#Adventword Day 25: Love

Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free. 

The Space in Between

Lotus by Ruth Bidgood
Bryn, the round hill,
dips to a valley that accepts
others:  a place of joining.
No wind carries up
Conversation of rivers.
Old sheepwalks, hardly grazed,
Stretch to the verge of forest.
On this grey day
no smoke rises:
from the one gaunt house.
 
Surely the silent utterance
of this place is ‘Emptiness’,
its time ‘Never’?
Yet it is said
That not leaves, not petals,
but the space at the center
of the heart’s lotus
contains everything.

                                    Here
rivers out of sigh
have their rhythms,
like blood through the heart.
Stillness throbs with the flow
of unperceived lives.
 
This is a place of joining,
whose silent utterance is ‘Abundance’,
whose time is ‘Ever.’


A week from today I'll be in Wales.  I can't tell you exactly what I'll be doing,  but if it keeps raining there like it has been, chances are it will involve curling up with a cup of tea and a good book in this room:

or getting lost in my writing at a desk somewhere in this room:

 

Ostensibly, I'm going over to do some pre-scouting of some of the sites we'll be visiting in May on the pilgrimage I'm leading for Washington National Cathedral.  The recent floods in Britain might mean a little less hiking to neolithic stone circles and wandering around abbey ruins and a little more time spent sitting quietly inside ancient churches and old cathedrals. 

 

Earlier this week I was stressing  about not begin able to get everything on my "to do" list done during this trip.  Then I realized that the idea of having a to do list is itself counter-intuitive to pilgrimage.  Checking off sites is a trip for tourists.  For pilgrims, the journey is about creating space-- being in the landscape, settling into sacred places, opening up to the space, both literally and metaphorically. 

 

So that's what I will be doing next week.  And somehow it seems like a perfect way to enter into the first week of Advent, traversing a dark winter landscape,  looking for glimmers of light, listening, waiting.

 

 

Happiness and Blue Moons

SO MUCH HAPPINESS

by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press)

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

I've been keeping this poem in my pocket (aka my draft file), waiting for the perfect day in which to share it and after last night, I think today is that day. 

It's not that anything remarkable happened last night, at least nothing I can put my finger on.  I was sitting by the labyrinth during Cathedral Crossroads people watching.  Some visitors were sitting in the nave with eyes closed, letting the strains of Karen's harp and flute music float around them like snowflakes settling in their laps.  Others wandered around in quiet reverence as night pulled down shades of darkness and shifted their attention from glass to stone.  And then there were the walkers, the ones who came for the labyrinth and embarked upon its path like dancers taking the stage in a purposeful ballet.   

Later as I was walking to my car with some friends, I pointed out the almost full moon hanging high in the night sky.  Friday night is the second full moon in August, a rare occurence and the origin of  the expression "once in a blue moon."  I'm often content but happiness is something different, more rare, more fleeting, more floating as Naomi Shihab Nye observes.  And last night as I noticed all these people and then the large, lovely moon, I was  overcome with a wave of happiness definitely larger than the National Cathedral could contain.  Larger than even the day could contain as it's spilled over into this Wednesday morning and there's every indication it will continue into the afternoon.