Adrift

Adrift,

On this River,

Rootless & untethered to shore or sky

Sun blazing overhead;

this feels like freedom

But when clouds gather...

sweet solitude becomes gnawing isolation

I reach for You-

Be my anchor,

My place to moor; A safe harbour in the coming storm

Capturing the Unicorn

I haven't written anything, in what seems like ages. I have begun many times, only to discard the results as the distractions of the day & my ever wandering mind create a muddled mess of my thoughts & words. I suppose I could say then, that life has been good, peaceful, steady, with no new crises to push me into a prayerful or meditative place. Then again, the steadiness of my days also means no grand adventures or startling revelations. My sleep has been deep and dreamless, my days filled with the monotonous business of living. We are in the midst of the last languorous days of August. In a week school begins again, and life will assume a new rhythm, and I find I am torn between wanting summer's lazy torpor to linger and longing for the structure & purpose that comes in autumn. (Maybe, though, that is just the eternal student in my heart, eager to go back to the business of learning)

In any case my heart still longs to write, even if the thoughts that dance behind my eyes refuse to let me find words to express them. Fear and doubt torpedo my ideas, and the more time that passes the more I manage to convince myself that returning to my writing should be some kind of genius, although in truth to me it is not so much what I write, but that I write. Like prayer the more I do the easier it becomes. On Sunday morning, at long last, the idea, the metaphor I had been wrestling with finally let me grasp it. I reached into my bag, retrieved pen & notebook and poured out the phrases-not the prose I had been unable to tame, but my surprising first love, poetry.

In a caragana bower, under a sun bleached summer sky,

Weaving a garland of goldenrod and sage brush,

Prairie grass and wild flowers;

The endless song of grasshoppers and killdeer, the murmuring breeze, the cry of the hawk,

Circling overhead

No maiden, I, but pure in heart

Waiting for that rare & elusive Unicorn,

Is it you? Is this finally the mythical beast, Resting in my arms?

Goodbye/Hello

Goodbyehello

It seems as though all my life

is letting go-

saying goodbye

Always endings, closing doors

Every hello tainted by an inevitable farewell

You stand behind me,

Murmur hello against my neck

Your arms around me are a promise

Reminding me goodbyes are blessings;

“God be with you”

A prayer until we meet again.

Closed doors mean opened windows

Hello, hello

My oldest son has been away, visiting his girlfriend for the past 3 weeks, but was scheduled to come home today. I noted with a wry smile his Facebook comment yesterday: "Packing sucks". and felt a twinge of sympathy for her this morning when her status lamented; "another adventure ends".

As I prayed for a safe journey for him I could not help but think that I have been saying goodbye to my sons for all of their lives; they were 1 & 3 when their dad & I split and not long after a judge deemed them better off in their dad's care.

My son is grown now, in the fall he starts university. Thankfully he will be starting here, at our local school, but he has been talking about schools further afield for some time now. I am infinitely proud of my smart and handsome boy, and I have always known, as mothers do, that one day he would leave and build a life of his own. But I am not ready. I have had so little time with him, to teach him the things he needs to know to truly be a success. From the first moment I held each of my children and said "Hello" we have been moving toward these goodbyes.

Goodbye is a bittersweet word. I am one to linger at the door, unwilling for a visit to end, to always have something more to say on the phone. I have said goodbye too many times, although in most cases there has been opportunity to say hello again. It's been more than 25 years since I left my dad enjoying his breakfast on a Sunday morning not realizing it would be my last chance to say goodbye. I miss him still.

It's interesting that "hello" has little etymological meaning. Other languages' greetings seem to translate to "good day" , but goodbye was once "God be with you", a blessing, a prayer against the dangers faced in the world.

My subject matter may sound a little melancholy, especially for a beautiful summer day. I am not at all feeling melancholy. August has just begun, but summer has reached its halfway mark. The days are growing shorter, soon the routine of a new school year will begin. Change is in the wind, I can feel it. I have never been one to embrace change, but I am learning to, to see it as an adventure rather than a trial.

As I was considering goodbyes this morning I realized while every hello is inevitably followed by a goodbye, every goodbye also leaves us open to new things. Saying goodbye to friends who are moving to a new stage in their lives, be it physically or metaphorically creates a space for new friends to come in and enhance our lives. For me saying goodbye to unhealthy marriages allowed me to rediscover myself to say hello to a new adventure, to new relationships.

As I thought about how the losses, the goodbyes, in my life have opened the door for new, and often unexpected blessings, I was reminded too that there is one hello, that will never end in goodbye. When we say hello to Jesus as our saviour He promises to never leave us or forsake us-to never say goodbye. Hello, forever friend, hello

Strike the Ground...

I've been thinking a lot about the things we ask for, whether we ask in prayer or by holding a hope or a dream in our hearts, or even the casual things we speak in "wishful" thinking. I have always been a dreamer, visions of palatial homes, adoring children, devoted spouse, friends gathered around my table filling my fantasies since I was in my teens. We all have our secret hopes & dreams, and the saddest realization of my adult life came when I was asked what I wanted and I could not answer. The pain & loss, the heartbreak I had suffered, that we all suffer, in living in a broken world had stripped my dreams from me. I was surviving, but I had forgotten how to dream, Worse than that I had begun to believe I didn't deserve the dreams I recalled in fragments. Somehow I had started to think everyone else merited happy homes with devoted spouses, family and friends, fulfilling careers, all of the good things our hearts were designed to long for.

I cannot begin to tell you how often I have stamped my feet and shook my fist heavenward in frustration; crying out for it to be "my turn". I never expected life to be fair, but neither did I
expect to so often feel passed by. It is a strange dichotomy, believing God is a Father who longs to pour out the blessings of heaven on me, and still believing I've been overlooked & forgotten.
As I write this I find brought to mind the image caught in my mind's eye last spring. I don't recall just what I had asked to be shown, but I saw a huge chest, the kind we often associate with pirates. I reached tentatively into that chest and chose a few items to adorn myself...and suddenly the contents of the box were being poured out over my head, piling up at my feet, more than I could ever have imagined or hoped for.

I wonder sometimes if we, even once believe God wants to give us the desires of our hearts, think we should (there's a word we could lose, "should"-but that's another post) only pray for BIG things-health & healing, world peace, the big ticket stuff, not our everyday needs & longings, as though God only cares about the so called important things. If He knows when a sparrow falls, knows the number of hairs on our heads, why would he not care that we ache for a companion, for jobs we find satisfying, for things beyond our daily bread. Why are we satisfied with enough, or good enough, when the abundance of heaven is ours?

Yesterday I was reading a passage in 2 Kings 13:15-19:
¹⁵ And Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and some arrows.” So he took himself a bow and some arrows. ¹⁶ Then he said to the king of Israel, “Put your hand on the bow.” So he put his hand on it, and Elisha put his hands on the king’s hands. ¹⁷ And he said, “Open the east window”; and he opened it. Then Elisha said, “Shoot”; and he shot. And he said, “The arrow of the LORD’s deliverance and the arrow of deliverance from Syria; for you must strike the Syrians at Aphek till you have destroyed them.” ¹⁸ Then he said, “Take the arrows”; so he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground”; so he struck three times, and stopped. ¹⁹ And the man of God was angry with him, and said, “You should have struck five or six times; then you would have struck Syria till you had destroyed it! But now you will strike Syria only three times.”

As I read it a again it occurred to me that we do what the king was doing, asking, in ignorance for "enough", when we could have asked for so much more. I pray differently now. Many of the deep desires of my heart are still so deeply buried they may as well be forgotten, but I have asked of my Father, who knows all that I be given these things too-and sometimes I find myself with some wonderful gift in my grasp, and I realize that I had no idea it was just what I had always wanted until it was mine.

Are you bold enough to "strike the ground" beyond what seems reasonable? I am.