Tag Archives: Life

“I AM has sent me to you.” – Exodus 3:14

God of Now and
God of Then and
God of Will Be,
who endlessly appears in the corners of our eyes,
burning,
in a bush, in a smile, in a picture and
in the alighting of a falcon in a tree;
we imagine your name in our imaginings
and find our thoughts far too narrow and small 
for pure being to settle into us in these dizzy days;
send us into the realm of corners where we dare 
to believe nothing is true and sacred and,
burning,
we may be seen rising in our finest moment of freedom.
Amen.

The Pit and Stones

Life is a lesson in loosening absolutes;
separate from a connection to any particulars;
like the pit inside a peach letting go of the fruit.

Take a walk around the block holding the hand
of your favorite belief and see how many steps 
it takes before collapsing on to the concrete.

Some people like to slice time up as if it were a pie,
hoping to eat a piece of the morning before the sun
rises above the straight roof line at the treetops.  

How many first stones not thrown lie one on top 
of another, creating a pile next to us which we
can then use to build a walkway to our next love?

Different From Yesterday

I said, "My fear is that organizational
formality will swallow all of us whole."

She asked, "Does that fear arise from 
the dangerous memories that haunt you
or from some gracious hint from the divine?"

I said, "A life's pilgrimage lives in the steps
taken closer to my heart than out beyond
the land that rises in the West."

She said, "Imagine big smiley faces written
lovingly across the pages of your notebook."

I said, "I am keenly aware of how, unburdened
from affliction, we reach a state of grace."

She said, "Then let us broaden our experience
of time's moments differently than yesterday."

A New Home

I have yet to attend a funeral where the officiant
declares, The deceased has gone to hell.  Does 
that absence, or avoidance, create some strange
disservice to those who survive?  Perhaps a 
detriment to the deceased?  It is our enormous 
error to view the present state of nature 
as a punishment for divinely-prohibited, fruit-
nibbling.  While there are those who still feel 
that the sun is the center of their universe, 
I choose to bring the newborn baby home
with the expectation that tradition will give
her all that has been created and fall away
to something terribly and wonderfully new.

To Live, Just Once

I keep "Minute" perpetually on my shopping list,
hoping to find one on the grocery shelf tucked 
between the dried blueberries and granola.
And then to find another and another and another.

A strange way to seek immortality - no less bizarre
than traipsing off through a jungle in search of some
mythical fountain of life where a sip of bubbling water
promises an additional breath for each breath drawn.

To live another day - to experience one more hurricane,
more casualties of war, a sunrise and another summer
of the buzz of cicadas - with permission from life
to get out of bed and to be a beginner again.

Is one experience of body-surfing a wave into the beach
not enough?  The taste of banana taffy again?  To hold
the hand of my beloved?  Or do I search for more time 
afraid that, like birth, death will only happen once?