Not Quite Naked
/Rain brings sky to earth and everything grows. Spring is a time to consider the benedictions we invoked and a time to knead the blasphemies we incurred into the ground. Do this in remembrance of me.
Everything riots.
Birds – colors – creeks.
Not-quite-naked branches
climb into moonlight,
and by day, shiver
with budding
poetry.
Dawn remains a dusky bruise. I savor these morning solitudes before neighborhood house lights flicker like new constellations. The clock on the dining room wall outwardly marches towards some unknowable destination. It makes me think we belong to the silence, despite traveling with the sound of words into the world.
This tribe of language.
This palette of creation.
These echos of the universe.
Is it possible to face inwards and outwards at the same time? It is this sacrament I now study.
*
When we gaze into these world-mirrors, what is reflected? Do we see the known or unknown? The ancient or the new? The temporal or the eternal?
Gray-white light is reflected in the slick wetness of the deck. Hyacinth and daffodils begin to color April’s thresholds. Staring into both appearances, life emerges as a continuous act of transfiguration involving something seen and unseen. Perhaps it is something like an inner and outer friendship – an intimacy percolating as a wellspring of mysterium. An ancient belonging stirs and unfurls, reminding us that we want to known.
Maybe?
*
Dawn's incredibly generous and gentle light – you peel darkness away from the world with soft, silken fingers. This time of day nurtures friendship with our mother earth. How many of us now miss this birthing from night's womb? It's all so very poetic until you realize it is not quite so. It is a hardened bedrock of truth that we now prefer to hide or destroy. A prayer is that we waken and accept the deepest friendship ever offered with immediacy and the sense of eternal belonging.
“The Deer's Cry”
I arise today
through the strength of heaven, light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor or fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of Sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
~ Celtic prayer, translated by Kuno Meyer