Incremental Revelations

but for now...

What follows is not artificially generated, these are the early morning ramblings from my own journal. All errors, miscalculations, and typos belong to me. That said, wow, I haven’t written here since last August and I can’t decide if I am ashamed or impressed I am just that non-competitive that it’s all ok. I think it is mostly that all the times I have attempted to sit down and write a post, I discover I just don’t want to add more noise, more kindling to the already lit conversations. Perhaps it is my introvert nature to advance, then retreat? Perhaps it is all the voices clambering for my own attention I can’t quite bring myself to be one more clanging cymbal. Whatever the reason I felt it was time to post something and decided this journal entry from Sunday would be my first post of this new year…

Back yard with snow…

It's that ultramarine blue time of morning when dawn breaks in the January air like a pale electric blue against a velvet indigo darkness. It's an awake darkness. Not the solid sleeping dark of full night. I can make out the jerking first flight of birds I can't yet identify, other than that they are birds. They too are awake, but like me, still quiet. Jagged shadows of trees begin to take form-first here a towering pine, then there the naked branches of the tri-trunked Birch. Each time I look down to write, or sip my already too cool coffee, when I look up again the world has changed in incremental revelations.

It's my favorite part of the day, even more so when I am alone with the hum of the heater, or the tender clicks of my old white cats nails tiptoeing across the night cold floor. I can almost never drink my first cup of coffee before it grows tepid but that is a burden gladly borne in the blue colored magic of pre day. It is this hour that I can believe in the world again, that I can gather enough unmarred simplicity and beauty, enough mystical nourishment, a manna of sorts, that I can face what I know will creep in with the increasing light.

With that light, I will remember worlds are burning. With each home burned an entire world goes with it. Floods, and wars, elections, corruption and convictions without consequence-worlds burn in their own ways and some days it feels like too much hopeless helplessness locked in a preternatural watchfulness for the next conflagration.

Now the light reveals weighted branches, a small snow capped concrete Pagoda hidden beneath pine boughs, and garden tripods empty of their creeping green tangles outlined as if drawn with magic electric blue-white ink. Rudbeckia, low rambling Rose, and other un-recalled skeletons poke stiff limbs through the thick batting and I wait, watching thinking any moment they will shake themselves free and stand.

Now the sky and ground have become the same shade of ice. Perylene shadows flow from trunk to trunk as ruddy ochre Beech leaves shiver in the breeze. These listless leaves will linger until spring, until the fearful Beech is assured a new green cloak will arrive. Maybe it's not so much fearful, as it is bashful not wanting to be caught bare. I find myself wondering when its burning time will come.

Everything must burn at some point. Whether by flame, or flood, or disease, accident, or death. This world will burn its own version of fire, will fall to what comes next, but for now...but for now can I just watch a dry brown vine resist the wind and remember it's greenness? Can I wait for the dun colored yearlings to high step through thick drifts on their sniff search for something tender to eat? Can I sit to think of where the recipe might be for the good apple bread? The one heavy with meaty bits of fruit, then think of who to share it with, all warm and tart as it melts on our tongues. But for now, is it all right if I sit here in my small acre of ability knowing I cannot put out the fires, or change the outcomes, or resurrect what's lost? Can I be enough in the world just now?

All I can know is that I need to love who I meet, to help tamp down the fires within my reach knowing I can never put them out completely. We will not escape this place, you and I, but for now it is enough to know that though our worlds will at some point burn, we don't have to burn alone. If I were worth my salt, I would wrap this all up in a perfectly singed bow reminding myself that God, in his heaven, has this all. That He has this all under control, that right prevails, that the fires go out, that the floods recede, that the Earth stops quaking. It may all yet do that, maybe just not yet though, and our great good God is still here. He continues to come again, and again in the form of tireless arms wielding fire hoses, shovels, food bundles, blankets, and even prayers. I've seen him pull a sheet up gently smoothing it's comforting weight. I've seen him sweep debris, and hammer nails, make endless pots of coffee, thick soups and chewy breads. I've seen him forget to disagree. Forget to see difference. Forget.

The advancing minutes reveal more falling snow, indistinguishable from ash in the dim light. It accumulates like prayer upon prayer upon prayer for all that is so wrong. But for now, knowing our own hour will come, or has already arrived, is it okay to sit in the mystery of electric blue mornings? Hold hope close in the darkness that someday all will be well. Maybe not this side of heaven, but it is still hope, it is still real hope before this day fully arrives bringing with it new fires.

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New Year’s came and went with no resolutions-something I am not good at anyway. Life has a way of interrupting resolutions and leaving the broken ones behind like so many reminders of not enough-ness. How do you begin a new year? Does it only come around once ever three hundred and sixty-five days? Or, is each new morning an opportunity to begin again? I am leaning towards this second option going into 2025. The books on my list right now have much to do with simplicity, longing, and intention and I am leaning into them with openness and hopefulness as well.

My creative journey is evolving and I am deciding what that will look like. I would love to hear what your goals, or intentions are for the coming days and year! What books are feeding you? What practices are nourishing your hearts? I want to ask more questions, invite more conversations and would love to hear from you-

Peace to you-

Susan