Tag: love

random thoughts

Immaculate

BKL
The Annunciation, Simone Martini

I spent a bit of time pondering the life of the Virgin Mary today. Looking up at the crescent moon this evening, it felt like I was looking at a desert moon, one that may have hung up in the night sky for the Mother of G_d. What does it mean to be free of sin and bear the Divine? To watch the Divine be sacrificed and ascend? What does it mean for one’s own ascension? What must it have felt like to watch your love (the heart that lives outside your body) die before your eyes?

Death and birth are both difficult and shocking. It is almost winter. Things die to make way for new life. Is that our purpose?

daily draw, random thoughts

Perfectly Random

BKL

IMG_0602

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body

   love what it loves.

~from Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

The poem, excerpted above, knocks me out.   I have read it a hundred times and have seen it posted and re-posted by friends online and I still can’t get over how it is tuning-fork, goose-flesh-rising-on-arms, true.  It feels like Heaven breaking through a cloud.  Today, this was a most-needed tonic. A random event online that was pure beauty. Serendipitous.  In a week that had one sick child, a flu-ridden adult, a vacation that wasn’t really a vacation because it was filled with applicant files to read and professional reviews to write, and missed visits with dear friends, it felt like Mercury’s retrograde came in a bit early…and I was beating myself up about all the things I hadn’t done and all the ways I am not ‘good enough’. This beating up thing is exhausting.  Fast-forward to this morning.  A balm arrives in the form of a poem.  Poetry.  I think the Persian poet, Hafiz, was absolutely correct: Good poetry makes the universe admit a secret: “I am really just a tambourine, Grab hold, Play me, Against your warm Thigh.”