Coin

Trying to write today, about the relationship of grief and joy (like two sides of a coin), about true celebration. I find this quote and realize I won't have room to include it. But I want to draw it out from the piles and piles of notes, keep it, meditate on it, ask You about it...

The experience of joy is so incredibly rare…because it entails a constant giving up in order to even recognize the territory. We prefer to return to those states of seminumbness with which we are more familiar…. The rare appearance of joy… is so painfully exquisite that we may actually experience joy as a moment of terror. It opens to us all our possibilities and yet casts a shadow of comparison across all our other moments. Joy brings an intimation of death and mortality. This joy will pass as all others have before them. Laughter catches in our throat because we refuse to accept the corollary of joy, the soul-enriching poignancy of loss.

I think I understand now why joy has so often eluded me. Ah, that You would give me courage to face the griefs, that I might embrace more fully the joys.

Color God

What were you thinking
when you forged scarlet,
birthed purple
from the bowels
of the universe?
Pink was a no-brainer,
soft and innocent
lavender would greet
the mornings, whisper,
"hope, hope" even
when death
shadowed the doorway.
Green would be life
ever lasting to
counter our ways (hemlocks,
white pine, ivy, fern).
Brown, a reminder
of where we began.
Black, the night to hold forth
diamonds. White, the sea foam
and clouds ethereal. But what
were you thinking
when you forged scarlet, birthed
purple, into our sight...

This is an offering for the writing project going on over at Seedlings in Stone.

Sitting

Wind whips, the hemlocks dip and sway. I sit in silence, sipping green tea. Waiting for solitude to do its work. To stir my soul in ways I cannot see, cannot make happen. Something about simply being here, setting myself in the cool of the day when sun is obscured by greyness and rain is at my back... something about it feels like a swabbing, a sweeping, a winnowing. Nothing happens per se, no lightning with this particular mist, from these clouds on this day. I am just sitting. Letting the wind wail, the trees speak. Sitting. Waiting.