Poem: "The Way the Soul Arcs"

Delphiniums courtesy of Pixabay

This poem was first published in living with what remains:

THE WAY THE SOUL ARCS

              Judith Deem Dupree

A bee has come

to harvest my delphiniums --

circling them,

leaving a halo only I can see.

The blooms are potted

on the sun-streaked deck --

in clay flared slightly

by the hands that held it to the wheel.

Its shape reminds me

of the way my hands cup, rising,

opening in praise

when Grace is nearly palpable.

Blossoms spill in tangled glory

down the earthen jar,

too much glory to define as *blue*.

They break with logic,

with its need for category --

the prompting

to explain, to clarify, compare...

Like the way the soul arcs around

our shaped theology,

searching for that unseen radius

where Glory spills --

as indefinable, as prescient,

as honeyed as the aura of delphinium.

Poem: "One Day"

Photo courtesy of Pixabay. In the public domain.

One Day

One day, before the earth grew old

and mostly bald and full of stink,

one day I woke to music, to a chirrup

in the trees that rose and fell

like exhalations of the earth itself―

a gargling of the morning air

in bright polyphony, in crisp staccato.

And I knew the birds were prophesying―

knew I heard the voice of God,

sweeter than the earth itself,

rising like a counterpoint, an arching,

aching tremolo―

heard the wild of Him that we have tamed

come bursting forth in feathers

and arpeggios and yearnings inexpressible,

too large and small for syllables that slip

into our narrow ears;

and so I stood and listened to the world

as He described it, listened to the reveling,

and knew that I was born for this―knew

that doves, that sparrows sing epiphany

at dawn each day, and breathe

the earth’s core in and out, and feather

all that breathes and flies and sings,

and I must sing, must sing, must sing,

and this is my arpeggio, my only syllable.

Amen.

© Judith Deem Dupree 2017

                        

Some Likeness Unforeseen: A Poem

This poem was published in living with what remains, a collection of poetry published in 2004 that is available on Amazon here: living with what remains.

Some Likeness Unforeseen

Nature listens--hearing  ever that cell-voice
which breathes its silent syllables
through each tiny universe,

and studies it covertly there, this hidden marrow--
studies its likeness and its endless variance,
with thought of molecule, of phylum
and of husk and fur, of stamen, semen, zygote--
thought coaxing life to rest, to build
and build again some likeness unforeseen.

The elm lifts its solemn face upward,
begging light, breaking light into prisms
with its slanted arms. Does it remember,
cell-bound, how the earth first broke its life
to shimmering replication
from a million broken faces of the sun?

And far beyond these shaggy fields
(these honest homilies of faith), the cougar crouches
low against a rock-bound peak
and paces where his tendons flex to tell him so;

and on beyond, at the stubborn jaw
of this great crouch of land--upon its lip,
between its jagged teeth,
the seaweed swirls and is spit back endlessly;
fish explore it with their great, globed eyes.

All these are likeness, and each, each,
is alone within that whisper which bequeaths them.

Beneath and above it all,
the earth swirls on its great, gray bath of mist,
on, on, and on--containing all--cell-bound
in the splendor and purity of light.

And you and I,
dependents in a breathless universe,
defendants of the heart's internal entropy,
of the way time sucks our cells dry
and draws the circling marrow from our bones . . .

We lay our weary head against our wary soul,
its hidden universe, and beg for rest there--
hearing but a syllable beyond our own,
finding there a Likeness long foreseen.


~Judith Deem Dupree

beneath His cool shadow: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers and on Amazon. Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

This excerpt has been previously published on the Blog of Ruminate Magazine on 12 August 2016.

* * * *

Afternoon shadows stretch from tree to tree, and I am sitting beneath their shelter. The radio thrums with the passion of Rachmaninov; my feet waggle automatically to my favorite passages.

Bliss . . . The concerto soars to its conclusion.

And then the news intrudes. From the sublime to the ridiculous? No, no―not ridiculous! Vicious. More and ever more, death is becoming a mordant and morbid exposition, an endless parade of phantasmagoria. From every quarter of the globe comes word of new atrocity, new frenzies of violence and hatred. From far-away, unpronounceable places, from our comfortable suburbs and, of course, at the bleakest cores of our communities, where despair so often spreads on a turbulent tide.

Anger spews from mouth to mouth, group to group to city to nation―and bursts like wildfire from the barrels of guns. Such pervasive violence, such undeclared, personal or group vendettas were virtually unheard of some decades ago, beyond the nation’s battlefields―and not or never on such a scale as this.

We humans are a haunted race . . . .

But it has always been there, been here. Within us all. Christ said as much when He walked alongside us. He saw through the thin veneer of our inherent goodness, our presumed civility―saw how humanity behaves when the heat is turned up, when the pressure is turned on, when the “spigot” is turned off.

It is, now, “the best of times―the worst of times.”

In a world of technological miracles and legislated manners, we still look in the mirror and see, shadowed as they are, the savages who dwell within us.

We die for each other; we lay down our lives for each other―when we believe in Life.

We kill each other―when our souls have died, when we are afraid of death.

We do either, daily, in small ways, with a quick, instinctive impetus that either creates or destroys. All that we carry, all we have nurtured within us will tell its tale.

Violence. The children . . .

The faces of children are the hardest part. We want to gather up the little ones―the innocents, the real victims―gather them in our arms, shelter them, kiss their cheeks, rock them until the fear leaves their eyes.

Oh, the children! When, or if they grow up, they may well kill each other.

Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem long before Christ came to invade it with His wash of tears:

“’Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the Lord.

He went on talking to Jeremiah, to us: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Only beneath His cool shadow do we find surcease from our heated hearts and ways. Here upon this small and Spartan ranch there is a peace that can only be called luxury. Often during the days I remind myself of this privilege. And when the guilt for being here, for having this, engulfs me―and it sometimes does, when so many have so little―I walk out upon the meadow, where I can see for a great distance. It helps. I stand silent, overwhelmed with the pain I see, yearning over life upon this heated earth, willing such a peace as this upon the world.

Willing a Sabbath rest upon the world.

“Peace, peace . . . .”  It will not come easily, such a Sabbath.

Above me the branches fidget lightly; their shadows dance easily, back and forth, across my outstretched legs. On the radio, the concerto rises and falls in its lessening and strengthening, like a turbulence of thunder . . . .

Like a fervent storm come down upon the airwaves.

Like a great and lovely storm, a cleansing.

The Journey to the Journal

Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

It began with an invitation to house-sit. A chance to get away, break loose from the "ordinary," the expected, and, let's be honest, the grief that had backed up inside. A time to shed some hard soul-grit that I'd carefully swept into the corners and closets of my life . . . lest anyone suspect I harbored such detritus. The unseemly and, I always hoped, unseen.

A proverbial "empty-nester" by now, I was lost. Not that I mourned for our three young ones all that much or often—they had left comfortably, in stages, by ages, for school and promising new lives, new livelihood—still near enough to show up when the dinner menu tugged. My husband was absorbed in a job that fit, that filled any empty spaces between us. It wasn't him I couldn't tote into any equation of tomorrow. I had simply lost tomorrow.

And so, yeah, I'd be glad to hang out a while on a funky old ranch. I grew up in the foothills of Colorado, and bunkhouses were no anomaly. It would be kind of like back-pedaling to a less mean and more lean time, when inevitable complications were manageable and I had the stamina to fix  whatever I thought needed righting. Yes, I realized that three months was a long commitment, but she'd agreed to only half of each week on site. I could see doing that. In fact, I could hardly wait . . . .

Sometimes adventure simply means a sidestep from despair.

And so I set myself up for a nice little trio of days into weeks into months. It sounded a tad scary, but shiver-scary, not trauma-scary.

Sometimes unknown is better than an endless known.

~*~*~*~*~

So I showed up, out there beyond the trappings of our busy world, where the brazen hills bulge up and down in anonymity. Sky Mesa Ranch: A bit or more down at the heels, redolent and raw with nature, left behind in a bright new age of tech. A paradigm and homely parable. I found there, to my surprise, an evolving link with the history of our lost beginnings—of my lost beginnings and unwieldy endings. And yes, our-my lost belonging, in this risky edge of life we have all begun to mourn. It was like stepping onto a bridge between Alice's rabbit hole and Gulliver's infamous Lilliput.

This journal is a strangeling, an unpremeditated tour into timeless Premises, both meanings. A book of hours. Time to learn and relearn reflection, to measure earth's shadows against the unexpected Light. Time to wander and to wonder. To tenderize—to begin at last to hear, with new-opened ears, the weary heartbeat of a struggling world.

The Journey is yours too, for the taking. Join me there. 

To purchase a copy of Sky Mesa Journal, please visit the Amazon link in the sidebar or click here: Sky Mesa Journal available now on Kindle and in paperback. 

We would be most grateful for Amazon and Goodreads reviews. Thank you.  

Harvesting Eden

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

This post was originally published on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 19 August 2015.

Today I stewed up a vat of plums gathered from the arching boughs of our two trees out back. Tomorrow is Jam Day, a sticky-messy sauna of stirring and puree-ing and sprinkling in the magic of sugar and pectin. Then . . . oh, tasting the fruit of my labor! On homemade bread, I insist. Only that will do. The bread has been waiting, frozen, for this first sweet moment.

We planted our small orchard―a plum, two apples, a pear, a cherry―nearly a quarter century ago. My original vision didn’t extend beyond the thought of these now-weighted branches. Of picking as if I were a child turned loose in a candy store, envisioning a sweet-wild taste in my mouth that no grocery purchase could touch. My teeth almost ached with lust for it all!

And after the first few years of their probing babyhood, my gawky, dusty-green adolescents began to blossom here and there between their shaggy knees and elbows. I recall with delight the first apple blossoms on our small “granny.” Eden!

Nothing less than Eden. My tree. It was my beloved green granny! It still is. My soul is entangled in its lattice of leaves. Last year over a thousand apples ripened through October, like a mis-seasoned Yule tree all decked by nature.

Along the years, by a miracle of nature or bird or critter, three more gift-trees showed up: Our plum gave us many babies each spring, popping up beneath its sweep of limbs. We dug up and gave away some―and kept one, as fertile as its mama. Out front, in an old wooden tub of soil, an apricot seed cracked open and unfurled, and soon enough fruited.

Today, long and firmly grounded, it perfectly shades our spare bedroom, dangling its small golden-orange globes in front of the window. And in the tangle of vinca beside our front porch, a “bush” thrust up one spring, filling a bald space nicely. Lo, in a couple of years its strangely familiar blossoms spoke for it: apple! Rosy, tangy-sweet fruit now replicates delicately, bobbing in the breeze.

A bit like Elijah in his cave, we are, in God’s quirky generosity, fed by ravens―yes, those hulking black shadows in the pine which nag incessantly, lest we forget that we owe them a dole a day from the seed bin. A fair trade indeed.

Now, upon this day, standing at the kitchen window, I see His current-timeless panorama. Our trees have aged along with us―creaky, a bit more brittle of limb. Weighted with fruit, or waiting―an inward thrust we cannot measure. Occasionally barren. Seasons of drought and of bounty . . . each of us, trees planted. Life as orchard.

Younger friends now come by in early summer and scale our ladders, with long-pole pruners in hand. They stretch to heights of our pear tree that we cannot, dare not reach―to trim dangerously bending branches. To cull what seems far too many immature pears. Ah, the timeless reluctance of letting go―of ladders, of fruit! Of whatever we cannot climb or carry. Weighing the promise of abundance against the poverties of broken. We have learned broken.

And now this new, sweet harvest―knowing this: These pears and grannies, et al, this varied fruit―“my” fruit―I have discovered, is not mine at all, beyond the tending. Its unprecedented largess, newly picked or processed―by me, by delighted others―is scattered around the village and sometimes far beyond. That is the wonderful way of His Kingdom. The trees I have pruned are part of my own essential life-pruning. That’s His way too. And so, I celebrate this today also: a fruit-of-life called friending.

I have years of canning, saucing, jamming, freezing, dehydrating behind me. Often done in tandem with friends both young and “almost-my-old” old. The fruit of His labor. The labor of His fruit. My kitchen and heart are full.

This small Eden truly runneth over, flourishing in unexpected soul-soil, bursting through hard shells, blossoming into new identity. Often, oh yes, rooting and blossoming despite the entropy that time imposes, shaping something indefinable . . . sweet and tangy, birthed with promise.

the incarnate, here: excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo from the public domain

I want to share a part of my past that has become an integral part of my today and tomorrow. A quarter-century ago, I was privileged to have been granted a summer (half of each week for over three months) lodged on an old ranch in southern California. A time of healing and rethinking . . . and life-sustaining revelation. It all happened that long ago, and still "happens," in a sense, every day. Every new day.

During my weekly sojourn there, I journaled daily. And left the pages in my files―until now. My book, Sky Mesa Journal, will be out in a few months (Wipf and Stock Publishers). I have lifted a favorite sketch from this work. I'd like you to meet a "beast" who spoke Life to me: Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

the incarnate, here

A donkey lives here. Linda is a sag of bones and ripple of tired muscle and thatch of unkempt pelt. Linda is a belly that looks ready to burst with foal; she is as old in donkey-years as Sarai was to Abraham, and her womb is long empty. Linda is two rheumy eyes that beg for something she cannot name and I cannot give. Linda leans with a sigh against the uncertain fence, or against my unfamiliar hand, and my heart aches. It is, perhaps, foolish to love a donkey so——and so quickly. But I am often foolish.

When I watch Linda, I am always struck by her patience. Donkeys are traditionally “temperamental.” Not so, not here! Linda lost her mate last winter. Surely the beasts of the field know grief and loneliness; I see it in her eyes. Perhaps it is this that gives her an air of quiet grace. That’s an unusual statement to make of a donkey——especially one with as broken-down a chassis as this one.

Somehow this gives me consolation——sharing this time and place with her. There is such a separation between human lives, the processes of getting along, getting ahead, getting by——and the natural world, that which we call wild, which struggles on, much too tangential to our own.

We see a flash or so of the other “order” in our passages between our life experiences, or perhaps more likely, when these experiences wane. We may dote upon the pets around our feet (and they are often vital, life-enriching―and sometimes, perhaps, our stead, our alter egos). But for most of us the breadth of the animal world exists mainly behind bars and barriers of place and purpose.

We cannot, by our minimal exposure, know the great heart of an elephant. Learn patience from the patterning of a covey of quail. Explain the explicit cosmos of the bee. We see too little value in the furry and feathery denizens of this planet, other than admiring their occasional beauty or oddity. Or granting our continual and anonymous picking clean of the bones of the edible.

But I see the incarnate, here―in this old gray lady-beast. An embodiment laid firmly, consciously, upon the earth-life all around me. In Linda’s gaunt dignity I am reminded of the promised Child who was carried lightly upon her once, the fullness in His mother’s womb.

I see the sorrow of the man-Christ, the weight of His burden for Jerusalem, for humanity . . . and how the weight of us all has bowed the back of this beast of burden.

It is not unkind to ride a donkey. But mankind has ridden too far, too long, on the back of nature, and has never reached Jerusalem.

Linda is “only” a beast, a domesticated animal rummaging at the fence-edge, at the far edge of a long and well-lived life.

When she leans her frowzy head against me, Christ weeps with us both.


And I would give life back to her, if it were my gift to give.

After Resurrection

Photo from the public domain

The morning after my mother died, a sparrow crashed into our large picture window. I rushed outside and stood looking down at it—a rumpled little female sparrow, her dangling head and convulsed feet and splayed wings telling the truth. One more small heartache.  I bent and picked her up, Dead. Except, when I folded her gently into my shaky hand, I felt a slow, frail  thump against my fingers. Her heart had not yet quit. I could not lay her down, could not give her up. For several hours I cradled this little body, stroked the twisted neck, untangled the  claws, folded the wings. Sang to her . . . and walked blindly through my chores, holding her close.

My mother's heart had beat slowly like this, a small, persistent thud-bump, a metronome, for days beyond the dying of her self. Now I had to wait it out, walk it through again, for reasons that I could not formulate.

At the end of a long morning, birdie suddenly stirred against my palm. Her eyes flicked open, shut, open, staring at me. No fear, simply "Who are you?" I talked to her softly, ran my finger lightly down her neck, and felt the sudden strength that straightened it. At that moment, Life was the sparrow and me, breaking through a barrier. There was nothing else. She wriggled suddenly, and I turned her over, stroking her disheveled back. Holding her just loosely enough to give her wiggle-room.

We walked around the yard thus while she squirmed, cocked her head, surveyed the landscape. I took her into the kitchen, slipped her gently onto the table.

At first she simply huddled there. And then, in a beautiful slow motion dance, she began to practice the patterns learned as a hatchling. Doing push-ups, getting the kinks out, maybe. Strengthening her matchstick legs—those springboards to a good takeoff, which every flying critter needs. Up and down, toenails gripping the tablecloth. She swiveled around now, perfectly content to use my table, my kitchen, for her pre-flight maneuvers—stretching her wings, nodding her head elaborately, like a dancer receiving Bravo's.

Slowly I reached, cupped her in my hand again without her protest, and carried her out on the deck. And then I heard it, for the first time: from a nearby pepper tree, a frantic bird call. A sparrow, of course, over and over, a small, shattering lament. I knew. Birdie knew.

I put her on the railing. She shook herself heartily, leaned ahead and cocked her head forward, one last time, like a runner at the chocks. Off she went, dipping a bit precariously . . . and then, and then she soared. A grand flutter of leaves high in the pepper, a raucous duet. Home.

Resurrection. A trail of tears that comes to an "impossible" end—Life renewed at the end of end. And yes, my frail little mama was Home, I knew.

A strange way to say miracle. But we always need new language, new framing for the housing of our hopes. For the phrasing of our falling and our rising. We too soon forget. That's what has happened, too often, too ubiquitously, to Resurrection. It's too often buried in the tomb, having died a thousand-thousand deaths by the hands and words . . . and yes, the hollowing of messengers who speak by rote, who have never fallen, broken by life . . . and soared.

Before we make that final plunge into the unKnown—that precarious, breathless, extravagant  dip and rise upon sudden wings—we are granted many a rehearsal, many an encore. Learning to live fully and die often. Little deaths: a sudden snap between the synapses—ZAP!—and eternity breaks loose in the sludgy soul, the bloated brain, the brittle heart, and something new comes forth. A small, bare death, and a delicate cell of Truth is born, unfolds, flowers. An "Aha!" A new perception out of the muck of our last thought. The act of Genesis again. And ever again. Unending. That possibility which proves the impossibility of impossible.

Where we are called to live . . . in all the small and untidy and heartbreaking places.

Prayers with Wings

Dove in Flight-public domain

Oaks and a few struggling pines snug down into this pocket valley, offering refuge from the mid-day heat. Above the aged line of treetops, a barren hillock lunges upward, step by jagged step. From where I sit, this shady dent in the earth is the palm of God’s great hand.

Beyond me lies “the world” and all its machinations, its splendors, its complexities, its uncounted woes

A simplistic scenario, of course. Woe and splendor are played out here as elsewhere. But for the moment, I can settle back beneath the branches of this gnarly old behemoth and pretend we are sequestered here together.

We see beyond us the long, tangled-scrub heights, a fairly formidable barrier, and beyond that the great unknown where “the rest of the world lives and dies.” It is, for now, beyond our seeing.

Now let's imagine sudden wings upon our backs. We are able to rise above these “formidable” heights and see beyond. The heights have shrunk beneath us, and now breadth is our barrier. So much of a muchness! Too much to take in, to compress into a soul-scape sized to our perceiving.

And once again we are instantly equipped for this great transposition. We have only to lock our eyes upon some small, distant point . . . and we are there. It lies before us, demystified.

Now we see with unaccustomed clarity, close up, what once was simply an unknown―or a vague perplexity, a perhaps dangerous complexity, with attributes that distance had distorted. Now we know what is, and our response is subject to our sudden fuller vision.

Back and forth we go, from one compelling spot or scene to another, taking in the new landscape, perceiving what is in the context of all that lies around it―all we never really knew before.

And then, back once again in our familiar “pocket,” we are changed; we are spoiled for the old margins and myopias that so long constricted us. We will go out beyond the barriers of height and breadth, on the wing of expanded thought…on the Wing of Prayer. We will see, or more aptly, perceive, and we will know. And we will listen for the Word that puts it all in focus.

Vision . . . the point of this small, homely metaphor. Vision creates the kind of prayer that leaps all barriers of land and mind and spirit. And of course, prayer creates the kind of Vision that knows no barriers. It is this sacred synergy that draws us to that God-filled dimension, “a little lower than the angels,” where the real work of the Kingdom is done.

A great leap of faith indeed.

Vision . . . that insight/hindsight/foresight Begotten within us when we aren't gnawing on the bones of earth. We often have wings when we least expect and most need them—and now we feel the push and rush of wind beneath our aspirations. This is an uncommon-common gift of God, this perception. It is meant to be ordinary—which is why it is extraordinary.

Humanity is, by nature, bred to think beyond our small world-set, but it is our own questing thoughts (and those of others) that guide us. When God moves upon us, He infiltrates; it is a beautiful Awakening. Our responses to ordinary become, if we choose, extraordinary. Seeing beyond sight. Knowing beyond our staid or heated opinion. Our conjectures and mental-emotional particularities are confirmed or amended or shredded—with sudden and often compelling clarity. For the smallest reasons, by our reckoning. It is, perhaps, the difference between begrudging and believing. The schism between pouting and praying. It is meant to become our ordinary, this Second Sight—for greater reasons than we can imagine, by the reckoning of God. And this is the ground laid for prayer.

When this wonderfully real Gift comes, it comes at the point of sacrifice—our willing escape from that prison-of-mind which long constrained us. When we are touched by this costly commonality—unity—this hidden treasure released in us and by us, we are free. We become real. More real than we ever pretended to before. And everything looks different.

In our stumble of living, there is refuge from our raw responses. We are, when we plead, held in the palm of God’s great hand, to learn and to tell back what we now see.

Our prayers will have wings.

What Nature Teaches: On Suffering and Steadiness

My "neck o' the woods" -- photo by Judith Deem Dupree

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine blog on May 8, 2015

You may view the original blog post HERE.

I live in the southwest, or, more particularly, the far southwest corner of this great, rugged-ragged hunk of earth―where it ends in an endless seascape. It―San Diego County―is an unordinary panorama, with its potpourri of terrains and neighborhoods and breathtaking shorelines.

Further inland, beyond the continuous clots of habitation, a long, slow rise unfolds―undulating hills and creviced valleys peppered with flocks of live oak and manzanita, strewn with sage, the “heather” of our terrain. And yes, this nearly-uni-season haven―daydream of many an east coast “survivor,” is also an ongoing, four-season lesson in durability and fragility…endurance and defenselessness.

Some days ago the wind lashed at us again: It comes as a thief, a wild beast racing free, pouncing, devouring, sucking the lifeblood from all things green, sucking the soul from life. Conjuror of fiery death. Santa Ana, they call it. Or devil wind, appropriately, breeder of fire. Oh, they are not frequent, but once a lifetime is many times too often.

We who live in the sprinkling of small villages that cling to the backcountry hills―savoring their timeless simplicity/eccentricity―have learned to live with our ears tuned for this telltale roar. The howling voice of nature gone insane.

In one of these fires, a friend lost everything but her life, and nearly that. She has written a book that takes us through the fear, the horror that she experienced―and deaths too grisly to describe, too near and known to forget. Ultimately she has come into abundant life. The transformation from victim to “victor” was not, of course, quick and easy. But today she celebrates the new radiance of living, and we feed upon the richness of her testimony! (You may check out her book, The Fire Outside My Window, at her website: sandramillersyounger.com.)

Twice through our years here I have been paralyzed with such fear, watching the great trees beside (and fringing) our house groan and teeter with their incessant whipping, felt the crescendo of crashing limbs upon our shattered deck, inches from our windows. I have seen the dark bloom of smoke on the near horizon, the way it flares to crimson and consumes the sky. I have coughed incessantly in the acrid air. (And yes, we have fled, wisely, when the wind turned its dark face toward us.)

And so I have become, gradually, both “tenacious and tentative.” I have forged something akin to strength, to endurance―qualities I never claimed, never fully understood.

Nature teaches us such stern lessons: Seek its beauty, solace, incomparable inspiration. Memorize and celebrate its great and small particularities―treasures beyond description, beyond the artist’s brush or camera lens . . . and carry them lightly. Holy sustenance. Let them “feed the stream” that feeds us, that balances us when all the smallness and dailyness, the shriveledness of life closes us in. That gives us breath when we are sour with despair.

That teaches us, over and over, to inhale and release. Love and let go.

Now each sunrise and sunset that my friend experiences upon that once fiery mountain is a radiance of a new sort. The gift of endurance and its wordless wonder is born from the ashes of utter defenselessness.

I have seen, and known, this life-taught gift again and again.

There are many heartbreaks, a slight or brutal chain of them draped upon us all. To live is to come to terms with suffering, to come to birth in a new landscape. Whether or when we are brutalized by the weather of nature or the nature of mankind, or the distorted nature of our own cells, we may search out a way to see beyond the rubble.

All losses are not finally, ultimately, losses. A house and its heritage, our history, is not our life. We cannot understand the heights of wholeness, the miracle of eternal Now, until we know this.

Daily we face the endless unraveling of life across this haunted earth, and across the street, and in our sometimes haunted homes, and our throats choke up. We have to mourn; it is a gift and a tithe and a demand that God lays upon us―and yet, soon or later, we turn/are turned once again to the delicacy and clumsiness of that dailyness we live in. Of course! It must be so; we are not meant to mourn our way through the days.

No, Christ mourned merely for a moment before the tomb of His friend Lazarus―wept with his grieving sisters. And then . . . He turned back to the tomb and called out: “Come forth.”

Another dear sister discovers that a fire is raging through her body. It is not benign. Her new Landscape is both uncertain and quite certain. I am mourning for one long moment with/for her. Her eyes crinkle with uncontained love for all the varied dear ones sharing time and bread and written-down words and pungent herbs. There is a Table spread before her. She is living to the uttermost, readying for the eternal Now.

The call to us each, I believe, is to come forth. To fully live―in but not for the things and ways and means that have necessarily engaged us, and yes, entombed us. We forbid them to define, to engulf, to drive us to fear the frenzies that drive the world. The gift is to learn to dwell with steadiness upon the desert of smallness, wade steadily through the swamp of misery. Without becoming small. Without allowing pain, loss, to devour the holiness of this-day-given.

We can live broken-mended on the raw edge of life―without edginess, knowing cell-deep that all,all of life, is both durable and endurable. Fraught with peril, seasoned with grief, and raucous with joy. Timeless . . . and so very fragile.

We are created to embrace and release, over and over. To find a way to face the roar of wind without collapsing. To rise from a fearful crouch. To stoke our wounded soul on sudden sunrise.