Poet's Choice

Pretty much any spiritual practice, whether religious in the formal sense (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, etc.) or purely secular (counting breaths, a centering prayer), finds divinity in contemplation. To become fully alive, we must still our chaotic desires. The poems of Greek-born poet Tryfon Tolides work almost like mini-meditations, bringing us to a sweet, nameless emptiness.

Calling

Come to the point where, finally, you are lost,

wayside-sitting, wind-gazing, train-whistle-listening,

if you want to converse with the invisible presence,

continual, sustained, indwelling, be lost,

be abandoned, so that the heart, the mind, as big

as God, come to the place where you are lost,

so that all your days and the shuttering of each day's

light and the blue magnetic incomprehensible

jumping and motionless blue of twilight and the fine

blackening after, around the incomprehensible

waiting and breathing of trees with their delight-inducing