A yearning for the unseen world hidden inside the evident world.

The great Hound of Heaven.

How does one begin to articulate what is only seen dimly by the person who lives it?

Longing being something I must battle.

Look and be present.

Jesus Christ – the one true myth.

Is life one big chore – a journey to delight, the mystery, the enchantment.

What would become of me if I was to become so brave as to believe His words?

Shut your teeth upon your need.

The firmament demands nothing of me yet offers everything.

Time fell away from me in the mundane dailiness of survival.

God, of course, does speak to me in my pain – His megaphone to reach me.

It is true, that if I am free to be good then I am also free to be bad. Yet this choice is what makes possible the love and joy and goodness worth savoring.

To feel it as a tremor under my ribs: the subtle shift beneath the foundation of my home – the change that arrives with stranded souls.

To walk around Oxford Jerusalem and let it seep into my soul and change the internal structure of my heart.

The trees and the river breath holiness – You bring us together, please be with us.

I want the landscape to be mine and the landscape to have me – Israel?

In that place to start to feel the contours and edges of my internal landscape, a world that as a 62-year old I’d still never quite mapped.

Jesus – the One True Myth; God is the storyteller and Providence His own storyline – walk into one of the stories, to see a place once only imagined. Is this possible?

With each dropperful of our (?) lives that we drip into our conversation, the closer we become.

Allow nature to bring me to silence.

Sneak my way into the fourth dimension – timelessness (see notes on A Severe Mercy).

Exploring (England), spending time with (Jack & Warnie) to feel like who I really am.

Who can I be(?) a brilliant light, cherished for who I am.

To get on well – to laugh – what draws people together as when they see the same truth.

My fear: that I would never know real love.

Pain – leads to a great spiritual awakening. I know I must get my emotions in order.

Friendship of the highest order: being connected to me as I am to (him).

It is in the smallest moments that I understand larger truths, if I pay attention.

Walking in rhythm side by side.

I burrow into this happy feeling asking myself what this really about (imagine: Green Lake).

All will be well. All manner of things shall be well (Daybreak Star).

In one fell swoop of the grand forsakenness – I must destroy my own ark – to weep for all the loss I never acknowledge, all the pain I hold in reserve: my MC, my dreams, my career, my health – begin my wanderings.

The Whispering Gallery – my boundaries dissolve – transcendence envelop me (God calls me His friend), scabs of my ego falls off in large chunks of acceptance (in the ‘what if’ R cannot love me – the real me, the hidden me yet must be married or what if, I’m wrong – the absurdity of the fact overlooked feels simple (?)).

Allow my head to rest on (his) shoulder the way my heart rest on (his) words.

Scrabble – I’ve met my match.

The sky is holding its breath and then exhaling.

You tolerate what you must when it becomes your reality.

I want (him) to unload his heart into mine.

The obscure things burrow themselves into my brain. No one really knows you, do they, Lies.

The moments with a good friend, when one turns to the other and says: ‘you too?’.

A house resumes its natural rhythms – the common room – Aslan.

Sehnsucht: the idea of an inconsolable longing for what we don’t understand: God?! Often confused with longing for someone or something else.

Feel inside myself, poking around for an answer. I mourn for what could have been. I feel sad for what I wanted it to be but it never ways. I miss the idea of what I want for all of us. But I don’t miss what was. (The books, the chessboard in the living room).

The simplest joy.

The surprise mystical quality of nature to open our hearts to the reluctant conversion.

Take me into (his) gaze, steady and still. I believe more than anyone I know; you are enchanted by this world and its sentiments (Enchantment – sacraments – Tab).

To revel in the unfolding, to keep guard as well as I can over my own heart, to watch carefully for the interlopers of fantasy, for the thieves of obsession and possession.

Death not divorce.

How does one not destroy the most sublime philia?!

Allow the simple statement to shimmer between (us).

Gratitude floods me with warmth and chatter.

A hidden life.

To press (his) heart and mind as close as skin to bone.

To be at peace when (he) is near.

I don’t want to cross over to eros and destroy the love we have. I can’t lose you or this deep, abiding friendship. I can feel your love. The footholds for moral goodness – morality is    about choice. If I attempt virtue, it brings light to my life. If I indulge desires, I invite fog and confusion. Logic offers no rest for the heart. Touch between (us) becomes easier   now.

Bareface – until we have faces.

Eventually for love to be true, we must show our real faces.

The journey from possessive love to wholesome love. From the profane to the divine: union with the divine through love. Braiding our spiritual journeys together like two stories from the same Father, parallel and mystical, infused with nature’s divine ability to change us.

I know now Lord why you utter no answer. You are Yourself the answer. Before Your face questions die away. Do You love me?  This is the answer, and this is the mask, and this is the way.

Petty self almost always requires the seeing of deception – illusion. The face I already possessed before I was born was who I was in God all along, before anything went right or went wrong, before I did anything right or wrong, that was the race of my true self – my ‘bareface’.

I cannot help trying to live what I think – Dallas Willard: mind orders feelings, will regulates       mind – will what God wills.

Pause in the beauty of (his) praise.

My friend, if it was sin in you and me\that we went fishing for each other in\ the troubled waters of life (Joy Davidman Sonnet XXXII).

Mental fog of pain.

(Our) laughter entwined and filled the room and also seemed to fill the world.

Miracles, my love, never break nature’s laws – God’s prescribed order, not the fallen world.

The love (I have for you) has built a bridge to my true self – joy.

Silence of the sublime sort, hovers.

You doubt your value – don’t run from who you are.

What does it mean to show our real faces, when told your decision to always show me your face without veil(?) That is love?  Although it is your mind, I loved first, it is not what I love best. The heart of you is the heart of me know, and I want to know it fully.

I preloved you in the same way that my poems prewrote my prose, in the same way your poems and essays preloved God.

Desire comes suddenly, and exquisitely long ago, flourishing in time.

Coming together, slow and luxurious and only ours – both with (our) childhood mystical hints of nature that follows us – our lives intercepted and interrupted – Kairos. Only now did I know, only now. For as long as we have. For as long as I can.

At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more. When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death. And when he shakes his mane, we shall have Spring again. (LW & W, Lewis)

Grace is given only in the moment.

Three more years, I clung to the great Lion, buried my face in his mane, and dropped to my knees in surrender. God and love don’t dole out their gifts on merit. Eros has naked bodies; friendship naked personalities.

‘Gift Time’ ‘unconvenanted mercy’.

Laughter is the right response of all sensible lovers. Seek the most out of every day as well as I can, as often as I can, ever making time more valuable, palpable with grace and thrumming with desire. Death = amputation. Pain & loss are redeemed with service of our lives. The tiny heartbreaking commonplace.

Prolific imagination cannot do justice to the great unknown.

Two trees entwined, unable to stand alone. Love, waiting for surrender, from where we come and where we go.

With the great Aslan, I end my life with these words whispered in truth:  I am at peace with God.

From Becoming Mrs. Lewis (Patti Callahan) personalized

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity