A Revolution of the Heart

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 12 May 2015.

To One, To All Moving Through The Silence With(or with)out Motion

Essay Question:

Do you view this lack of scenium as a story truth or as a happening truth?  While its place in literature is undisputed, does it extend past the pages and transpire into reality for you? Is all that we see or seem but a (screen) dream within a (screen) dream?

For further contemplation, do you believe we, as a collective species occupying space in 2015, can ever truly engage in the present moment? If yes, do we still - despite our greatest efforts - look like novices compared to Dorothy Day and her mindfulness, to Rilke and his capacity to embrace the transient nature of life, to Emerson and his patient procession through this transience? If so, why? If not, why still?  Do you believe in what Jean-Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment”? Do you agree with Rumi, that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground”?

If you affirmatively have faith in (wo)man’s ability to be present, is this attentiveness not, in some measure, as triumphant a reversal as that which is turbulent?  Why wait for the transformation to happen to us?  Why not happen to the transformation? How about now? Not in five minutes. Not tomorrow. Not when it's convenient.
But
right
now.
Be present.
Yes, you.
You through the screen in the chair.

As Dorothy Day wrote in Loaves and Fishes,

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?  When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’

If not now, when?

The text continues,

One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside the proximity of the suffering poor is their sense of futility.  Young people say, ‘What good can one person do?  What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the action of the present moment but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

I leave you with this recording of Mary Oliver reciting one of my most loved poems, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac (part 3).

I warn you: There is so much to admire, so much to weep over.

So why not listen to it immediately?

Did you listen?  Did you weep?
Lovely. You’ve been attentive, after all.

Class dismissed.

Be ignited, or be gone,

Liza

P.S. I’ve not yet “finished” my Sea Devil Mascot sketch, so in the meantime, here’s a picture I painted in undergrad of Dorothy Day.  May it guide you through your days one brick at a time.