In the Sound of Sheer Silence

In a motel room and awake before dawn, having showered and shaved, I sat in a chair in the dark for some while. The rush of the a/c unit’s fan pushed air noisily about the small room. The abrupt disturbance of a door opening and closing across the hall shook even the door to my room. Outside a fire engine blazed by with din of siren and lights. Then racket of fan and door and fire engine went quiet. Utterly. In the sound of sheer silence, God, intimately present: questioning, challenging, assuring.

Images of Grasses

When I was at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (Dorchester County, Maryland's eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay) earlier in the summer, I was entranced by the grasses, and by the grasses and water. Such varieties of grasses: textures; heights; colors; densities. I took several photographs. I could spend a long time observing the many grasses in their varied contexts of time and place, of light and air, of weathers and seasons. I wonder if I could produce a set of quality photographs. I would like to try. It would take extended time and effort. Yet the possibility stimulates and pulls me.

And related to this, I think some artist ought to compose "A Symphony of Grasses," or at least an extended tone poem, to evoke the textures, heights, colors, densities. I would only need to learn more about music and grasses. Ah, but for another life.

Present Circumstances, Present Self

How in the ambiguity of my present circumstances, not some imagined or desired ideal circumstances, can I glorify God? How in the ambiguity of my present self, not some imagined or desired ideal self, can I embody and manifest the truth, beauty, and goodness of God's kingdom? These questions have long wrestled me.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

At the end of the twelfth day,
it wells up. How many more?
How many more Christmases
to wonder and carol, to wander?

To ponder keenly in this regard,
we think peculiar to late years.
Yet truly it shadows one and all,
whether many or few remain,

Christmases, that is, since his cry,
for shepherds far at night in fields,
for mother pierced to the morrow,
for young and old alike, for me.

The Winter Garden

The winter garden,
pared and cleared,
bides in time,
no mind or heart
for hour or day,
nor length of night,
just life in still,
bare-limbed,
cold-clod,
plant and soil;
when of a sudden
air to earth
wings a cardinal,
as if a hinge
of time, of summer,
memory and hope,
seeded in us,
sursum corda,
while we face
the coming snow.

The Space Between

In the confession in Morning Prayer, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we daily admit our wrongdoing and failure: "We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent." And daily I stop short between these two sentences. Will I cross the space?

A Psalm in Two Questions

Has God in mercy
spared my life
these many years?
Or, just to censure,
mercy spared,
many these years?