A pause spring brings
“If anyone should ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord essay to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.”
–Meister Eckhart
Spring today. Into life again, then, by choice, it seems to say. The sudden expanse of big warmth after narrow cold. The cardinal’s crystalline notes, cheering on life over still brown hills.
Life after death after life. Heart of the universe. Equinox today a stanza break in the ode we live.
pause/breath change of voice turn/ counter turn/ and stand she lifts the mask
Reading near-death experiences, noticing all without exception speak of the love that renders old worries so petty upon returning, the love we may in this life discover, knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.
Joy and sorrow doors in the house of the heart. Without them, a tomb. Sealed/
We do not come back seeking refuge from oblivion, asking for protection.
We know we are camping here in our skin tents/ to ride horses across the steppes/
hear the first flute notes of the cardinals in spring/ fall off mountainsides in love/
fight with our selves.
The word love is more naked than our nakedest body parts.
We choose again to return, like spring, to rebloom the given, unhusk the absolute, crack open the speckled blue eggs of the inescapable.
“But who would count eternity in days? /
… (I measure time by how a body sways).”
Theodore Roethke, ‘I Knew a Woman’
