Slowing down to see

A long year and many miles later
exhaustion has found me.
Sometimes just being found
is alright.
                   And then you
may begin again with life
at such place as
you find yourself.

[awash]

I have been lost in the narrows of the mind -
sometimes out, but mostly lost  -
lately it seems
between the rock reefs swirls through
is this my life?
until I find myself at sea
and am relieved at least
the sea and sky show up

Dusk of the Mind

In the half-light
between the crowded tasks of day
(lit harshly perhaps, but at least there are fewer shadows)
and the darkness of the night, which may
hold oblivion or wrestling in one's soul
(depending, it seems, on how much you will miss that sleep),
is the lamp-lit hour of the mind.

My hands are always aching then
to feel the words flow from the fingertips,
my mind impatient and yet afraid to open that font,
and my heart is pressed so
already, how can I distill this life? (which
has become thick and swimming with
sorrows and joys I do not understand
and there are monsters in the deep I had never imagined
until I came to dwell with them)

and hoping that my fingers will find some answer
that my soul has missed, I sit silent.
And watch the shadows dance on the lamp-lit wall
(The less you speak, the more they dance.)
until I find another night has fallen
on my weary wordlessness.

Struggles with being

The harder I thrash
the faster I sink.

Is the secret of life
to be still and think
up?

Not wasted

Fumbling with the recycling
     in the dark,
I step into the perfumed night--
     a single-use invention
Designed just to delight.
     Profligacy of the highest order.

Revisiting Epiphany

Around the new year, full of the hopes and dreams that come with beginnings of all kinds, I told the universe and a friend, under a starlit sky, that this was going to be a good year. It would be, I determined, the year of grace.

A few days later, as I was thinking about epiphany, it struck me that Christ--who is the incarnation of epiphany, the Word, the sudden realization of God, breaking into our world--and whose incarnation is epiphany--is in fact the grace that God is giving me this year.

Many beginnings, of course, have endings. And some of the good things I envisioned under those stars have ended. But Christ, who is the beginning of all things, does not end. It is meet for me now to come back to that epiphany and see it fresh.

Of all the graces God gives--some harder than others--Christ himself is best and most real. When I am longing for flesh and blood, God gives it to me in Christ. Constancy, love, acceptance--all are in and through Christ. In him, this is the year of grace. That is the best beginning of all.

Just when you have taken your eyes
off the world,
the fog lifts
and everything real reappears.