Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning 
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows, of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start my day
in happiness, in kindness.

This beautiful poem by the beloved Mary Oliver, is a piercing reminder of the fullness of the nest in which we find ourselves. This thing called life holds the macro experience of being alive in the vastness of the whole universe…the Sun which opens to us every morning, the darkness that can threaten to overwhelm us. It also contains the micro…the faces of tulips, the surprise of opening morning glories. Each day we walk the balance beam of both the enormous and the minuscule.

At this time of year, I try to have tulips in my house at all times. They are one of the first signals that the season is turning and their color keeps on telling me to calm down, all shall be well. The truth is they were the first flowers my husband ever gave me and so have always held a special place in my heart. Right now there are orange and yellow ones in the living room and red ones in the kitchen. Their minute petals hold a whole world within if you have the time to look at them. A sunrise in the center of their unfolding.

Lately I have been thinking of this macro/micro world we inhabit. My ability to hold the pain and suffering across the world has limits. Watching as families flee the horrific devastation in Ukraine is too heart breaking for words. The anger and despair that accompanies those feelings could undo any ability to move in any ordinary day. And the privilege with which I say this, not being in their shoes, observing from such a distance is not lost on me.

And yet…and yet…I walk by those tulips and I am drawn to their beauty and their grounding. I try, if only for a few minutes, to stand with what they have to offer in one hand and my feelings for those so far away moving across uncertain paths in the other. Those two outstretched hands form a prayer that is filled with both gratitude and lament. To be human is to live in both worlds, macro and micro. We hold out our hands and our hearts to the beauty and the terror and pray that somehow our intention makes some measure of difference. 

As the poet says…’Good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start my day in happiness, in kindness.’ Here we are, all of us, held ‘in the great hands of light.’ Again. And again.

“You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun
lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,
when a parched day finally broke open, real rain
sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples
and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards
tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished
in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again-
beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.
~Molly Fisk

For those of us who make our home in the Christian household, the season of Lent paid another visit beginning last Wednesday. It is a season that is not always a welcome guest. Depending on the brand or branch of this tradition in which you were raised or find yourself, it can be forty days of deprivation, penance, furrowed brows, resignation, or all manner of soul dampening things. We so often forget that these days we have infused with often misplaced theology really gets its beginnings in the word ‘lecten’, an Old English word meaning ‘lenghten’ and referred to the season of spring. And when spring arrives, and the days lengthen, we experience that amazing gift of…light, more light. 

And aren’t we all hungering for that? Because the fact is this Lent could be shaping up to be the lentiest Lent. I don’t know if that is a word, in fact I am sure it is not, but it is the thought that keeps coming to me. I may have thought something similar last year when the isolation, deaths, and illnesses that surrounded us had no end in sight. While some of that reality is still with us, now we are confronted with a war that is evil and unjust and has most thinking people wondering what can possibility happen next. 

All this may just be why a season like Lent has continued and stood the test of all these years. Marking Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the temptations endured on the journey toward Easter are meant to help us mark our own forty days in our own lives. Our own hope of having the light lengthen into something brighter and more hopeful than where we are right now is important work and life-giving work. Spending some time with this notion of ‘lengthening light’ has had me watching for ways in which the sheer goodness of light emerges and is helping me see what this Lent may have to teach. 

Light comes in so many forms. There is, of course, the pinnacle of Light, the Sun. And there are those actual rays of light that have begun to melt some of the ice and snow that is stacked in our yards and have encrusted our spirit. And there is the light that bursts forth in our hearts when we hear good music or read a turn of phrase that seems filled with a light of knowing coming from another world. There is also the light that happens when friends family speak with laughter and understanding. There is even the light of silence that can hold us when the words of the evening news threatens to darken our tender, fragile souls. 

The poet says: “You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face, when a parched day finally broke open…Oh, friend, search your memory again-beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.” In these days, these lentiest of days, life does seem “a house of cards tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished in a bitter wind.” 

But as those who have the ability to recall, may we find the courage to embrace the beauty and strength of the sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine, lifting our faces toward the light, standing tall in resistance and power. May we mirror the resilience we see on the faces of those who flee and have been forced to fight.  Lent…lecten…lengthen…light. May we awaken what is only sleeping and have the grace to find our way toward a brighter time.

Today I am thinking of Miss Neff. She was my high school history teacher and in those days we said “Miss” not “Ms.” She was somewhat of an enigma to me, small, very thin with bird-like features she always dressed as if she might be going to a business meeting later in the day. Maybe she was. I never knew much about her except that, once on her way to school, she had been involved in an accident where a young child was involved. To this day I wonder what happened. But today I am remembering Miss Neff for a particular moment in our World History class, one in which I was paying marginal attention, because all we ever studied was war, right? and I was tired of it and I was a teenager full of myself, of my dreams and of a narrow view of the world.

Miss Neff, standing in front of the room with her clipboard containing her notes resting on her bony hip, was outlining yet another war when she said:”At this same time in history, Mozart was writing music.” My head jerked up and, I could have fabricated this memory over time, but I thought our eyes met in a knowing way. She knew that I was a ‘music kid’ and that my plans were to study music in college. She then went on to name some artists that were creating and some writers that were writing. It was a moment when history became ‘both/and’ and not ‘either/or’ for me. I began to formulate a world view that encompasses all the many connections and complexities of how humans move in the world.

Today, when we are reeling from the news of what is happening in Ukraine, my heart is breaking for the people there. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, all holding a collective breath to see what will happen. Our minds trying to understand what possesses people to do what the leaders in Russia are doing and the feeling of helplessness that accompanies this. The fact of the matter is that we have lived a long time now with one foot ready to send us into the pit of despair. Four years of daily whiplash perpetrated by a president drunk on power. Then a pandemic that sent us into our homes, isolated us from those we love and those daily acts that made up our lives, that brought us a modicum of joy. A reckoning with the ways racism and injustice has been the food of our neighbors , of those whose lives have always been pushed to the margins.  And now war.

This is the moment to own the privilege with which I move through every day. That during all this time I have lived comfortably, knowing warmth and having everything I needed to eat, with resources to re-imagine ways of still being in community with friends and family. That privilege extends to the color of my skin and the resources that are always a click away. 

And yet today, with Miss Neff’s gaze etched in my memory, I am also naming the despair I feel. The knowledge that there will always be bullies and that their need for power and dominance causes others to pay a huge price. History books and sacred texts are full of their stories. While that gaze dusts itself off, I am also reminded that there are good things happening, things are being created, beauty is being born, compassion is being extended, healing is possibility. The both/and of the world still reigns.

So, today I will try to embody the lesson of my teacher and not allow the despair for the world to overwhelm. I will send fervent and gentle prayers to all that is Holy to be present to the Ukrainian people. The helplessness will still be there but I will also do something to remember. Here is a poem by Jane Hirshfield that might help:

Today, when I could do nothing.
I saved an ant.
it must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked 
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer -warm-
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through switftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom-
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could no nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
~Mark Nepo

It was time. In fact, it was past time. My piano was in desperate need of tuning and my beloved tuner is no longer with us so I had to find someone new. After a thorough internet search, I arranged for someone to come and restore the sound that lifts my spirits.

Of course, I had forgotten the sounds that have to happen before the beauty arrives in the touch of the keys. I sat in my kitchen as the tuner worked his magic in another room. The ping and plop of pitches echoed off the ceiling and into the room where I was trying to write. High pitches sounding like cats raking their nails across a chalkboard. Low pitches grating out like belches of middle school boys. Over and over again, until with some finesse, amazing patience and maybe a dose of magic, the pitch slides into the ‘just right’ place. For more than an hour I listened as the technician did his work. Work that astounded me at his ability to endure such scratching and belching until he landed in the home of tonal beauty. 

Captive at my kitchen table as I was, I began to think about how these last months and years have been a little like this tuning. Most of us have felt off, strident in sound, not knowing if we would ever be able to stay on pitch again. Some days we would find a word, an activity, a glimpse of something that would pull us up from the pits of disharmony. Other days, we were just strings plucked by an angry, inept hand. 

Sitting there, I was reminded of another experience of tuning I had a few years ago. I had anticipated walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and arrived expecting a quiet, calm and contemplative time. Stepping onto this stone path modeled after the labyrinth in Chartes Cathedral in France, I was only a few steps in when sounds like I had never heard before began. The huge, beautiful pipe organ was being tuned! If you have never heard an organ going through this adjustment, let me say that it is a primeval-like animal sound until it makes its way into its homeland. As I walked, I remembered reading that “Everything that happens to you on the labyrinth is metaphor.” And so, I continued to walk, surrounded by beauty, watching the unfolding path without being able to see exactly where it led, held in the sounds of tuning…blessed tuning. The experience allowed me to enter into a place of adjusting myself, of reflecting on the places that needed that very turn of an instrument that brought me back to myself. 

We are all still in the tuning stages of this pandemic. Each of us will find our way into a new harmony that has yet to be discovered. Tuning is not pretty. But it is necessary. So, let the patient hand of the tuner be gentle with us all. I trust, and I hope you do as well, that we will find our way eventually.

Last week I took refuge from the frigid temperatures by going to the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul to hear a concert hosted by the Schubert Club. These Thursday events held at noon in the large, open space there seems as safe an opportunity as I can imagine to soothe a wintry heart. All folks are masked so it is impossible to see the beauty of their faces but the spirit of people in the presence of live music has the ability to remind us that we are still community, hungering for the sounds and silences that have had the power to lift the heart and heal the soul since the beginning of time. 

This particular program contained two song cycles performed by a string quartet and the beautiful soprano of Maria Jette. In her description of the songs we were about to hear she talked of how the composer, Robert Schumann, was given to ‘weltschmerze’, something she described as a feeling of melancholy, world-weariness, even pain for the world. The masked faces around the majestic space seemed to all nod in a collective ‘ahh, yes’. Jette was the only unmasked person in the room and so her face mirrored our own pandemic knowing. Weltschmerze…sometimes a different language can say just what needs to be said. We are all in a certain state of weltschmerze.

I am not sure if this German phrase is what caused me to begin to push back at the melancholy of it all but I began to think of the ways in which it is possible to lift one’s self above the world-weariness if only for a moment here and there. In a  bag I had been keeping in the basement were paper white bulbs I had intended to do something with. So, I brought them out and began to create a way for them to grow and bloom. Not today but in some future that will come. Around the bulbs I placed some shells I collected on the beach a few weeks ago when the Sun was beating down and the sound of the ocean was filling my ears and nostrils. And then I placed the butterfly that I found last June on the pavement of a parking lot. The winged one was already no longer living when I found it but still has the ability to thrust its beauty into the world. Before I knew it I had created a shrine to whatever is the opposite of weltschmerze.

Then a few days later, the world lost the beloved Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. The wisdom and presence that he inspired seems the very antidote to weltschmerze. His teachings are a very call to see the gifts of every moment…even those wracked by a virus that does not want to leave us. Even in these times he can call us embrace whatever is happening in the world and to see it for what it is. 

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I see myself as a flower.
Breathing out, I feel flesh.

Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.
Breathing out, I feel solid.

Breathing in, I see myself as still water.
Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.

Breathing in, I see myself as space.
Breathing out, I feel free.”

Winter days are threatening ongoing cold. There are shrines to be built to remind us of what endures. Deep breaths, my friends…deep breaths.

“Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.” 
~ Rumi

One of the great gifts of travel is that you not only see things that are not on your usual daily menu but that you also have the opportunity to open your mind’s eye to new ways of seeing the world and all that inhabit it. I was privileged this past week to take a little break from the snow, white landscapes of my ordinary days and walk greener, more colorful paths in Florida. The ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ of colorful blooming flowers and birds whose flight patterns are unfamiliar to me were joined by two encounters with the banyan tree…something certainly not seen on my daily walks in Minnesota. And what a tree it is! There is a sense of dripping bark as the limbs and trunks melt into one another forming shapes that are both artistic and prehistoric.

It is under the banyan tree that the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. And, really, who wouldn’t be transported to some higher plane sitting at the base of such a magnificent work of Creation. Words that are often attributed to Mother Teresa but which were probably spoken by one of her workers of the Sisters of Mercy say: “In the East,
especially in India, I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan treefor half a day chatting to each other. We Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving
it is not in the result of loving.” 

We don’t often think of trees teaching about love or if we do we might be reluctant to say it aloud. But, in looking at this amazing work of nature there is so much to notice. The connections are so clear, how one limb leans into another, relying on its neighbors for support and strength. The trunks appear to be mirroring the roots I imagine are below the ground giving it the nourishment it needs for growing and flourishing toward the sky. The recognition of the importance of intertwining, that no one limb could stand alone. And then there is the beauty…the sheer beauty…of being held together in bark and wood and vulnerability and majesty. Isn’t this what we hope love is? Support. Strength. Deep roots. Heavenly reaching. Vulnerability. Nourishment. Growth. Connection, blessed connection. Beauty, even, perhaps, a little majesty.

I feel blessed to have come into the presence of these banyan teachers and pray that their wisdom has seeped into my own limbs, my own trunk. And I also pray that I can see the lessons the trees I see in my own backyard have to teach with new eyes and how they might propel me toward great loving. 

A little less than 48 hours ago, the calendar turned to a new number. Whether this is something to be heralded or dreaded depends on your perspective I suppose. It is safe to say that the last year, the last two years, have had challenges we never imagined, ones with which we are still reckoning.  And so, to turn a new page can carry much…anticipation, fear, excitement, hope, so many emotions.

On December 31st, in preparing for a very quiet dinner to mark the ending of one year and the beginning of the next, I went searching my bookshelves for some words that might hold the evening and speak to the threshold on which we stood. Practically reaching out to me was a copy of the book Prayers for a Thousand Years, a collection of poems, prayers and writings for the new millennium. Remember that time? Talk about anticipation and standing in the ‘what next?’ of the uncertainty of what the next 100…1000… years might bring! Would all the technology we had come to depend upon be able to flip to the next page of the internal calendar that guided it? We filled our bathtubs with water. I can’t remember why we did that.  The words collected for this book contained these by writer Ursula LeGuin. They seemed to fit the evening of this particular new year so I shared them at my dining room table.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
walk mindfully, well-loved one,
walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us, 
be always coming home.

LeGuin’s writing is always filled with rich metaphor and so each reader will make sense of this in their own way. The part that reached out and tugged at my heart were the last ones. “Well-loved one”…a moniker to carry each of us into the certain uncertainty of 2022. If we can live in the knowledge that we are ‘well-loved’, we can, I believe, live this new year with a deep knowing that together we can weather whatever the year brings. Reaching out to offer love to others… who are equally loved though they may not always know it… holds the power to bring us to a place we have yet to imagine, a new beginning. This great love extends to the two-legged, the four-legged, those with wings and fins, those that crawl and slither and to the soil on which we all co-exist. 

“Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.” Here’s to a new year, one that has never been before and will never be again. May we hold it gently and walk into it with compassion and care and a great love in which we are ‘always coming home.’

All over the world this week children will don costumes to act out the Christmas story. Tea towels will be tied around heads to make a six year old look like a shepherd. Bath robes will be worn to create what looks like the magi. Little girls will wrap their heads in blue fabric and put on their best face to appear like Mother Mary. A boy will look a little sullen standing by her side to represent Joseph. Ears and tails and pajama-like suited children will portray sheep and cows lowing. And anxious parents and pageant directors will hand long poles to the tea-toweled shepherds and pray that said pole remains a staff and not a light saber. Multiple photos will be taken by grandparents and parents as the story of the first Christmas comes to life starring their offspring. It is a sweet and poignant tableau, one that only the Grinchiest among could not be charmed by. At the church I attend this happened last Sunday and each of us left the service feeling lighter, more hope-filled and dowsed a bit by the Spirit of Christmas.

The idea that this happens every year never ceases to amaze me. We do not do it with any other of the stories from scripture. Yet, each year, it happens and we look forward to its happening. I have thought about this phenomenon over the many years I have either directed or watched the story come to life. And over time I have come to believe that the act of creating this pageant and telling this story once again allows each of us to enter the story in a new way, from where life has taken us this particular year. The year I had a new born at Christmas I identified with Mary at the miracle I held in my arms and I truly ‘pondered all these things in my heart.’ I imagine the parents who are trying to shepherd a wayward child wishing that the work was as simple as ‘watching over the flock by night.’ And the angels…oh, the angels…hovering near singing over the new life, the worried parents, the humble beginnings of such a family. I have a sense that our hospitals are filled with just such beings whose wings are not quite visible but being such a presence.

This year the characters that most fit my own story are the wandering Wise Ones. In the journey we have all been on over the last months and now years, we have indeed been traveling a road that was unfamiliar, treacherous, and toward some future we cannot yet see completely. The twists and turns cause us to stop and take stock of what is guiding us, where it is safe to go and where it isn’t. And many times we have found ourselves needing to ‘go home by a different road.’ A few years ago I wrote this poem I called Night Seekers:

What must it have been like?
No maps, no highway.
Only the twinkling of stars
and the deep, velvet blue of sky
to guide their way.

What courage –
to step out in their search
following the brightest star,
propelled by a deep knowing
that they were, indeed,
on the right path.

Their visions in the night
fueled their longing,
to see, to know, to behold,
a world transformed,
led them further and further
until there was no turning back.

Gaze turned heavenward,
they traveled on.
Stars illuminating the sky,
they traveled on.
Until…there
right before their eyes.
Everything was forever changed.

May this Christmas find us reflecting on the transformation the last months have brought us and finding the courage to embrace the very best of it. May our eyes scan the nighttime sky looking for the Star that will guide our way and lead us toward a peace we have yet to realize for the infants, parents, shepherds, angels and wise ones among us. Blessed Christmas to all.

Going through some of the many photos I’ve snapped over 2021, I came across some I had taken when I was in Columbus, Ohio over the summer. The images took me back to the stunningly beautiful day and the sculptures suspended in a beautiful garden in what is known as German Village. The sculptures were such a delight and were filled with a winsome quality that made the day even more special than the blue sky called forth. 

Looking back at the photos, I was reminded of the song from the musical Wicked called “Defying Gravity”. This powerful song ends the first act of this story that allows us to know how the Wicked Witch of the West comes to be the evil character that haunted our childhood dreams. It seems, according to this telling, that Elphaba(the Wicked Witch’s name before going to dark side), saw through the Wizard all along and that he was not really a hero but a con artist and one with evil intentions toward the animals of Oz. Glinda, the Good Witch, doesn’t see the Wizard in this way and tries to talk her out of exposing him as they share this song. It is a break in their friendship and in their lives. Elphaba’s refrain is:

Tell them how I am defying gravity!
I’m flying high, defying gravity!
And soon, I’ll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz
No wizard that there is or was
Is ever gonna bring me down!

These sculptures which had all who were walking through the park that day craning our necks in wonder at the way the figures and, in turn, the artist gave a taste of ‘defying gravity’. I venture to say all of us were a bit envious of the power of these beings to fly high above our heads. We longed for the freedom of lifting above the Earth and seeing the world with new eyes.

For much of my life I had a recurring dream of flying. I think this is pretty common. My ability to fly started with me beginning to move my arms as if I was swimming, the front crawl, limbs moving through air, not water. Soon my whole body would lift up and I would be flying above the ground and all that was happening below to those who had given in to gravity. I haven’t had this dream in some time and I miss it…and the way in which I felt so light, so free, so able to see further than my grounded eyes could ever do. I don’t know how dreams work but if I could ask the dream gods to be visited with that dream again, I would certainly do it.

In the last two years during these pandemic times, wouldn’t it have been wonderful to be able to defy gravity and lift up to see things with a clearer view? What might we have seen and learned? The answer to that likely depends on one’s perspective to begin with. But I do know that an equally powerful story to that of The Wizard of Oz, The Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table, contains a wonderful scene where Merlin gives the young Arthur the ability to fly. As he soars over the landscape, Merlin asks his student what he notices. Arthur says: “There are no boundaries.” The landscape and the people who share that vista were all in it together, there was no division. The vision of the Round Table becomes the place where people can see one another with connection and, in turn, compassion. 

There are gifts to both gravity and defying it, I suppose. As we move toward a new year, I pray for the ability to defy what is holding me down to old ideas, past hurts, bygone patterns that no longer serve. May it be a time of reflecting on what these months and now years have taught us. And may we find a refreshed enthusiasm for what draws us together and lifts us above all that would bring us down.

***If you haven’t seen ‘Wicked’, I invite you to check out the many Youtube videos of different folks singing this powerful song.

…And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.
~Mary Oliver, excerpt ‘Coming Home’

It started out as an ordinary day. I had completed the majority of tasks on my ‘to do’ list and run the errands that needed attention. So, I decided to treat myself to a cup of coffee and some time with a book I was reading at my local coffee shop. I was reading away when I saw a young man lift his phone toward the crossroads just outside the window. The woman with him was also looking and soon two other people in nearby chairs were doing the same. I followed their lead to see a male deer standing at the corner as if waiting for the light to change, his antlers held high. But, of course, he was not waiting. He was trying to make sense of where he was and how to escape the predicament in which he found himself. Cars slowed, stopped, watched, drivers likely pulling out their phones as well, as we all watched this beautiful, huge animal try to make his way to safety. I held my breath hoping he wouldn’t try to cross at an inopportune time and be hit by a surprised motorist who had been paying less attention than they might have. Soon we all watched as the beautiful, brown animal jumped across the street and headed toward the nearby park and the woods and the river that lay beneath. We all breathed a sigh of relief. An accident had been averted, one in which we would have all been helpless bystanders.

Not long after I was sitting in my living room and there was an urgent knock on the door. I opened it to a man who said there was a runaway dog that he had corralled in my backyard. The man seemed so caring and shared that he had recently had to put his own dog down after it had become ill. I could see the concern and grief lined on his face. I went to the backyard to see this sweet, young black lab bouncing about and trying to figure out either his luck in finding freedom or his fear in the danger of being loose in a world without his caring owners. I tried to remain as calm as possible and slowly the dog came to me and I talked to him and we were able to read the tags on his collar. After some time of quiet talking, he allowed  the man to hold his collar while I fetched some rope to create a leash. Calls to the vet on his tags soon had him reunited with his owners. I then learned that ‘he’ was really a ‘she’ and his owners had been frantically searching for their beloved pet. 

These two experiences had me thinking about the fragility of life. A deer misplaced, a dog lost, confronted with what can be a harsh world. Certainly over the last months, years now really, we have become aware of the fragility each of us wears like a scratchy sweater. Mostly we don’t want to think about it, this fragile, precarious nature of our living. But then there is an illness, an injury, a virus, a mistake, a loss, a death, a broken bone or heart, and we are propelled into the truth of our own fragility. Things can change in a moment and what was will never be again. Circumstances arise and we are called upon to see the world with new eyes, a fresh perspective, often without really wanting to. We find ourselves ‘believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.’

What does it mean to live with all this? How do we continue to put one foot in front of the other and show up in this life for which we have been blessed to have another day?  Perhaps it starts with tenderness toward all living beings and, especially, ourselves. This might be followed by offering grace upon grace, forgiveness even when carrying a grudge seems so much easier and fulfilling. All this might be held in the precious knowledge that ‘we are all just walking each other home’ as Ram Dass said with such wisdom. That goes for the two legged and the four legged, those with wings and fins, those with limbs and petals. And, of course, our dear Earth home. That we are linked through invisible lines of connection in this Universe can help us each remember to walk gently, care deeply speak compassionately, as we help build a nest for all the fragile creatures.