I felt a million living tendrils
rooting through the thing I was,
as if I'd turned to earth before my death
Or in my death somehow could feel.

-Christian Wiman

On beauty causing suffering and the need to take pictures

I have noticed that I suffer more in beautiful natural surroundings, simply for the reason that I expect myself to more fully appreciate it, and that creates stress. The way I had often dealt with this in the past is to take a picture, even though pictures NEVER do justice and when I look at them later I am almost ambivalent. As if by taking a picture I could immortalize this moment, prevent impermanence, and absorb its beauty over a lifetime (and my kids lifetimes).

No. This moment will never happen again. I cannot immortalize it. I cannot fully appreciate it. It is already leaving. And I shouldn't even try to savor it. The part of me that needs to appreciate and hold onto it is suffering. Every moment is just as precious (and mundane) as ever other. And until I let go of needing the moment to be anything other than what it is, or keeping it as it is, there will be suffering. 

Learning to hear it as music

It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music that, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult to learn to hear it as music.

Christian Wiman

Hunger for Something

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile,
cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,
or even the smoke itself,

sinewy ghost of ash and air, going
wherever I want to, at least for a while

Neither inside nor out,
neither lost nor home, no longer
a shape or a name, I'd pass through

all the broken windows of the world.
It's not a wish for consciousness to end.

It's not the appetite an army has
for its own emptying heart,
but a hunger to stand now and then

alone on the death-grounds,
where the dogs of the self are feeding

Chase Twichell

Wiman on Incomprehensibility

The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane. Innocence returns us to the first call of God, to any moment in our lives when we were rendered mute with awe, fear, wonder. Absent this, there is no sense in arguing for God in order to convince others, for we ourselves are not convinced...

There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment. This realization is not the end of theology, but the beginning of it: trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author's personal faith is not actively at risk.

Christian Wiman


The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns relationship, and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer sayable, and fall back into creation, into love and death.

Rainer Maria Rilke - as quoted by Christian Wiman

The Goal is the Path

Instead of recognizing that the training is the indivisible unity of path and fruition and that this fruition is present as a natural possession, the basic straying is to believe that the path is the training, while the fruition will be attained at another point...

The basic straying is to regard the emotion to be discarded and the training as separate and so to use the training as a remedy against the emotion. Whenever a thought moves or when encountering a difficult situation, the temporary straying is (to believe that) one can only be composed in meditation after the difficulty has been overcome...

Instead of recognizing that the training is the indivisible unity of means and knowledge and that all phenomena are the essence itself, the basic straying is to generalize with a conceptual focus that they are devoid of self-nature. Rather than putting the training to use, the temporary straying is to generalize by wanting to recreate a past experience. Or, it could be to believe that meditation should interrupt thoughts: "I am dissatisfied with the present state. I must create a better one later!"

Dakpo Tashi Namgyal

...And that is where the joy came in.

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

-Christian Wiman