Prayerful and Mindful Poems to Contemplate

  

Contemplating spiritual passages while knitting encourages those passages to take residence in the heart, according to Peggy Rosenthal's Purl One, Purl a Prayer: A Spirituality of Knitting.  During this peaceful activity, the knitter can settle down and open up to spiritual thoughts and feelings. While engaging in this practice, I collected a group of reflections on prayer and experiences of mindfulness that encourage spiritual activity; they are included in this post. They are from the Christian and Buddhist traditions.  

Poems about Mindfulness to Contemplate while Knitting

Rainer Maria Rilke's Moving Forward

from Robert Bly's News of the Universe: Poems ofTwo-Fold Consciousness

The deep parts of my life pour onward,

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

that I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my senses, as with birds, I climb

into the windy heaven, out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Mary Oliver's Sleeping in the Forest

from Robert Bly's News of the Universe: Poems ofTwo-Fold Consciousness

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.  I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees.  All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness.  All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom.  By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

from the poem Timely Rain by Chogyam Trungpa

from the book Timely Rain: Selected Poems by Chogyam Trungpa

In the garden of gentle sanity,

May you be bombarded with coconuts

Of Wakefulness.

Prayerful Poems to 

Contemplate while Knitting

from The Bible Philippians 4:5-7 

Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.  Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

You pray in your distress and in your need; you would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space,

it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.

And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer,

she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping,

until you shall come laughing.

When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.

Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible

be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.

from The Bible Philippians 4:8 

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things.

from The Bible Isaiah 55:12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

A Psalm by Thomas Merton

from A Thomas Merton Reader 

When psalms surprise me with their music
And antiphons turn to rum
The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder
Opens a heaven of naked air.

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

The pictures of the Buddha above were taken by me in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The picture of the Church was also taken in Philadelphia.