March 11, 2012

Daylight Savings Time, hmm . . . good thing I have off this week of spring break to adjust to the time change.  It will take at least that long because my body is slow accepting the lie of this time change.  It knows what time it is, for real, and refuses to give up its reality for outside impositions.  I have to slowly convince it to . . . as my husband's Garmin GPS says . . . recalculate!  And it is not nearly as easy to convince as the GPS, it continues to believe in the "real" time.  This morning, no matter what hour it claims to be, it is dark and gloomy, gray and overcast when not actively drizzling.  The rain has helped with the pollen some, where the rain ran off the roof, it frothed yellow as if it were some weird carbonated drink.  It seems to be getting darker this morning instead of lighter.  They say, and we all know who they are,  it will be warmer and sunnier by Tuesday . . . I am holding them to it!
Today is the day for the blessing, and even grumpy about time and gloom, I know my life is filled with innumerable blessings.  It seems that even when we realize that, it does not preclude the fact we are all prone to grumble occasionally.

Before He Makes Each One

Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one 
out of the darkness.

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses. Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest
you can go. Don't let
yourself be separated
from me. The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Let everything happen to you . . . and not just the good stuff, everything.  It will all happen no matter what you chose, there is no life without some moments of beauty, and some moments of terror.  We must just go and live out there in our feelings.  In us there are so many countries, so many feelings, so much we believe and believe in.  Life is a serious thing, the most serious thing we know, yet, it's okay to take joy seriously, or fun, or all those frivolous things that make us happy.  They are included in the shadows of things, because they cover the ground of our lives with their existence, because we burn with the joy of them.  We are sent out by our senses, how else can we experience God, or anything?  Our senses give us the world, and even if you believe God to be wholly insensible, you can only have a relationship with God through what you experience, and we experience through our senses.  We might imagine things, we might create things, ideas, art, but we all work in the world, using what we know from the senses to do all that.   If we live in the world we cannot be separated from God because it is the world God created, and we put out our hand to that world every day.  We create our interaction with the world, that is our greatest creation, our response to what we sense, to what the world is.

The blessing is in our choices, in what we do with the world and how we use it, how we think about it, and how we love!  We have been blessed with this world and all the worlds out there, all the worlds to come from our choices, from our lives, from our loves.   We create our own blessings with God stuff, with the stuff of the world, and all the love we create in working with our world, in our lives, with our desires, we give God clothing.  Now that is a thought that gives a whole new meaning to the idea of blessing <smile>.