The Second Story Mountain

(x = space)

x

x

The Second Story Mountain

x

Merton wrote

The Seven Storey Mountain

About his journey to faith

And affiliation

David Brooks has written

The Second Mountain

About the search for a moral

Life that also

Has in it

Brooks’s journey into faith

x

There are many such stories

(John Henry Newman, Anne Lamott

Karen Armstrong—I give these folk

in order of reading them),

And high places

Are often an association

x

Once we climb, once we achieve

The phenomenal

The numinous,

We end up

On a mountain top

There is, in fact, the mountain-top

Experience,

A trope of faith

x

On my way back recently,

I skirted a tunnel torn up for construction

And drove over two mountains

As an unmarked detour,

Taking roads who edges were too near,

Too sharp, too narrow

I was scared

x

And wondered among things while driving

How folk could live on either side,

Having these as ways

To take a normal day

x

I don’t like heights

I don’t like driving off the road, either

It’s all done now, and if I’m smart

I’ll never take that way again

There was a mountaintop, I guess

There were two such tops

I only noted a change in incline

Down from up

There was not a park or anything

x

A pullover,

A bench with an inscription in huge letters

Come and have your mountaintop here

Rather the only words I got

Were my own

That said, don’t look down so much

x

I’ll live in the valleys,

I suppose,

And have my faith life there

Or at the oceanside from time to time

It’s not stormy weather

That I mind

Though someday it should take

Me home

x

I’m sorry, this is more a story

Than a poem much cleverer,

Not much more

Than talking

In the room

Over coffee or some such,

Should we be meeting

At a table

Or in comfy chairs

Or with both

x

I have my life of faith, such as it

Might be

I hope, I even pray, that

You have yours

In a healthy sect or tradition

That suits you and

Creator and

Creation

x

Fits you like a story to

Which you return

Time and again

x

C L Couch

x

x

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks

Route 641

x

Photo by Fabrizio Lunardi on Unsplash

x

Lord,

Lord,

 

I don’t know what I’m doing

I know I often act misdirected

But where is the magic

The spotlight that tells me

I’m in the right place

And on the good way?

 

Came out of nowhere

I just heard that phrase used to

Sell something

A cliché, but it’s poetic

Really

Out of nowhere, ex nihilo

Philosophy

But isn’t that how you create?

Out of nothing appears

Matter

To set new flesh upon a wound or

Fill a gulley in the desert with

Water unheard-of in the

Season

 

Out of nothing I was made

The spark in emptiness that fused

A spirit to new cells,

And I am here

Though you’ve always been here

 

And I can’t say I understand that

How you are in the charges

Of my neurons

And the pulses of my heart

And over Earth

And through the universe of chances

 

Although I still feel useless

And pathless

For the Gethsemani contemplative

It was enough to know

Random instincts somehow speak to

Providence

 

That isn’t me

I’m not so smart

Or self-sufficient

 

Maybe

He wasn’t, either

We both want to know

And what do we find out?

We wander an agnostic landscape

Step toward uncertainty

An answer in a

Moment

And for the next,

Maybe

 

Will that do?

For us, it has to

And bold enough, if cautious

To go beyond the mortal shell

To tread in a fossil sea

To take a walk on Mars

 

C L Couch

 

 

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040628.html