(God is near. Rejoice in the evening and dance in the moonlight, wait for the sun, and begin a good life, enjoy. Or something about peanut butter warning. Or something about keep off the nibbles, and cryptic lettering of ancient kinds, and kindnesses). You probably can’t read it. Tilde knew what it said, and certainly the raccoons knew what it said. When Tilde was writing for them she kept thinking that maybe it would be better to make a similar, more direct sign--something with a straightforward message like, “Keep Off the Grass.”But, no that wouldn’t work, because the raccoons never keep off grass anywhere if they want to walk on grass. In fact, in Tilde’s first summer she’d heard the mice that lived in the house say that the raccoons were perfectly happy to not only get on grass, but to dig up grass. Of course there wasn’t any grass for digging up around the house, except down by the creek. Nonetheless, this was getting off the subject and if there was anything Tilde was good at it was getting off the subject. She decided on the sign that you see when you go by the house near the drive. We’re getting to the end of our story, so to make a long story short, Tilde didn’t succeed in keeping the raccoons from the nibbles. But she did succeed in making a very nice sign, which the raccoons commented on and spent some time looking at. In fact, the sign was the talk of the raccoon community, which she heard when they started their usual pushing and shoving each other around. The sign stood all summer long. And Tilde often had nibbles on her moonlight walks, by the way. After all, the raccoons left some. And no, she never did get around to putting out the peanut butter so fortunately that part of her plan was just a passing thought. A Posting On the Atlantic Monthly This from a posting on The Atlantic Monthly unbound site, a poem created from a transcription about God (speaking with). Peter Menkin - Dec 15, 2000 You are observant to see this as a centering statement. I “distilled” this, as a poem, from a long six hour conference. These are the results of my notes, and though it needs some work I think it reflects the result of a conversation on spirituality. The place of the conference was a monastery in Berkeley, and the leader of the group a Benedictine monk whose inspiration of prayerful living was declared as an invitation last December before Christmas. Is it so noticeable that the season is, in this placing on the notice board, were the words before the Christmas coming, but more festival as glad tidings. So one yearns, so one enters in. Thank you for your appreciations of this poem that took some time to get to this stage. Apothatic Prayer: A Transcription, December 1999 Peter Menkin, Obl, Cam, OSB Invited by God into a wordless kind of prayer--Cataphatic is opening the Bible and believing the images of entering into the wonder of the scene. The same one invites us into the apothatic spirituality. Desert, stripping, pain, addiction. Loneliness. (Aloneness.) Desert spirituality will be deeper, and this is one invitation to an all new spirituality. This is the monk’s. Birth at forty. Forty to eighty. Eighty to one-hundred twenty. Moses was offering deliverance. (Acts.) Settles into what is the symbolic period of 40 years -- into the future. After 40 years he was learned to, as a child.