Tribute to a Poet

     Her life was luminescent, her poetry, more so. In the end, verses that she penned became her life and her obituary. Best to let her speak for herself through her words. Sophia, which is Wisdom? Yes. Salvation? Likely.

    In her poem, Landscape, she wrote, “Every morning I walk like this around / the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.” Her last walk, real or remembered, may have been on January 16, 2019.

A Harvest of People by Rev. Max Coots

     Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting,
and though they grow like weeds
and the wind too soon blows them away,
may they forgive us our cultivation
and remember fondly where their roots are.

     Let us give thanks:
For generous friends . . . with hearts as big as hubbards
and smiles as bright as their blossoms,
For feisty friends, as tart as apples,
For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we've had them.

The Potter's Impassioned Clay

     In a piece entitled, “Impassioned Clay,” Ralph Helverson wrote, “We are clay, the dust of creation with the breath of life. ...The core of life is a tough residual element that is earthy and basic. Earth and air and fire and water—these conditions birthed us and sustain us.” He used the metaphor of “impassioned clay” to symbolize what it means to be human.

     His words recall those of the book of Genesis in which humankind was created out of clay, made in a divine image. To be made in the image of a creative force is to suggest that fundamental to our being is the ability and the desire to create.

Born Again (and again)

     The phenomenon of creation, whether of an individual bee, bird, or human being should take our breath away. Each happens in a community, one in a hive, one in a nest, and one in a family, however configured.

     Depending on how it is fed, the bee can become a worker that lives a few weeks or months, or a queen that lives three to four years. 

     Depending on the species, the bird will be shell bound for two to three weeks, then nest bound for two to three weeks, totally dependent for food. Finally, the moment arrives when the fledging is pushed out of the nest. The choice is all too simple: fall and be killed, or begin to fly and become reborn into sky.

Grow a Soul

     The Rev. A. Powell Davies wrote, “Life is just the chance to grow a soul.” Between nature and nurture, who and what we become is a lifelong process.  We are both the raw material and the artist. Every experience becomes part of the material with which we can work. Every person we meet is a possible partner in a mutual collaboration of formation. To be sure, we can stop the process by settling, by letting the clay of our being harden, but the wiser choice is to remain pliable. And the goal? To complete our life before it is ended by death. The people that we tend to admire are those who kept growing and changing throughout their life, first by addition, and then by subtraction as they shed layer upon layer in search of their essence. 

     Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash