June 10, 2012

A very noisy morning, the birds seem to be gathered up and all conversing with each other, several pairs of cardinals, and a pair of blue jays, a tiny flock of small ones, too fast to identify, and, of course, cicadas louder than the birds and more constant.  It's such a typical summer morning you almost couldn't ask for anything more . . . summery.  Just close your eyes and think beautiful summer morning, and you will have the same experience:  blue sky, white fluffy clouds, trees all leafed out and getting to be that deeper green, lawnmowers, small planes overhead, occasionally the deep thrumming of a distant cigarette boat on the bay, and as many birds as you could want, and the cicadas, even a light breeze to keep the air from stagnating and stifling. 

Sunday and the blessing . . . this poem depends on how you see it, and so does the world, light or dark, half-empty, half-full, which ever way you choose.

The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light.

David Whyte

Some mornings are like that, we wake up not only to light in the world outside but to light inside us, to moments when we are filled with it, even though we know it's tenuous and things change and that not every change is going to be something we want to experience.  I think of those mornings as . . . full of grace, as in the prayer.  I don't know what creates them, but only know that my mornings looking for a poem to send, watching the same things outside my window, thinking about connections between us, friends and family and the world outside, all these things seem to make more of them, and for that I am grateful.  I think of this time as that quiet pathway of light the poet sat up into.  This is my pathway of light, not just today when I think of it as a blessing, a connection to God, to the foundations of love, but every morning, even the mornings when I wake up grumpy and out of sorts, this part of the morning makes a kind of light that blesses my whole day.