A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp

where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package

drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together

like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a  field

thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.

I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman

I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,

the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.

The melody of birth harmonizes with the haunting notes of death and calls us into the wilderness.  Entering that path, footsteps pause and our resolve falters, for we know not what is before us.  Yet if we do not go forward, we will miss the most beautiful sight we will ever see.

What is it that you would see along this path?

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some—now carry my revelation with you—
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world—its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself—I imagine
this is how it began.”

I am startled that Mary knows that love was the core of her life.  How many of us can say this?  I imagine that you strive to make it so, but do you sense that you fall short? For if you truly touched love with your very essence your life would be lived in bliss. Right?

I think not.  For to be in love is to ache with the separation that is ever present.  To be in love is to know the intimate caress of loss. To be in love is to give oneself over completely to that which is loved.  This doesn't sound like happiness to me, but torture. 

Oh Lord, who would want it any other way?

May we begin this day with the innocence of first love, so hungry to love that we do not take our eyes from the sun or the infinite beloveds that surround our days in beauty.

With whom have you been in love?