I’ll Leave the Light on for You

This article was originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine blog on 12 February 2019.

* * *

It’s getting dark out here. It’s harder to see the beauty that the eye yearns to fix on, like the way a child stands entranced before moonlight. Sometimes we cannot find the flame of Hope that keeps the soul steady—when the footing is rough and we cannot feel the Way Homeward. When Home is not visible, when we do not know what Home is. These days it’s a rugged uphill zigzag, groping for familiar signs that have always glimmered just a step or two beyond our clumsy reckoning—like a low drift of stars above a stark, dark hillside.

Sometimes it’s lonely, slipping into shadows that are patterned by a glare of harsh light.

I have lived a long life in a world too few would recognize now. I reckon, by today’s standards, it was “old fashioned.” Simplistic? We managed to live with an ingrained sense of simplicity, of sufficiency. Our lives defied any particular sort of accumulation. In my community, we didn’t experience what wealth or the utter lack of it can do to the human soul, because we didn’t face either alternative: glut or bare subsisting. My professor-papa and his mix of friends were on the same scale at the church, the school, the grocer’s, the gas station. They were there for each other in the things that counted—perhaps a side of beef from the latest butchering, hand-me-downs for the ever-sprouting kids, a strong right arm with a grip on a hammer. Or most likely, a long-strong shared grip on the collateral of daily life.

In that lost world, we didn’t count our “farthings” as if they were our life. We all “did without” during a horrendous war far from our front doors. If your car was up on blocks due to a lack of rubber, or our car was too run down to repair without new parts, we swung by for a ride. Or walked. Or streetcar’d or bussed or hauled out the old bike & patched the tires over and over.

The complexity of our interdependence was a multiple of life’s simplicities. We could not imagine today’s equations—the knot of interwoven superfluities that goad us.

War was our unseen enemy, but when the lights went out for air raid drill, the darkness did not grip. It was not fear that drew us close, not in the great Midwest, but a life-changing grief. We mourned over something much greater, more eternal than our stringent days: Our hearts were ripped, were riven over the endless cruelty unleashed by “civilized” society.

It was a time and place in history unlike any other. A long, hard historic moment-momentum of discovery, of recovery, that will never recur in quite the same way, and will forever illuminate the shadows of our need. This, this fortress that arose in a timeless panoply of Truth, is where a stranger suddenly becomes a friend. Here, and anywhere. Even our enemies. Especially them, at the end of it all. Despite all our moral failures as a nation, this lesson learned seemed to be our redemption.

Today, too, is a time unlike any other. We find the U.S. difficult to recognize now. The gloom, the clotting of our national soul. The grip of a strong right arm on the neck of civility. Today, those who rule us make war, tell us whether we are above or below our neighbors, tell us we need anything and everything. Today we so often listen to the wrong voices, and too often make the wrong choices.

Today, a friend who was etched into our heart becomes a stranger. Today, a servant of our nation devolves into a sycophant. Today, our concept of community, of neighbor, is ravaged by false dichotomies.

Today, our every day, is a eulogy for what our nation always proclaimed to uphold. Today, portions of our nation’s past lie shattered, strewn across the borders of our states, and we have raised new “boundaries” that name us. That shame us. Today is a darkness we have made, by action or consent . . . or by the kind of inaction that forfeits what we most need because it comes as a cost to our personal comfort.

Home is not visible. We don’t know what Home is. I am old, and I have lived and learned—by heart, and years of stumbling—where the footing jogs and where it runs true. I have seen the falling of the darkness and the way it swallows us. And I believe in miracles—a glow, a radiance that each of us is meant to yearn for, to soak in, to wear against our hearts— to guard against the lengthening shadows. I believe in you who shrug the darkness.

I’ll leave the light on for you.

~Judith

Seeing Sideways

Originally posted on the Ruminate Blog on 1 February 2017: "Seeing Sideways"

It was raining again when I walked out of church—a slow spritz that would invoke a guffaw in the saturated NorthEast. But in California it was, Oh yay, rain! I smiled, raised my umbrella, and headed across the street.

And I saw him standing there. Facing the church, holding a ragged cardboard "help" sign. My first thought: Panhandling, of course. He knows how to 'guilt' people! Get them coming out of church, stoked with a good sermon on 'doing unto others.'  But he was directly between me and the parking lot, and to evade him would have looked obvious. Yeah, evasive. We know it well.

So I walked directly up to him. I was almost surprised to look into the face of someone as alert and "normal" as other folks zigging past us. Not one of the usual street people. His eyes were intensely blue, clear, observant—the word benevolent occurred to me. Strangely, because he was seeking our benevolence. Here he was, slightly shivering, damp and uncovered, and he might have been handing out bonbons or tracts, for the look on his face. 

Not a tinge of down and out.

"Hi, my name's Jerry.* I'm an ex-Marine, on disability, and the checks quit coming. I'm trying to get through the legalese and straighten it out. I'm supposed to have more surgery." His declaration was quiet, well-modulated. He stopped and lifted the cuff of his knee-length khakis. His leg was distorted, and a thatch of scarring ran from ankle to mid-thigh, where it disappeared under cover. He looked straight at me. "Afghanistan. I survived. Got patched up, discharged. And lost my home, lost my address, pension, medical . . . lost it all." It was matter-of-fact, direct. "I need a bus pass to go get help. A monthly pass—so I can go back and forth and deal with all the government paper work and stuff."  He explained it all carefully, his reason for asking.

"Where are you staying?" He obviously wasn't rumpled and unbathed, unshaved.

He gestured behind him. "Oh, there's a shelter a few blocks down. No computers, nothing but a free bed. Me and 250 other guys." He smiled ruefully. And then he grinned. That surprised me—the way he shrugged off the hardship of his predicament.

"God knows where I am. The bus will take me where I need to go." He said it quietly, carefully. He was watching me closely.

And I knew: He was a believer. Jerry came to us, to believers—not complaining, but directly presenting his need. Directly focused on what we could do to get him through. Our brother.

We talked a bit more about that—the Connection. I dug in my wallet and handed him a small wad. My husband came by, assessed the basics and added another bill. A sister scurried over, carrying a jacket, and helped him into it, adding a bright purple "girlie" umbrella and a quick hug. We all laughed at "purple." With a suddenness that amazed me, we were a small, brief family—HIS people standing there, damp and undampened by weather or "whethers." It was a meeting of Minds, of mindsets that were timeless, that were set in Place, in focus, over 2000 years earlier.

This man wasn't a beggar wheedling. He was our brother, setting himself before us, whole and broken, trusting in our broken wholeness. Jerry was our unfamiliar friend who needed a daily ride to the right place for the right reasons.

Because God knows where he needs to go.

Our adult class this morning focused on indifference: What it has done to the world we live in, to the people we live with—nearby or distant. The Jerry's of our world have been defeated by indifference. By bureaucracies that regularly ignore/avoid too many "Jerry's." By nations preoccupied with real or supposed exigencies, and cities that have grown apathetic about the "dregs of humanity" that litter their sidewalks and make everyone uncomfortable simply by being. And we, by our preoccupation with the nitty-gritties of our own lives, and yes, by our own care-less-ness. I have often been guilty.

The Good Samaritan comes to mind here. His inner eyes weren't focused on his own pending situation—the why's and wherefore's of his journey, the occupation and preoccupations of purpose. The man, a pariah himself, had "sideways vision" too.

He checked the ditches, walking by.

The things that compel us, distract us, attract us, and fret us—these effectively bind our larger thoughts, blind our wider vision, dim our compassion, our rightful determination. The barriers to our benevolence. We do not clearly see the peripheral "other." Not really. Only smelly, messy, chronic, dysfunctional other. We measure lives by what they have become, and seldom wonder how they got "there," how their lives unraveled, how the right people crossing the street at the right moment (one infinitesimal example) might have changed the outcome.

We overlook the poverty that hovers over the Appalachia's, the dead-end tenements in too many cities, the hovels adjoining crop-fields, the wretched encampments that metastasize beneath freeway overpasses and spill onto our urban avenues.

And the why's and wherefore's escape us. The endless poverties spin on and out―all for 

the want of a horseshoe nail.**

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. 

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

"For want of a battle the Kingdom was lost?" Yes! Yes, it was, is that. His Kingdom lost.

Indifference is the missing nail. We fail to see sideways, and then perceive attentively, the deteriorating state of humanity—the poverty, home-grown and world-wide. Here, it has become simply a familiar backdrop to daily life. Across the barrier of seas, the tide of refugees rises and never wanes. It begins to engulf everything.

When humanity is ready, ultimately, to fight the right battle, to face the inner myopias, to call out—cry out to see through a glass less darkly, to wage peace against the war within and with-out . . . HE will raise us up from the dust of our ploys and pretensions, from the honest griefs and struggles that engulf us. His Kingdom will take shape before us, finally, our eyes clear-seeing.

This is my ultimate "take-away" from a brief encounter with Jerry, a solid-wounded man standing  in a drizzle on the curb across from where I worship. Where I head every Sunday to celebrate and petition the GodMan who sees everything—sideways and inside out. 

Everything.

The One Who rescues because He lay flayed and splayed in the dirt, finally, before the nails—helpless and spat upon. The Rescuer whom we abandoned at the cross. Who comes to us over and over to heal both our abandonment and abandoning, to awaken us, His hurting and hurtful world. To save us from this long indifference.

HE knows where and who we are, each of us. He will take us where we need to go.

                                                            *          *          *

*Name changed for the sake of privacy.

**This ancient proverb, in various forms, has been quoted and repeated for varying uses over the centuries, particularly in Early English writing. Benjamin Franklin also made note of it.

                                                                                                         

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.

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.

Finding Quiet: Silence as Presence

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog, 18 June 2015

The world is speeding up, and I am slowing down. It was inevitable. It’s all right, of course… mostly. As I grow older, life enhances the quiet ways and shoves at the expediencies that used to shove at me.

It is good to quiet down, to make pause without breaking faith with my to-do list, or someone else’s. Good to miss a beat in my endless rumba with that great god Expectation. To laugh at my clumsiness. To slow dance with the Holy Ghost. To fall in love with all the neighbors I have never known, and marvel over the way yeast rises and makes miracles.

I begin to practice yearning, hungering―fingering the world for a larger scope of being, foraging for things that lean back in time and connect with the unknown known. For all the maybe’s I have spilt along the way, that maybe spilled into the eternal. Now, here, I begin to stop and listen to life more suddenly, and, oh, oh I hope more freely.

I think we get lost so easily in the great cacophony that pervades on planet earth. Does this sound overstated? Hyperbole? Of course; and yet, it happens every day, to all of us.

We vibrate to the whole of life, even in our essential partial-ness, our chosen partialities. What is out there pervades. Invades. We cannot help it; we are caught up and moved along by the great, lumbering sum of all the infinitesimal parts. An endless, sometimes relentless tide. We are, each, one of those small fractions, often rubbed raw, bruised by the enormities and the sum of all the smallnesses. It is as hard to put words to all this as it is to live with it. The world, indeed, is too much with us. And so silence, a certain kind of silence, truly is golden.

We so need a sense of it―of silence as a presence within a welter of external stimuli. This reality is dear to me―that silence hides within the bedlam. It is near-aberration in an age of “auditory graphics,” when all that engulfs the world is poured out upon us by every media, from every angle, for every purpose. As if there is no other way to live?

Of course. What we must treasure, what I am defining, is peace. What is notable is that it is imparted in such a way that it bides with us, resides within us. This is renascence! A revelation that becomes a revolution. There is a quiet, a storm shelter, built to the scale of the human heart.

HE says: My peace I give unto you.

Within these few words lie an inner world of rest.

This is peace which cannot long hide beneath our hide. It becomes unquenchable. It flings itself against the ramparts of our neuroses until they crack. It breaks through every Yes, but… that we have posited. The days both here and there and everywhere grow full, full, full of slow or sudden, timeless, ephemeral Graces. They swallow up the nervous jangle of urgencies that wrap us daily.

Be still and know that I am God! I will be exalted…

If His Kingdom is real, it must lie both beyond and within the cacophony. It simply must. And if we are to survive, and to thrive―to live well within our own skin and cope with whatever lies before us, beyond us, we will receive that Rest within the silence that lies beneath the noise.

The “noise” of life doesn’t own us. Finding that quiet “place” beneath―yes, within the existential clang―becomes our grounding, the birth-place of miracles. We carry the seeds wherever we go.

The Reason for the Light

Posted from The Ruminate Magazine blog, 9 June 2016

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

We are artists, of one genre or another, at one stage or another. Our leanings and yearnings are all somehow touched by this reality—which may be a lodestar, or still a flicker on our horizon. But yes, something within us takes shape and form and word because it must. Because it cannot be denied without losing our balance in life.

But it comes with a certain caution, a yes-but that hinges on that word balance. Something has been nibbling at my overloaded psyche, and left me with serious thoughts about an arts-exclusivefocus: Life in the “real world”—the multiple issues that press upon us day by day, and the escalation of national and world problems.

Artists and writers, and all sorts of people who celebrate art and writing, are deeply concerned about the hard issues that life in today’s world imposes. There is an unending interplay between expressing creativity and handling the ordinary and inevitable hard realities of living. We cannot worship creativity at the expense of entering the fray. Art is not a retreat.

This leads us to a slight but obvious shift in focus. A way of stepping outside our normal boundaries and busy-ness, to join others who are affected (perhaps unconsciously) or afflicted (quite consciously) by the rigors of our national life—indeed, global life—and want to better understand and withstand and respond to it as creative people.

We often feel torn between our unmet need for creative expression and the rude facts of living in a sometimes “hostile” world. Admittedly, we may feel guilty at times for wanting to run away to a quiet place. (And yes, our artsy self needs tending!) Growing national and universal distress is the elephant in everyone’s living room. Climate change, global unrest, and societal upheaval confront us each morning. They shape everything by their looming presence before us.

How do we live in light of this encroaching darkness? How do we respond as writers and artists? How does it invade, inform, shape what we do? What do we bring to it that is redemptive?Where might it take us creatively? This may be an entry to new life for us. We would do well to bring our intuitive natures into a larger context—into a heart-full and mindful and authentic response to the problems of today’s very fragile world. We need to step out beyond our comfort zone if we are called to be comforters. I believe this is the prior and priority call upon us each—to gather up our Giftings and offer them as Gifts. No, not “freebies.” Bigger than that.

As people who believe in the value of arts, the practice and enjoyment of them, and their soul-necessity, we can move in small, incremental ways—as people who are not “consumed by consumerism,” or defeated by despair, or captivated by the masks of things simplistic. Or dumbfounded by the endless stream of dark chatter that invades us daily.

How do we “tend” each other and care for those beyond us, in a toughening world? How do we build or join in a supportive community? We can come into it all, become insiders—bearing Light, wearing Light, sharing it. Art in the trenches is a bridge to higher ground. Small steps toward inventive living in times of crisis, a buoy in the flood of crises. We can gather hope from our inner resources, from those around us, and from the wisdom of the past, to create hope for the future.

Does this sound like a healthy challenge? I believe it is. I hold onto this, daily. This is Fine Art.

Come join the adventure. Bring your viewpoint and ideas. Say it with passion and tenderness and hope that defies the shredding darkness. Listen to what our readers, your “neighbors,” have to say. Weave something sturdy, something plain-spoken and beautifully simple into the fabric of life around us all. This is redemptive art . . . the reason for the Light within us.

Cleaning Out the Clutter

Image from the public domain

Originally Posted on The Ruminate Magazine Blog 20 September 2014

We’re cleaning out the garage. Not only this day, but the days and weeks ahead. Step by laborious step.

I am a saver, a re-user, a make-do mama―part of the world-war-raised generation that learned as young children to find a new use for anything usable, for whatever might be spruced up, re-purposed or recombined imaginatively, somehow, any how.

It is a secret and semi-legit and often passionate game I have played for much of a lifetime. And, guess what: not infrequently, it really, really works. An old-new thingamajig to live with once again! A transformation! A victory against planned obsolescence, against humanity’s dreadful, casual waste. Reshaping as art—yes, even that!

And sometimes it truly becomes “yes, even that”: a recreated entity, useful and well-used or imaginative―either by its re-purposing or a heightened, expanded “sameness.” It offers testimony to a sort of, umm, resurrection. Sometimes it is the clay pot―mended, ready for holy water, or perhaps a muddle of shards gathered, sorted and shifted, chinked into mosaic that would never have become.

Confession: More often, I admire and set this gizmo-wonder aside for when I might need it, or someone else might need it . . . and it dies, unseen, forgotten, shelved perhaps for years, a space-robber for the essential―for the freshness of the new new. At what point do these re-creations or salvagings become simply debris? The answer, which I’ve long suspected and often avoided, may be that anything that doesn’t have a viable application is suspect.

But wait; there’s a deeper layer to all this clutter-mutter. My garage is a visible metaphor for the crowded chasm of my mind. The head-cargo is of another sort, but no less wedged and dredged.

Do I really want to rummage my thought-life, unravel my theses for remnants patched together over a lifework of processing the whole of it? Do I even know if I habitually do this―feed upon leftovers gone stale with their keeping? Do they, my patterns of response, become too comfortable/comforting, from years of shoeing them into tight assumptions and new juxtapositions and “Aha!”ing the way I patch my old disparities together? Do my alterations and altercations look suspiciously like rationalizations? Place-holders? Are they that?

Life must be more than a convoluted word game, a scrabble of shifting shapes―runes that might fit somewhere, deciphered somehow. It is self-deception, even arrogance, to assume that our cupboardful of suppositions, profess-ings, rationales, can be lifted from their dusty contexts and cross-stitched into a covering that serves the need.

Consider, oh my soul: Have I played God with all my toying and tinkering in response to life? Is this neuronal closet atop my shoulders likely my storehouse, the Ark I’ve toted place to place to place―my Holy of Holies? ? A crammed repository of symbolism and syllogism that I “need”. . .

. . .to shape the need I need to shape, to shape the house that Judith built?

My real need? To sift through the dust and find out what anchors me, what lies at bedrock. What have I shelved in there― behind, beneath the swift or stuttering articulation that is real life? That absolutely begs to be recycled, refurbished . . . rethought. Reshaped without losing some core identity. Redeemed. Perception that becomes bread, that bestows breath.

The Kingdom of God is surety―a clearinghouse for every cluttered mind or closet. It is time to unload. Time to stand before that disheveled mountain of the unknown, unremembered, unusable, and whittle it down to rock. There, and then, I need only stand. Stand and wait.