More on: wisdom

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Art and the Religious Sense To say that someone is “only human” is to say two things at once. We mean that person is flawed—and that this condition is no more than we should expect. Yet for all our awareness of human frailty and venality, we are haunted by visions of human flourishing, fullness rather…

Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…

THERE WAS a great blackened pan being eased out of the greasy oven by a tiny old woman in padded oven gloves. No one in the crowded kitchen—yellow walls, hideous mess, marijuana smoke and incense—came forward to help her. But someone, a joker, called out “What is it this time, Scottie? One of your concoctions?”…

In wisdom hunger lies. On black days, dress in black. Autumn is the echo of Winter. The name of the river’s curve is Leander. Take your cup from the tulip tree, your plate from the size of a spider. Rejoice! There is no choice in matter. If you would arrive, first leave. That is how…

We are walking in the mild midwinter Snow and thin ice, up Coldwater Creek, Its many tributaries, their steep ravines Tracing the blue and brown lines that wind Dizzily over the unfolded whiteness of our new Map like staves for the crazy earth song we’ve been Sight-reading with our feet; we are singing the impossible…

I know a woman who, when she hears wise words uttered, turns her palms upward. She’s as likely to place her hands on my shoulders, to comfort. None of it for show. Palms upward, she’s a basin. Palms downward, a wellspring, rain. May we be basin and well to each other. May we be rainlight…

Balthazar KING Balthazar loved the freshness of his gardens and smiled to see the reflection of his ebony face in the clear water of the tanks. And he loved the joyfulness, the commotion, and the abundance of banquets, and often his parties lasted till daybreak. However, late one night, after all the guests had withdrawn,…

Little cherub, do you not fly? Or have you landed here in clothing of light To fool the eye? If I hear you in my heart Are you not alive? What I cannot touch I feel I cannot know And yet I know you are in my knowing If knowing is a body, does it…