Chose your words carefully
Remember both your predecessors and antecedents
While neither should define you, the latter may constrain your rightful impulse towards flight
Because sometimes silence
Because…sometimes silence
Hides terrible things.
There have been other days when the sturm und drang of life has tipped the little ship, washing the sweet little sailors nearly overboard. But hopefully not today. Maybe a little–but only in the bottle where the boat stays now, carefully taken apart bit by bit, each then pushed one by one gingerly through only to be (who knows how) reassembled inside the bottle, so serene now, so still
All bottled up like that.
I have a hunch that when we get to Heaven we will realize that no matter how big, how wild, how impossible our prayers have been, we could have prayed for more.
Let me be clear: God does not answer prayers for evil. He does not reward our sin, cowardice, or avarice. He rewards the just, but if we pray along the lines of love, mountains do move.
Have you ever seen a mountain move? Have ever seen it lumber to the sea and toss itself in?
I have not. And as with these oh-so-solid mountains, many of the big-ticket items I have prayed for have been stolidly immobile for years.
Impossible things.
But I do worship the God of impossible things. His wry sense of humor, His unflagging love, His ridiculous, tenacious prophets, and His remarkable creation all suggest
Moving mountains ain’t no thing
For Him.
Forebear all hymns, celebratory, solemn, or liturgical
Just wash the stuffed animal
Mammalian, maternal
Using sewn-on paws to clutch
a miniature version of herself
To her belly, too big for an ordinary machine, she curls without consent into
The grey plastic washtub
Fetal position
I think, anthropomorphizing
Everything
This is a box. Make 49 percent of it as nice as you want. (You will be lucky to have children there
And luckier still if you can survive what happens when they go)
try not to dwell on the made-up
World outside
Or how untenable it might be to try to keep all you hold dear
In a box.
You can forget that a baby had been born. Forget that your knees were never good. Forget that you had already started foraging for man-made bodies of water despite being so close to the sea.
Forget the pain that was to come
Just remember the anniversary, the series of tragic anniversaries
I think about all the things I would tell the boy about his own part in my story, the bloodbath of both the Cross and matrimony, who is and is not good enough, but content myself with vacuuming
In relative silence.
I see you, late morning perhaps, wandering in, sitting next to this quintessential Ordinary Guy. He looks sideways at you. Pushes your favorite mug of hot something to the edge of the table he made himself. So long ago it hurts. A permanent scars kind of hurt.
And all he says is with his eyes-
You got distracted cleaning the kitchen. I thought about telling you to hurry up. Realized it was already all too fast–you were already growing up too fast,
I should will time to slow down, distract it with something
To keep us here together
Just a little longer
Ulysses fights through unspecified traffic, roads clogged with people trying to make their way home. He texts–
Proof love is
Ordinary provisions
Carrying Light 