will return to the faces of those 

strange to the untrained eye 

and the flame like a tiny onion dome 

fit for the bee whose work we burn. 

Each day my life settles like low fog

on a shoreline, blurring the momentary

for the horizon, hot sun stamping

its seal on the infinite 

rimmed with movement, asking

only wildness, asking

to return to the prayer which your feet

are praying, there quietly below

the fogline. 

Celtic Knot

You don’t need to step back

from your life to see it: the way

the most minuscule of sparrows 

becomes throat, or grass green fire

at the dawn. 

The way breath arrives after

a day of darkness, and you turn

your face again into the light.

Listen: life can be this beautiful up close. 

The deeper you go into the forest,

the more you belong to it. 

A hundred threads call to you from

the heart of things as you pass them by. 

Jenna K Funkhouser is the author of two collections of poetry. She has traveled the world as a nonprofit storyteller and encountered courageous and luminous souls in every beautiful corner of it. You can find her work at St. Katherine Review, Spiritus Journal, and Penwood Review, among others.

Moments that no clock can measure

There are moments of pure presence— 

not crafted, not summoned, 

not liminal, not profound, 

not conjured by will, 

nor granted by some gurus— 

but 

simple, 

so painfully simple 

that I used to miss them 

every single time. 

They don’t arrive 

holy as stone, 

nor bound in myths 

peddled as wisdom. 

They come suddenly— 

when I am whole, 

not splintered 

into fragments of being, 

body and soul. 

They come 

when I am free 

from the weight of “me,” 

untangled— 

from emotion’s endless weave.

They come

when I am basking

under the winter sun—

warmth slipping

slowly into my skin,

and I feel

a quiet flame

glowing within.

They come 

when I’m tying my shoes— 

mindfully— 

and suddenly I sense 

I am the knot 

holding it all together. 

They come 

when I scatter crumbs 

across the pond, 

and the fishes rise, 

stirring the stillness— 

and I dissolve 

into the ripple. 

I thought I was a poet, 

had enough words— 

but these moments surpass me, 

and this is the closest 

I’ve ever come 

to daring 

describe them. 

Would that still be a prayer? 

I carry a list—long, wrecked and wide,  

of things I want and things I hide.  

To have, to become, to rise and to roam,  

to seek out a path, to quiet this inner storm.

So, I kneel, like I was taught,  

hands curled tight with a tangled thought.  

I recite some borrowed words that I barely know,   

the ones I've memorized since long ago. 

I chanted loud with dead-eyed peers,  

out of habit, out of fears. 

I rang the bells, I bowed my head,  

plucked flowers fresh, then watched them dead. 

I played the part, I did my best,  

but doubt still thudded in my chest that  

if there is really no one up there,  

listening to my pleas from here, 

would that be a prayer? 

Or maybe I’m just dumb enough  

to trust silence when life gets tough.  

I sit alone with no practiced pose,   

no crafted self, just being there, without any guise.  

No hymns, no chants, no temple stage,  

just whispered thoughts, no scripted page.  

Talking to him with words whatever they come,    

no perfect phrase or devotional decorum— 

like a farmer kneeling not to ritual, but to rain,   

like a star shining not for fame, but to remain.  

If I only remember the Lord with gratitude,   

no longer caught in desire’s beggarly attitude,  

yet feel him near, crystal clear, 

would that, essentially, 

still count as a prayer? 

A cup of nothing  

I thought of doing nothing, 

so, I sat on the mat— 

didn’t close my eyes, 

just watched thoughts drift by 

like a tree standing 

watching the world move. 

Some I caught and tossed away, 

flashy ones that tried to sway— 

they came to phish, 

but I didn’t bite. 

I let them pass, 

no bait, no trick. 

Then I drank my tea— 

or rather, simply tea. 

A universe 

swirled quietly in me. 

I didn’t rush; 

I just sipped. 

I stared into the cup, 

saw its fragile boundary— 

walls meant nothing, 

hollow skin. 

The value lived 

in the space within. 

And if it falls— 

sky and tea will merge— 

into one. 

No cup. 

No edge. 

No need to mend. 

Later, I slept 

in that near-empty room, 

not knowing where I was— 

no name, no doom. 

And that’s okay. 

I need not know. 

I think I’m free now, 

maybe, 

I always was. 

Dipesh Parajuli a poet based in Virginia, USA. He has been writing poems for many years. He sees poetry as the most spiritual form of expression. Rooted in meditation and mindfulness, his work reflects his ongoing journey as a spiritual seeker. 

Salmon Guide

Searching for a life-cycle guide I turned 

To salmon. They leave their river water 

Gravelly nests to explore vast oceans 

Where they risk violence of predators,

Deeming invisible reward of hard earned 

Freedom worthwhile, the  prompting ardor

Remaining undisclosed. Does instinct drive return 

To nesting grounds? As if by divine order 

They spawn, shrivel to shreds, silently die.

As prescribed by my sacred salmon guide 

I was back for rebirth asking myself why.

There I was writhing as before inside

The pit famous for lack of insight

Where bells tolled prefacing routine bar brawls,

No wisdom to dispense, none at all,

Was I not perfect for the offering plate.

Pramod Lad was born in India and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell University. His poems have been accepted in Wilderness House Literary Review, Eclectica, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Umbrella Factory, The Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Pennine Platform, Litbreak Magazine, Amethyst Review, Soul Forte: A Journal for Spiritual Writing, Creations Magazine, Penwood Review, and elsewhere. 

Letting Go of Clinging

What an amazing French pastry, unlike any I had enjoyed before. Soft layers with complex flavours atop a crisp, buttery base.

The woman in the patisserie shop recommended it above all the others. I bit into it on the street, the cream oozing out, my fingers sticky, my smile enormous. 

But then, I wanted more. Every day I searched for just the right pastry to satisfy that itch: unique, delicious, grin-inducing. I tried another pastry from the same shop. It was very good, but the pleasure was not the same. I bought a pastry from a different shop. Also good, but disappointing because the surprised delight was gone. 

The craving to repeat, even exceed, my earlier pleasure was leading to frustration and disappointment. What I had was not enough. 

To be clear, the pastry itself was not a problem. Surprised delight is to be reveled in. My suffering was in the clinging. Repeated disappointment wasn’t something done to me; the problem lay in my belief that a particular pleasure -- which I needed to make happen -- would make me happy. 

“There is a very simple secret to being happy,” the Buddhist teacher Adyashanti reminds us. “Just let go of your demand on this moment.”

What do you have enough of?

Anne Gorsuch writes short invitations to internal and relational practice informed by her meditation practice and work as an intuitional coach. She shares occasional brief reflections like this one with subscribers via https://www.annegorsuch.com/.  

I Wonder About God

I wonder about God a lot. 

Sometimes I wonder about God so much, it makes my brain hurt.

I wonder about infinity. God always was, and is now, and always will be.

When I think about the vastness of the universe, I wonder if God put all the universes in the sky at once, or just a few at a time. 

I wonder if God was lonely and that’s why he created, well, everything. 

I wonder about God a lot.

I wonder if it was fun for God to create creatures like the sloth and the zebra and the giraffe because they look kind of funny.

I wonder why God created dinosaurs when he must have known they would become extinct. 

I wonder if there are other planets that sustain life or if God created earth as a special place for all the marvelous creatures that are here. 

I wonder about God a lot.

I wonder about God and some of the choices he made. 

He sent his only son to suffer and die for our sins. That’s hard to understand. 

I wonder how God can love all creatures, all humans, without exception, without reservation, even though some people commit cruel and evil acts. This love would be hard for me to do.

I wonder how God can keep track of all the people who are praying to him, asking him for all manner of things. That’s hard to understand. 

I wonder if God has emotions, if he experiences sadness and joy, pain and pleasure, the way we humans do. 

I wonder if God had a plan from the beginning, when he put all the ingredients for the Big Bang in place, for what would happen next. 

Or I wonder if God likes the idea of having some things just evolve and happen spontaneously. I wonder if God would enjoy that.

I wonder about God a lot.

I wonder what God thinks of social media and AI and other developing technologies. 

I wonder if God liked it better when life on earth was simpler. 

I wonder if God is continuing to create new life forms, here on earth or on other planets. 

I wonder if God likes music, since music is such a major part of worship liturgy. I wonder what kind of music God likes best.

I wonder if God ever gets exasperated with us about how we have treated the beautiful earth he has given us. I wonder if God ever considers giving up on us. 

I wonder about God a lot.

I wonder why life seems to be easier for some people, like me, and so hard for others, like the Jews during the Holocaust and now the Palestinians living in Gaza. That’s hard to understand.

I wonder if God thinks I am still an Agnostic since I have so many questions. 

When I find myself struggling as I wonder about God, I remember what Father Vincent frequently says: that God is beyond all understanding. I find it comforting to think about God that way.

Until I start wondering about God again. 

Jane McClure is a writer and traveler. 

Depictions

Inside a church
There are many windows through which light
Becomes the reason. I am filled
With a dark I know not the facets of.
There are glints, strange emanations
Of understanding. But no doors in or out.

The light is a kind of fading.
In here is me: It's a burden
Knowing I have to get to know him.
The windows in church, stained-glass,
Often felt creepy, so much violence
Done to a man they called king. 

Tommy Sheffield is a disabled, neurodivergent writer who lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches high school English in Southeast DC. His poems, stories, and essays have been published in ucity review, Adelaide, Sanitarium, Ghost City Review, cataloguing poetry magazine, and a number of other publications. 

Emerald Flight 

Liquid light drips over Almendro trunks,

through dense leaves in humid, misty forest,

awash in anticipation —

crimson-crowned, blue-rumped, azure-tailed, 

emerald-herald soars at first shy light,

unleashes defiant, soul-stirring call, 

announcing sun’s promise of illumination, 

ritual of dawn rehearsed long before man. 

Now—streak of living jade rides thermals,

glides past dangling orchids, 

where bromeliads hold rain, 

recalls forests once pristine, unscarred. 

Great Green Macaw’s voice

now scarce —

a lonely clarion call —

whispers fear

of ravaged, vanishing world. 

Photograph by Christine Beeton

George Chandy is a retired physician-scientist newly embarking on expression through poetry. His work grows out of his love for the natural world and its spiritual connection to us.

The Devoted Heart

                                       for M

Not easy to say when it began,

The slowing, and the going on

Through aging and the spool of money

Unwinding, and the jar scraped clean of honey.

Sickness – but everyone has that –

Despair – but everyone feels like that –

All up there trembling on the same high wire,

Each jolly juggler is a laughing liar

Clinging to hope; but hope won’t break your fall;

You can’t afford that luxury at all.

Your children love you and their mouths are open.

You’d feed them if your back was broken.

Never known a war; not even a bloody fight;

Nor a crazed, illicit love; and yet a light

Is on you, frail, most ordinary man:

Your measured step, the motions of your hands,

Kindly, protective, bargaining for time,

Connect with unseen others, equally fine:

The hearts that splinter with each setting sun,

Yet rise unbroken, slowing, and going on.

A Four-Moons Meditation

We had drunk well and warmly past midnight.

Two moons were waltzing in the trembling sky,

And two more swam the rain-pools at our feet.

The sky had cleared; but years-long tempests blew

Between us, friends who sensed the ringing truth

Of things, and couldn’t make the other see,

Or “smell the coffee”, as he liked to say,

With more cut gems like, “when we’re done, we’re done!”

We agreed to fight: some fuzzy swings struck air.

I left him at his door still braying Fact:

“What doesn’t sit with Science is a dream!

Everything else is playing ghosts and goblins!”

The lowest, limpest creed . . . When I see the stars,

I shudder at the space between the stars.

Space is the Giant; the fireworks are but foam, 

Scurf on a sea of deeps and silences.

God weaves a dream of bodies; matter dreams,

Pale lanterns pricking cool immensities.

Space kindles substance, thawing into Mind;

Goes drowsing though duality to God.

God made the scintillant stars, and left them there.

(Our sun’s a roaring orphan, not His darling.)

A spark of His old essence flings off things,

Leaving His print: but he is otherwhere,

Rapt widely in the great intangibles,

Beyond the beauties and the freaks of time,

Conceiving universes born to burn, 

Conceding life, but loving infinity

Much more, so infinitely more: this molten God

Streams through all-silence in His vast of Mind.

This Master-Soul, this Maker, made us – why?

That He’s a God of Joy, I think is true;

And we float on a fraction of that joy,

Like pale moths night-hung on a summer’s breath,

Or serried waves moon-dancing sinuously,

Or milk-bright snowflakes drifting down the dusk.

Joy is His very essence; steeped in joy,

We clutch Him in a searing, sacred swoon;

Fall from Him as the great oak drops the acorn;

Cleave upwards to an infinite release.

Glimpses

We are, I suppose, both noble and ignoble; open and conniving; selfish and giving; great-hearted and petty; jeering and sympathetic. The earth of our latent moods is lit up by the sun of circumstance. But what are we, any of us, at the very centre of ourselves, deeper than trifling intellect, where the root emotions have full play: where instincts smoulder and desires congeal or run free?

Are the emotions really the engine of belief? Left to themselves, my emotions swing towards nullity: I feel swallowed by the evils exemplified by my own being and behaviour. I slide easily towards materialism, pessimism and nervous morbidity . . . But then cool thoughts seem to collect around me, as if to talk me over; and a cool voice comes, and says, “You know better than that!” – it seems as if I do; and, “You are better than that!” – it seems as if I am.

When people deliberately wound me with their words, my first, reflexive response is hot black anger; and the next is a heavy, smouldering resentment deep-mined from the core of my being. I was not, it appears, designed to forgive. And yet I know this – that even in the most smug, cynical and aggressive people there is a love and a longing for love so obvious, so desperate, so real, that I can hardly bear to think of it. So I am wiser than I wish; and this unwilling wisdom pursues my grudges like a silent accusation.

This Universe is not random. It’s not a trick. I don’t know what it is, but it’s neither of these. I’m sure it’s deliberate and I’m sure it’s real. Beyond that there’s a mist in my mind, composed of love and beauty, and violence and despair; and in the centre of the mist, I hope, there’s God, with an explanation for everything that isn’t loving or beautiful.

God? God may, or may not, exist. But the arguments against Him assuredly do not convince. We are urged to see towering indifference in a world overbrimming with miraculous life - life which thrills at every level with luminous purpose and design. And each day reveals what may be God’s very face: and we rush about, crying, “But where? Where?” And God, perhaps, says very quietly, again and again, “Here…. Just over here.”

So I believe in hints, in glimpses; sudden flashes of Truth as suddenly veiled. I believe in a wonderful, fruitful, final something; and I believe it involves kindness, and love, and the certainty of rest. For me, for now, that’s enough.

But what do I do with the days that remain? What but the simple, natural things that always gave me pleasure. Water my flowers, and trim my borders. Watch the changing, never-changing skies. See the leaves falling; see them returning. See the people the same. All this, and the odd flash of glory, coiling over me like a shooting star – isn’t that enough. That’s enough.

Perfect Peace

What is peace? Peace is not having to ask, “What is peace?” Peace is not having to demand it, or search for it, or dream about it, or destroy others to conquer it. Peace is knowing that you have it – and then forgetting that you know. Peace is the kettle’s steam and the dissolving snowflake. Peace is drawing a line under everything, and watching it all disappear – including the line that you drew. Peace is the absence of all absences and the presence of all presences. Peace is the quiet clown of life, more foolish even than these weak words, the soft smile that strays through everything . . .

If you sense that your fable of life is almost told, and you’re content – that’s peace.

If the horizon is empty, and your mind is as clear, and you’re content – that’s peace.

And if Darkness, whom you were patiently expecting, drifts lazily past your door, being about some other business, and you’re content – that’s peace.

And if Darkness comes, and slips up the stairs, and curls close on the pillow, and whispers, “I’m here, and I’m staying,” and you’re content – that’s peace. That is perfect peace.

Nick Hayward took a BA in English from Queen’s University, Belfast. He worked mainly in
the City of London. Retired to the Loire Valley in France, he composed poetry to help clarify
his spiritual beliefs. These pieces are from the resultant book-manuscript, “Glimpses of God.”
He now lives in West Cumbria, UK. 

 A Walk to God

The benches are empty
or am I lost in my walks again?
A walk I take often, aimlessly,
amidst lips trembling unsung mercies.
Wish, no more, no less, only a kiss.
I hunger for a deeper taste,
like rain on parched earth.
For another appeal, my eyes implore mercy;
for I, so unworthy,
here I am, kneeling against your benches
against emptiness and holiness,
carrying the hollow heart of mine,
a corpse burdened with agony.
Is this my great demise,
or a great design

Cracks of Heart

I fear the lonely winter nights.
Arriving winds, seeping through the cracks of stones,
through the cracks of hearts,
rattling old wounds and haunting screams,
calling hands wavering into the heavens for warmth.
Warmth I struggle to find
always yearning to find the find
in the struggle of life.
Crying in the warmth of God,
lingering for an hour,
till the departing winds depart my heart.

In Hell

Dear God, my Savior
be my guide
in hellish fields of fiends.
They strike but do not land;
your arc is much too strong.
For theirs is restless,
and in their impatience,
you will prevail. 

L.S. is a poet drawn to themes of faith, loss, and endurance. They’re seeking fragments of clarity and redemption amid injustice and uncertainty. These poems were born of personal experiences and a longing to reach others who recognize the quiet power of words and the shared endless search for meaning in life.