Archive for the ‘hope’ Category

Wrapped!

Posted: March 22, 2020 in God, hope
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He placed a paper-thin, white wrapper on each garlic clove, then added additional gift-wrapping over the whole garlic head in front of him.

“This will keep the sulfurs moist and fresh until they use them. It’s the perfectly bonnet, cover, envelope, sheath for flavonoids!”

Yesterday, so long later, I noticed this perfect thin, white wrapper. Closing the garlic press I squished the yummy, savory garlic spice into my developing pot of steaming white bean soup.

Gifts, presents, treats — wrapped and placed in containers!

And thinking on it — so many things are like this — oranges with thick, pungent bright orange rinds, bananas with perfectly peel-able yellow jackets, apples with shiny red edible skins — pouches for essential nutrients — my potassium, my fiber, my folic acid.

When fear is high, when uncertainty rules, when the world feels dangerous I find the small, safe, protected container-gifts soothing.

My skin, the bag I live in, all twenty-one square feet of it, holding all my organic machinery — reassuring. 300 million cells in me containing me.

My cottons, my polys, my silks, my linens, my fabrics, my clothes.

My rafters! My beans! My roof tiles! My roof!

My cars, buses, trains, planes — my many-miled metal skins.

I live covered, enclosed, enfolded, encased, protected.

Oh for those who don’t or can’t!

We must take great care of them and bring them inside. We must bring covers to them and keep them safe, the lost, homeless, disenfranchised, the refugees, the immigrants.

This is love, to put a coat over another one. This is love! To put a sheath over life.

I look out into earth’s atmosphere, its stratification, layers, exosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere.

Sky-wrappings enclose me, keep in my heat, hold in my weather, protect me from space rocks hurtling towards the planet — turn meteors of stony iron, nickel and ice to vapor and dust.

Enclosed all — and yet the world reels. They reek. I reel. Don’t you think I’ve haven’t noticed? It reels and I shake from the stabbing, ripping, puncturing execrable, break-through vitriol, vomit, vengeance, venom, virus, vanity and violence. These penetrate our shields.

Yes, a large meteor might annihilate our city. Yes, a volcano may obliterate our sky. Yes, a coronavirus may kill us. Yes, one day the sun will vaporize the planet, but yes, yes, yes today we experience wondrous layers of protection we know, where they came from.

“They’re really going to like this!” he said — bark, dermis, film, membrane, carapace, shell, scale, sheath, skin, hull, capsule, chamber, package, pocket, packet, pouch, layer, strata, sphere!”

Steady yourself soul.

Protections all around.

Striding Toward Bethlehem

Posted: November 22, 2016 in hope, Uncategorized
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Gliding, gliding — centered sure
The new mother draws her baby near.
Things hold together; the center cannot shift.

A new revelation is at hand!

Finger tips touch finger ends,
Foreheads to kisses bend.

Holy water sifting down
Glasses clinking to the sound.

The best exult!

The worst slouch hellishly toward bedlam!

Surely something new is at hand!
Surely a second, third or even fourth coming is at hand.
But even before I am on the roof,
An epiphany!
I am barely up
When a familiar rushing wind
Buries the slow churning thighs in the bottom of the next cradle.
Pitiless lens, mechanical bird, dark-dropped-death smacked flat.
What holy child is this, it’s magic hour come round at last,
Who strides confidently toward Bethlehem.

Precosity

Posted: April 5, 2016 in hope, Uncategorized
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I sit with my latte, and my shredded wheat, my clover honey and my almond milk and discuss the hoped-for future with my bathrobed, hair-tousled, coffee-sipping wonder-wife.

We musify in the morning.

We do the back-and-forthification — which is fun — but reality keeps getting tossed into the mix, and it doesn’t always cooperate — thus there is precarity in the plans.

It is stirred into the plenty.

The sun comes up, we go to work, the day gears up, the stock market goes up, our hopes rise, fueled by interest rates and dark, rich caffeine, and then the turn, as we weary through the late morning, early afternoon, the long commute home.

The sun slants, time slumps, life leaks and floats back to the floor like a post-party balloon — precarity. Thus and so, we are temporaria  — even the wise ones, even the prescient. As the scripture says, we live move and have our being within the precariat.

Did you think it said something else?

Hatreds, hopes, happenstances; genetics, genies, jerks; accidents, illnesses, taxes — all these and more, the various and sundry vagaries and variances of any given era — these insure membership in the precariat.

Oh, life!

And yet, and yet — the persistent goodness.

I am struck always by the presistant plenty, the living-loveliness of life amidst the persistently pandemic poverties. The ghastly demons of not shirk and faint at the edges of exuberant gardens, lined with white roses.

Last week we put up an beautiful, rod iron, arched trellis at the church. And below it, we planted a passion vine.

Thus there is hope, for vine, flowers, butterflies, tendrils, the reach upward, the stunning beauty, all-passion, the inspired community.

I am shock-smitten by such improvements, everyday, constantly, the preciosities of nature — love, babies, brains, branches of community, friends, finials, finitude, infinity.

The precosities — they just keep gobbling up the precarities.