Doorways.

We go through.

Or we don’t.

We rise. We sink.

We struggle. We relax.

We live. We die.

 

 

 

Life is a terrible beauty.

The dichotomy of all that makes up our lives is impossible to reconcile. I realize now that I am not here to answer the questions, more than I am here to ask them and then hang in all that remains unknown.

Because, tell me, how can you possibly come up with any explanation for the horrors of yesterday’s mosque murders? Or to explain why little children have been indefinitely separately from their parents? Why the millions dead from the Holocaust? Why will one of us die of a horrible disease and the other live?

There is no answer good enough…not ever.

But then I ask this…how can the springtime birdsong fill my heart to overflowing? Why does a lover’s hand on your feverish forehead feel like a blessing? How can a shared laugh feel like magic? Why does it feel so good to do good?

 

 

In the face of the chaos that is our world, there are only a few things I can do: I can be good. I can be kind. I can care for others. I can be respectful. I can show another way, a thoughtful way, a loving way. In other words, to make sure to take care of my little corner of the planet.

And somewhere along that loving way, I will, of course, completely and totally screw up. This is inevitable. But I will ask for forgiveness from the one I wronged and for myself. And I will pick myself up and keep on caring for myself and for others and somehow we will all stumble along and do our best.

There are no answers. Not good ones.

But there can be moments of transcendent joy and there is love and the wind in the trees and sand sinking under our toes as the ocean laps our feet. There are cool sheets on hot summer nights and warm quilts for winter’s worst. There is coffee and warm chocolate chip cookies and holding hands in a dark theatre and flying down a hill on a fast bicycle and, oh my, there is the holding of a book, still lost in its pages, long after the last word is read.

I collect my moments and my memories. I hold them close, stack them up and store them safely. They are my little reminders that life is not just the horrors of the news or the latest twitter blast from people who have nothing good to say.

And then I send my love to those who are hurt and to those who did the hurting.

I turn off the dire announcements that feed the feverish cycle of news. Instead, I connect to real people in my here-and-now life.

I watch the breeze in the trees.

I focus on the good.

Held only by grace, I remain suspended within the great unknowing.

 

 

 

 

Daffodils

by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed and gazed but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.