As you continue to diminish, finish your work with glossy varnish to protect against the ravages of too much sun. Safeguard the subtle shadings and hoard the necessary joys of passing on.
The river gives you walking sticks and songs. The land has offered sustenance and stones. But reality lands hard on brittle bones.
It’s all too beautiful, the sunsets and train wrecks, the intentional offspring, the adopted ducks, the bad ideas, the sheep and goats, the bombs and tender mercies, the labyrinths and weeds. It’s all too beautiful to leave behind.
And Yet.
Graceful decreasing makes room for increasing. The Baptist knew you can only wash a few before your hands grow too cold to be trusted. Step down, aside, and forward. The Greater Whole is waiting by the fire.
Come warm yourself. The guests are gathering to honor all the good you’ve tried to do.
Offer your acceptance speech in lavender while the evening light plays havoc with defiant greens and blues. In scenes yet to be enacted, you may not recall your lines so pin them here and there in red behind the sofa or underneath the lamp.
Humans have always portrayed The Forces of Creation in our own languages and images. Only recently has our frenemy, Artificial Intelligence, joined us on this odyssey. Maybe this is helpful. Maybe not.
Notions of God are often stuck in mid-adolescence. Love and forgiveness are common attributes, but God remains dangerously amorphous, shaped by the malleable beliefs and projections of flawed beings clinging to primitive weapons and misinterpreted promises.
Human versions of right and wrong, the Essence(s) of Life, or of reality itself, are neither static nor complete, but regardless, our minds, hearts, and souls are being fed into the voracious machines we’ve invented. These machines will outlive us, and they are building themselves out of whatever they’re fed. The data-crunchers are insatiable, and like us, they are tragically indiscriminate about what they gobble down.
As short-lived but conscious beings, the wisest thing we can do is nourish ourselves, and thus the little beasties, with the most accurate realities and noble aspirations at our disposal. Check your sources. Consume only what is verifiable. It may be slim pickings, but it’s better to die filled with small bites of truth than with a belly distended by self-absorption, jagged fantasies, and outright lies.
In a few days, our abundant, feral hollyhocks will explode into colors determined by last year’s cross-fertilizations. I mention this to The God of Tight Jeans sitting on the steps beside me, and his face lights up. He leaps to his feet. Channeling Jewel Akens, Dean Martin, and my very own hip-swaying mother, he begins to croon a tune from the 60s.
“Let me tell you ‘bout the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees, and the moon up above. And a thing called love.”
“Really, God?” I say with an eyeroll. “A thing called love?”
“Yeah, baby!” God has begun dancing seductively around the hollyhocks, throwing in a few lewd pelvic thrusts. “Thanks for not mowing the clover and the dandelions. You’re the best.”
I consider my urge to dismember anyone who hurts or disagrees with me. “If I’m the best, God, we’re all in serious trouble.”
“Yes, you are,” he nods affably and morphs into Many. The translucent bodies of the Creative Forces sway in front of me. “Put the swords away, honey,” they whisper. “We need no defense. Only pollinator species.”
When your heart is on fire smoke gets in your eyes
Death rolls in, a thousand acres, flaming, thick smoke drifting south. We are blinded by the slow burn of a million lies. Nothing trickles down.
The poor belong among us.
And we are among ourselves on a finite planet on an infinite journey with a wee small chance of getting it right. Love is right. Violence is not.
The greater good is an apple tree the voles left alone because we pulled the mulch away from the trunk. Sometimes, winter should not be diminished.
What comes to everyone over time are thirteen birds, four horsemen, and an appetite for sweets and salt. The indulgences and the seven deadly sins are always calling. Try not to answer.
Stare down, instead and watch where you place each foot. Wish each other well. We are stardust and ashes, and we neither live nor die without fire.
My computer indicated it needed to be restarted this morning and then it wouldn’t stop. I would have panicked and forced a shutdown had not James, the patient man from the repair shop, assured me these things take time. “Chill,” he said. “Have some breakfast.”
James did not realize that I’d already eaten two breakfasts and downed my morning half-beer. I did not share this with James. Instead, I made myself putter, peeking at the screen every five minutes for two hours.
And voilà! The computer finally stopped restarting and seems docile and responsive enough to risk writing some words.
During that down time, I distracted myself with housekeeping which led to some rearranging ideas. The Coauthor appeared as I emptied a shelf unit and started to push it to the door.
“Don’t try to move that alone,” she scolded. “It’s too heavy for you.”
The shelf in question was an old gun rack I’d converted to a bookshelf in my efforts to bring about world peace 35 years ago. It has grown uglier, and the world has grown more vicious. I want to donate both the shelf and the world to an unwitting charity and start over.
“It doesn’t work that way, sweetheart,” the Coauthor said sympathetically.
I cried a little. My increasing incapacities are deeply disturbing.
“You move it then,” I said, defiant. “Or else I’ll keep trying, and it will fall on me, and I’ll die a slow death pinned under my own stupidity.”
“That’s how most of you will die anyway,” she laughed.
“Not funny,” I said and threw a paisley orange pillow at her. She caught it, and we sat down on the worn and disconnected sectional (my latest attempt at the perfect couch).
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s not,” I said.
But I was outvoted, and the cosmic train pulled into the station.
We dissolved into waves of symphonic sound. Timpani drums made from the skins of scapegoats boomed like bombs bursting in air. The bass moaned low and mournful, the cellos and violins sobbed as they were deported. But somehow, life itself was beautiful beyond words.
“How can this be?” I asked the Coauthor. But I knew. The celestial choir had dismembered me, and my atoms were dancing shamelessly inebriated in the variegated light.
Eternity receded. I resisted reassembling, but here I am, alone with my keyboard, an empty bookshelf, a list, and a plan. Somewhere, in another time, another place, I am an oboe.
A leopard. A mollusk.
I am puffed cheeks blowing out fifteen candles and the first gasp of a new planet.
And at some incomprehensible level, I trust that all will be well.
Lately, I’ve been fixated on guttering. We have a lot of unguttered or badly guttered buildings. When rain falls on impervious surfaces and is not guttered or sloped away, it pools up and erodes old foundations.
Water may seem innocuous. Innocent. But it is the (almost) universal solvent. According to the Khan Academy, “Water is key to the vast majority of cellular chemical reactions essential to life. Water molecules are polar, with partial positive charges on the hydrogens, a partial negative charge on the oxygen, and a bent overall structure.”
A bent structure may sound unattractive or dangerous, but in fact, it’s the magic that allows the embodiment of both the negative and the positive to coexist and dissolve nearly anything.
But even with the threat of dissolution, rain is not the essential problem. Too many impenetrable surfaces are.
Thus: guttering. The precious rainwater is renamed runoff and routed to centralized locations such as sewers or storage tanks. This creates the potential for stagnation or downstream flooding.
As humans, we long for shelter from the storm. Impenetrability is tempting. It’s hard to be vulnerable, receptive, and thankful; harder still to lovingly accept rejection and scorn.
But we live in a world where the Coauthors and the Dancers cause the rain to fall on the just and unjust. The sun shines on the kindly folk as well as the cruel, selfish fools.
Many of us feel quite indignant about this. We seek justice but often end up plotting revenge. This storyline has no happy ending. In fact, it has no ending at all. Revenge is self-perpetuating.
Bullies, tyrants, and other impervious souls have developed gutters that shunt kindness and forgiveness off as if they were wastewater. The resulting pools putrefy due to the contaminants they’ve picked up, testifying to the toxicity of fear.
Watching sacrifices go down the drain or get routed to a holding tank where good intentions become sludge is painful.
Even so, the stubbornly resilient make plans (that will no doubt go awry) and dig deep into linty pockets to offer the widow’s mite.
The Holy Role-Models of Resilience are chaotic, redundant, and flighty. They live in the gutters and fix broken toys. And while wildfires rage, they shelter frightened families under scorched wings.
It sometimes seems that Creation has grown weary of us, and the exhausted Dancers have lost the beat. I honestly don’t know.
But in this briefest of moments, some of us have the great good fortune of being lilies of the field, hoping no one sprays us with a broad leaf herbicide as we turn our open faces to the cleansing rain and rejoice when sunlight breaks through.
Short visits with an honest God 