Brightness WILL Flame Up Once More

We actually had a full sunny day today!  Yardwork ensued all up and down the street (our house included).   - mowing, edging.  Kids - ours, neighborhood friends, visiting family - all playing in the driveway ... up and down the street - almost at a feverpitch of play and not a jacket or hoodie in sight.  They went from bikes to skateboards to basketball ... all the things they've missed during the cold and rainy days.  They wanted to do it ALL!  No one wanted to go inside even as daylight dimmed ... and there was no pile of muddy shoes left outside the door to be cleaned.  All the scents and sounds of the day - fresh cut grass, buzzing mowers, neighbors standing in the sun to rest on their tools and chat,  kids voices and laughter at play  - I felt spring actually "click" into place.

The events around this world have drained me worse than winter and just as I was feeling the dark and drear of overwhelm Spring is here - as promised - to give me respite, refueling, recharging, rekindling, renewal - spiritual hope and reassurance that my faith is well placed - in Good and Powerful hands.

“Now winter, the winter I am writing about begins to ease. And what if anything has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age–events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on…”


- MARY OLIVER -

FOR FREEDOM

As a bird soars high
In the free holding of the wind,
Clear of the certainty of ground,
Opening the imagination of wings
Into the grace of emptiness
To fulfill new voyagings,
May your life awaken
To the call of its freedom.

As the ocean absolves itself
Of the expectation of land,
Approaching only
In the form of waves
That fill and pleat and fall
With such gradual elegance
As to make of the limit
A sonorous threshold
Whose music echoes back among
The give and strain of memory,
Thus may your heart know the patience
That can draw infinity from limitation.

As the embrace of the earth
Welcomes all we call death,
Taking deep into itself
The right solitude of a seed,
Allowing it time
To shed the grip of former form
And give way to a deeper generosity
That will one day send it forth,
A tree into springtime,
May all that holds you
Fall from its hungry ledge
Into the fecund surge of your heart.

~ John O’Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)