Look at this lovely poem on the blog “Beautiful World”

http://swatijr8.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/25/trackback/

I don’t know what she calls the poem. Do names and categories really matter?

The poem is celebratory. It sings. It lives!

In an extraordinary way, she sings about something so ordinary and so available and so near and dear, that it sometimes get overlooked. She sings about the divine within us.

Look, too, as this mention of something “ordinary” from Thomas Merton, as cited in the Sufi journal published by the Nimatullahi order.

In the spring of 1940, while he [Thomas Merton] was contemplating which order to choose, he made an Easter pilgrimage to Cuba to the shrine of Our Lady of Cobre, where he had a key vision, later recounting in The Seven Storey Mountain that he saw

“a light so bright that it had no relation to any visible light and so profound and so intimate’ that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience. And yet the thing that struck me most of all was that this light was in a certain sense ordinary – it was a light (and this most of all was what took my breath away) that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it … It ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth. [It] belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love. (ibid., pp. 63-64)”

 The ‘order of love’ had chosen him, and when he returned —after consideration of such orders as the Jesuits and the Franciscans— it was the sternest order of traveling the path of love which became his lot: that of the Trappists – the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Once he had been daunted by its very name; now, on entering the Abbey of Gethsemani in December 1941, he found himself embracing all its strictures with abounding joy. As with his paragon St. John of the Cross before him, the rigors of harsh conditions and a bed of straw only kindled the fire of Divine love the more brightly within him.