Sunday, August 12, 2012

August 12, 2012


There is the biggest blue jay at the water bowl this morning, making his rusty chirp sounds and hopping between the rim of the bowl and the rock in the middle.  That has got to be the biggest bluest jay I have seen yet and he must have called his mate as there are two of them out there not, the other one not quite so big.  They seem to be having a lot of fun out there, they certainly enjoy water more than I thought birds might.  So beautiful and outrageous, they seem to love clowning around.  The sky is pale today, marked by huge banks of white cloud, some thin as a curtain, some piled up so thick they look like concrete constructions of fantasy.  A soft breeze fans the leaves making them swing and sway.

Sunday morning and I have already been blessed by blue jays and white clouds, a finge of new cane my husband is grumbling over, the green shade of the back yard this close to midday, even the slow path of the cat stepping along the edge of the driveway keeping an eye on the birds in the bowl.  So if you had to choose what to you would be  . . .

The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone—
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of God and more, never fully
filled, never.
 
Pattiann Rogers

I don't want to have to choose, it's not a competition anyone can win, yes?  Still, imagining all those winners, all the greatest blessings filling up my life makes me smile, and the dark emptiness of the very next moment is somehow so appealing, the allure of what has not happened yet, what we can imagine to fill it, what can be seen or felt or read or experienced next is what keeps us going.  Do you sometimes feel that some things you read are as real to you as things you have experienced in your own life?  Sometimes it's kind of . . . wonderful to be able to have those memories alongside the ones you have made for yourself, kind of the magic of imagination opening the door to places you could never discover on your own in your real world.  Then again, what exactly is the real world?  The one I experience, or the one you do, or something of a consensus, or all of it together, each in their own creation.  Here come the 10,000 definitions of God, and aren't we glad there are so many, and so many more than that so each of us can have our own.  As many definitions as there are kinds of love, and who knows how many kind of that there are!  We have not come to the end of definitions for that and I hope we never will.

Today, Sunday, there are more than enough definitions of God and love, and they might be one and the same thing, depending on how you are willing to look at both.  All I know, all I want to know today, is I have been more than blessed by God and love in my life, and on Sunday I like to think of all those blessings and feel gratitude for them and joy in their presence!

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