Calming things.

I'm finding this week (this morning in particular) that I am needing more exposure to calming things. I've been looking through old journals lately. Some from high school, many from my studies in Europe. That's where the transition occurred. That's when I finally changed my own inner voice. That's where the Wordsworth affair began. That's when I understood the whole of things. That's where I learned to draw a perfect circle, because that's what life is - a collection of circles. I am in the middle of at least a dozen of them. That's where I learned about projecting, and about my part in nature, and about how everything testifies of its center, which is Jesus Christ. That's where I learned that it's not a hollow circle, but one filled-in, intersecting rings and rings of experiences in completion and re-routing.

Circles. What a conversation that has been through the years. Like the word "expectation."

"This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at black hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome with that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

As for calming things: Part of Book Fourteen

What in itself it is, and would become
There I beheld the emblem of a Mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power
In sense, conducting to ideal form;
In soul, of more than mortal privilege...

...such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs - the consciousness
Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image, and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised
From earth to heaven, from human to divine.
Hence endless occupation for the soul,
Whether discursive or intuitive;
Hence chearfulness for acts of daily life,
Emotions which best foresight need not fear,
Most worthy then of trust when most intense:
Hence, amid ills that vex, and wrongs that crush
Our hearts, if here the words of holy writ
May with fit reverence be applied, that peace
Which passeth understanding - that repose
In moral judgements whcih from this pure source
Must come, or will by Man be sought in vain.