you are with me still

Oct4

this morning, I reached into the dishwasher

grasped the smooth handle of my favourite mug

clay from the hands of the Mistress

formed into a vessel that holds memories

sadness, pours into me,

hotter than the waiting coffee

Lord, I miss Her!

alma mater

mine, hers and Hers

this – Her gift to me – to celebrate the journey

the end and the beginning

alpha and omega

living

striving, thriving, surviving

my graduation, penultimate to theirs

a year passes and we gather again

to encourage, reorientate, reclaim the promise

of what and who we are called to be

another year

dead

Less that two years Your priest, Lord?

mute incredulity

really?

You heal the cancer – remission

in thanksgiving and wonder She hears You

says yes

dayenu*

was it?

tears stream as voices slosh here to there and back again over cellular waves

we did not know, we were not told

of deadly returned, cellular multiplication

liver hosts, breasts long sacrificed to hope

we did not know, unaware

we wallow in guilt

the third rants

“I know you have a good reason, God!”

begging, threatening, “tell me what it is!”

yes

dark coffee spills and fills a vessel still holding the past

leaves fall beyond the kitchen window fast

turns a season

thanksgiving approaches

thanksgiving

for Her life

yes

for death

no reason

yet

I suspect it was missed

in a moment noisy

the still, small voice

“Spring comes, She is fully alive in Me.”

Romans 8:38-39 ³⁸For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Isaiah 64:8
But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

*it would have been enough for us

The Sky’s the limit (that we can see)

Nov3

Isaiah 45:8 Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation may spring up, and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also; I the LORD have created it.

I remember as a child, lying on my back on the front lawn, my head almost touching the flower bed around our house. Lying there, right angles to the walls, and looking up at the sky, the straight walls of the white frame home providing a solid parenthesis at the edge of my vision, adding a weird perspective of the unreachable clouds and evoking a feeling close to vertigo. Its a past time we lose as an adult, though we might revisit it with our own children, lying in the grass, watching the clouds skim, or float, or dance by; imagining shapes and objects of white to grey, purple to pink, orange to red, maybe bejewelled by a rainbow, depending on the time of day and the weather. It is another of those natural phenomenon that words, or even pictures don’t quite capture. Something is lost in the scale, or the vividness, or the lack of the whisper of breeze on the cheek, or the scent of rain on dusty grass.

It’s worth the attempt.