Refractions

What is the point of this journey, with its tiresome food  and its wearying wilderness sameness, (I have a map of Egypt in my wallet) with its thirst and nostalgia (I see you have one too),  its uncertain horizon,   its lacking of any sense of where or when?  Where did the time go? It rode in our packs and our pockets, through the sea, under the mountain, across the desert a vagrant doxology  from “in the beginning” to “world without end”,  until it arrived at this very nanosecond we call now. This time being threshold –  all there is, infinitely thin and containing all worlds. There is no hook I can sling  to recapture yesterday, or to grapple my way back to it. There is no line I can cast  to reel in the future, no tightrope of time I can cross to tomorrow. Suspended between voids on this threshold of now that I never cross. We say this is our story (I say this is my story): Inundating and subsiding water,  an ark, falling from qu...

  Where is the robust Story? Where is the robust Story, strong enough  to bear the weight of bodies and of souls, to touch millennia of wounds and scars softly, with healing, and to feel billions of muscles strain towards life? Where are the benedictions that we crave  when blessings seem in short supply? Will we, like Jacob, smelling like the hunters we are not and wearing the skins of deception,  steal from an unseeing one  the blessing for which we thirst? Or will we live our un-narrated lives, and say, as Esau says, “I have enough”, set out for the margin, known from that moment on   not as ourselves but as our children? Where is the story that will catch us as we plummet from the brink,  pushed off the page  by our own bare adequacy, by our having enough and no more? Will we wrestle  with a Stranger in our dream, and seize our blessing and receive our limp? Will we fall and rise again like Joseph, trafficked by his brothers –  ...

Visitors’ Day  We didn’t know then  there wouldn’t always be more time.   We didn’t know we would waken one day  to the absence who alone could tell us what we, too late, longed to know. There are so many absences, these days, so many orphaned questions, that I could welcome, even, “so little time”. You wonder why there’s not a day, one day a year, when a gone one could fill  one of those empty chairs,  and spend the day – so little time – with you. Would it be someone  So suddenly absent, so hastily gone, there was no closing time? (I’m thinking of one now.) Or one who knows the family stories, like “How did they meet?”  or the feuds –   “What really happened?” I might choose one of those.  I’d love to know what I could know now,  had it mattered then. Or “Do you remember learning to ride… a horse? a bike? a wave?” Or some event or thing or fact that would surprise them now: for my grandmother (who made cookbooks)  a...

Flaming Sword This moment, with its teasing hint of summer rain, this sultry day and this languorous self I am so unbusily being, this is the slow-moving forward edge of the flowing rivers  of time and choosing. There is a story to begin and a promise at the end, our ancestors taking in the fruit, taking in the difference,  the apartness from god, from world, and from each other,  naïve bonds now broken that held the otherness at bay. Do you remember summer days with Kool-Aid, bologna, badminton, sand-piles,  swimming, sand-piles, cousins, and naps?  We didn’t look behind the curtain, didn’t see or hear the wizards –  parents, uncles, aunts –  who in the midst of who-knows-what? held the Oz-world open for us, who knows how? Between then and now is the bramble of adolescence, confusions and hurts, of growing up, of aging and of death. There are scars, we all have scars;  we make them on each other, and tend them on each other, too. Long after the c...