I am reading David Whyte, poet and author. In The Three Marriages he writes:
"Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind o f acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking."

Here's a blessing I am using at the end of worship these days. I was inspired by a Christmas blessing by Fra Giovanni who died in about 1513.

A Blessing

May God bless you with eyes to see God – God who is all that you need – and that God is very near at hand.

May God bless you with the courage to find heaven in your heart. For you cannot find it elsewhere. Find heaven.

May God bless you with the patience to discover the fullness of God’s Peace which is not to be awaited in some grand or far-off future, but is in the face of your neighbor today. Find peace.

May God bless you with a hope that sees beyond any gloom in your life today, that sees through the shadow of this present hour to what is more true in the light behind the shadow, God’s joy. Find joy.

God’s Day is breaking here and always. May you be blessed by the God who is all in all and may you take this ever real God to everyone you meet that they may be blessed also. Amen.

Chocolate

One of my friends noticed that the title to this blog promises musings about many things and that the musings have delivered each and all except . . . chocolate. How could I go so long with nothing about chocolate? This is not like me. Especially in difficult and challenging times such as I find myself right now (more on that in other posts to come). I have always sided with J.K. Rowling who says in her Harry Potter books that chocolate can send away the dementors (the dark forces). At any rate, I shall try to find more to say about chocolate. Let this just suffice to at least make the heading on the blog correct that there is indeed chocolate mentioned here! I even found a picture of some chocolate. This is my son, Josh, celebrating his 19th birthday with a chocolate cake! You can see the dementors running away in his smile even before he takes a bite!

Sky blue home
Delicate as a kiss
Surrounds like a caress
The green life.

It will only last a spring's brief week
If that,
But home will remain
In the amphibian
Heart
On those summer nights when he is sated
With flies and mosquitoes.

Home will call
And he will yearn
Sated but unsatisfied
Until he find again
The ephemeral kiss of home
And the caress
Of the blue sky.

You said you do not like

Silly books of fantasy.

But what remains without them?

Just analysis and games.

(And even they do not escape it.)

I cannot see this world

Except with fantastic eyes

That dream

Imagine

Hope.

Puck magicks Shakespeare now

And angels message God.

The truth lives in the gap

Between

What is and what

Might be.

Fantasized, we journey

We soar.

Dreamless, we only sleep.

Poems, for me, are usually gifts that I receive. It may take hours and days to unwrap them and work with them, but they come to me a pure grace that I must refine in order to find the best of the gift. This morning early, I received this gift below. Hopefully, I have worked my part out to dig up the grace of it.

Yesterday, in the freshly turned earth
I sprinkled seed
With green hope that the wet, dark grit
That boasts the sweet smell of transformation
Would birth basil for fall pesto
And summer marigolds of yellow and orange.

This morning I find that others also have
Spring fever.
The red maple across the yard
Has flung its red propellored wings to the promising soil.
And among the veined, delicate embryos
More wings
White
And triangular
From a night moth
Whose body has gone to feed the wren chicks.

The Swan

I am reading a marvelous little book by Mary Oliver right now called Winter Hours. If you don't know Mary, you might look for her poems on line or dig into a library volume. She is a great New England poet of our own age after so many that have written before her. Mary speaks honestly and simply about what a poem must be for her in winter hours; and her honesty is disarming and lovely. She says, among other things, that at their best moments her poems ask a question and leave it unanswered. I know, I think, what she means. But I am not sure if it is really to leave the question unanswered so much as to be faithful and courageous enough to ask the questions and point at answers that are all beyond the light our human eyes can see -- to reach in the shadows of something greater than we will ever know with our minds or words or touching or chewing. For me the best poetry doesn't just ask questions, but it looks beyond questions to the deeper challenge where wordy questions fall apart, crack under the strain, and become so much distance between the truth and our little brains. I am not sure she -- Mary Oliver -- would disagree with me here. She lets her luminous poem, The Swan, speak of this in ways her simple words in the prelude to the poem cannot. The Swan does ask a question without an answer. But the question itself already points beyond the words to white wings and other shores beyond our knowing. May we never, in poetry or life, settle for even good questions without answers but always journey beyond.