The Smiling Host

Their feet are freshly scrubbed, and now

Their bellies will be filled--we know how

they feel, those quarrelsome disciples

gathered around the meal.

But what must it have signified to You,

Their humble host, on brink of sacrifice?

A foretaste of what You would win

Your view within the room that night.

To hold each foot, fouled and rough,

And make the reeking flesh come clean.

To watch them chew the broken loaf,

Their bushy beards amassing crumbs,

And cheer their spirits with the wine

That stained their wagging tongues.

The Love that animated Your travail

Must have rejoiced to see them eat their fill.

Now, having as well been purified,

I join my fractious family at Your board.

In remembrance of You we sip, divide

The loaf. Oh let me not be inattentive, Lord,

Nor abstract this full-bodied rite to empty rote.

I begin to see there is no better place

Than here, where by Your favor I am brought.
Here my clean soul can feast upon your grace.
Here I can feel my Savior's smiling face.

Oma

The houseplant you sent home with me,
And called "easy" to keep alive,
Did not stay green.

It needed your plainspoken blend
Of active love and common sense.
Wisdom, I mean.

That was your way. You had the knack
Of calmly keeping things alive,
Mostly unseen

By those who flourished under it
Amidst your cakes and coffee mugs
And china clean.

We now see that, though it may be
A simple kind of daily grace,
It's not "easy."

Cast Iron

Love alloyed your heart to mine,
and since we yearned to stay that way
were poured in that prosaic mold
to have and hold.

Now that ten years have filled and emptied, 

heated, cooled us, 

menaced us with dust and rust,

still we will see the sheen awake

in seasoned iron by the flame 

of daily use,

and that cleaving elemental bond,

no longer new,

still keeps us true in rest and trust. 

From whatever comes our way,
as the days we dwell unfold,

let us make new feasts always,

and have and hold. 

Birth Story

The day before you were born, your dad and I went out to Mother Earth Garden Center and purchased potted plants: Peace Lily, African Violet, Coleus. We didn't know that you'd be born the very next morning, but we knew it would be soon: you were six days past your due date.  I'd been having painless contractions for months, but I did notice that day that they were seizing me more often, lasting longer.  Jonathan, aware of this, teased me about going into labor, and I smilingly brushed the idea off.  "I can still talk through them, " I'd explain.  "Besides, I don't think I've really dropped--do you?  And I haven't lost my plug yet. I definitely haven't had my water break. At this rate, it'll probably be another week!"

Even so, my eyes must have mirrored the sparkle in his as we drove home.

Hours later, Jonathan greeted the news of my first unmistakable harbinger of imminent labor with a droll British accent: "Aha! The bloody show!"  I was so excited, I sent cheery texts to my doula, Andrea, and your grandma: Early labor!  Yay!  

That initial gaiety, unsurprisingly, did not persist.  Around 10:30 pm I began to understand everything I'd read about the uniquely excruciating sensation of true labor: waves of it robbing me of my power of coherent speech--although not, as Jonathan and no doubt every neighbor within a block of our house would attest, my powers of incoherent vocalization.

Your dad was a champion.  He brought me water and pillows.  He called the midwife, Diane, to inform her that labor had begun.  He ran my bath and massaged my back and turned on an episode of "Brooklyn 99", all while timing my contractions.  He cracked jokes to make me feel better.

At several points during the night he noted that my contractions, although still a bit unpredictable, were frequently meeting the standard that meant we should start making for the hospital.

"Abby, I really think we should call the hospital.  We should at least have Andrea drive here."  He was anxious, but I reminded him that first labors typically lasted a whole lot longer. The idea of arriving at the hospital with hours and hours of labor ahead of me so bothered me that I kept putting him off.  "Not yet.  I'm sure we have hours to go.  I just want to be home as long as I possibly can."  So I stuck it out,  on my side in the dark tepid bathwater, moaning loudly through the increasingly powerful contractions.  I didn't admit to myself that half my hesitation was simply because I dreaded the whole process of transitioning to the hospital in my current state.

Turns out, I was IN transition.  When Jonathan finally overruled me and called Andrea, she, hearing my wails in the background, ordered us to call the hospital and get ready to leave.  She was on her way.  Diane was alerted that we were coming.

I suddenly allowed myself to realize that I was well into labor.  Every time I moved position--from the tub to the toilet, pulling my clothes onto my shivering body, stumbling to the living room-- fresh contractions would debilitate me.  When Andrea arrived, she gave me a rushed breath-coaching session that quieted me down significantly, and she and Jonathan supported my failing legs to the car.

It was just after 5 am when Jonathan pulled into the vacant hospital entrance.  I relied on him and Andrea to support me through two more contractions on the walk inside, where a security guard fetched me a wheelchair and directed us to the labor and delivery ward.

I don't think the nurses there believed I was very far along at first.  They showed us into the delivery room and helped me onto the bed.  Jonathan mentioned my desire for a water birth as Andrea continued coaching me through the quickening contractions, and the staff started to set up the pool.  Moments later, Diane and her midwife-in-training Christy entered the room, smiling hugely despite their sleepy faces.

They did my first cervical check, and Diane announced, "She's a 9."  That news accelerated the pace of the room considerably, and filled me with a wash of relief.  Almost there!

I labored on the birthing ball awhile, and then was assisted to the wonderful warm tub with the jets, where my water broke at last.  Christy's face loomed over mine, and she calmly mentioned that it appeared there was meconium in the water.  The birthing pool was going to be off limits.  I didn't even care at that point: another contraction was seizing me.  Your dad's jokes had abated but he stayed nearby, and I found his presence incredibly reassuring.  He and Andrea took turns holding my hands, while the midwives reminded me to breathe, relax, breathe, relax.

At this point all my energy was focused on surviving each contraction.  Between them, I felt my body go limp and could sometimes muster a smile or a nod in reaction to comments or directives.  Then I would feel another starting up, and would summon my reserves to meet it (one at a time, Abby, one at a time) even as part of me shrank, willing it to just please please stop.

By and by it was time for another check.  Back to the bed to suffer the examination, which revealed that it was time to push. I got into position on the birthing stool.  Jonathan sat behind me, supporting me as I strained through each contraction.  They were so much closer together now, relentless, with a new sensation of burning as the pressure increased.  The midwives were smiling and telling me they could see your head.  I could touch it.  I found the strength each time to push harder and harder.  In the next few days I would realize how much this phase had required of me by the soreness in my biceps, but in the moment all my focus and feeling were concentrated on the excruciating work of birthing you.  Labor, indeed.

Fifteen eternal minutes of that, and then you crowned.  The little head I had touched moments before finally pushed out, and the rest of you slid after it, and you were a bright-eyed slippery perfect baby girl out in the world at last.

From the start you were alert and strong, holding your head up and latching immediately to my breast so I didn't even have room in my psyche to worry about the ugly aftermath of delivery, because of the shocking all-encompassing joy that filled every cell in my body.  As all my physicality moments before had been focused on birthing you, now it was completely awash in the experience of holding you, leaving no space for pain or weariness.

This is when the photo documentation can take up my story far more vividly than I can tell it, and I hope you see everything I struggle to say: our joy, love, exhaustion...and your fragile beauty. 7 lb, 4 oz, and 21 inches of sweet sweet human life.

It is six and a half weeks later.  I have healed, and we are a family at home, developing a rhythm around your tiny life that already feels natural.  I reclaim that crushing love and happiness each morning, waking beside your bright-eyed fragrant infant body.

Welcome, Florence Abigail.  You are so worth every bit of it.

February 24, 2015

Tonight is band practice. Exploratory guitar strains and vocal commentary drift through the dim downstairs rooms from the attic above, and I wonder to myself if the stirrings and kicks that pulse just beneath my swelling belly are my child's response to the strange chords and voices.

This final week of February marks the first week of my third trimester.   It has been a long and difficult month, but interspersed with a handful of happinesses.  Mimosas and Mexican baked eggs by candlelight the morning of Valentine's Day, before I left for work.  Jonathan in his Mr. Burger trucker hat and blue flannel shirt, improvising a goofy song on his bass guitar for the baby after dinner.  The installation of tile and a toilet in our gutted bathroom at long, long last.  The first house show for Flowerstalks, and the first time our home has been fit to host since last September.  Yellow tulips somehow making the dining room come to life.  Today's wonderful stroll with Jeremy through the frozen marshes bordering the Rice Creek trail, cattail rushes tossing the sunshine just ahead of us and rattling brightly in the breeze: the only time of year when one can safely trudge through swampland.

And each day the thrilling pulses and flutters of new inscrutable human life lifting me out of myself, into wonderment and joy.

A Welcome For Willa
New-minted infant, Pioneer,
no matter that under this sun
is no new matter.  You are new.
You have only now begun
as an inimitable self to know this place.
Familiarity will grow, and with it an
attendant tendency to bear contempt
for earth's redundancy and imperfections.
Contend against this inner bent.
Happily apprehend
that one convention of this world
is irrepressible renewal.
The song of the lark: five notes unfurled
day after day, that bless us yet.
And more than that:
The first secrets remain intact
and potent still to dazzle and confound.
Let long acquaintance make you fond,
but not complacent.  Living thus, you'll do your part
to keep this ancient garden green
and ardor kindled in your heart.

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."  -Willa Cather

"Men expecting yet another sun / To do the shapely thing they had not done"

YEAR'S END
(Richard Wilbur)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

"The word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind's deep connection with the real.  On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger..."

Ursula K. LeGuin's "Things Not Actually Present"

November morning

Ah, and today I did.  I woke in the light, went for a long walk with my dog.  Of course, the lapidary azure days of late October have already hissed away, and it's almost mid-November.  My section of Minneapolis begins increasingly to resemble the neighborhood I fell in love with my first days of marriage almost a year ago: the skinny trees, the frostbitten lawns and windy alleys, the pearly grey sky with streaks of shouting blue.  In this wintry monochrome setting all pops of color gladden the heart.  In a similar way, slow mindful mornings like this rejoice my soul in the whirling monochrome of my busy days.  Waking in the light.  Bundling into my winter coat and mittens.  Watching Janie snuffle ecstatically at the edges of lawns and curbs and the trunks of trees, and then leap ahead, tail wagging, to the next big smell.  Inhaling the coffee scent in my cozy home upon our return from an indulgently lengthy walk.  Warming my fingers in the sudsy kitchen sink before settling into my devotional time at the dining room table with my coffee mug and a slice of jam and toast.

I know.  Even now time is escaping.  Ten minutes and I'll be driving to job one of two, and before I know it, the day will be over and I'll be returning to bed.  And no more waking in the light, not for awhile.  But waking in the dark, leaving my groom asleep in our bed, walking the stunted half-block with Janie before I grab my things and drive to job one of two, seeing the stars and being a part of the fellowship of early risers on my city block, each of us with our cars fuming to warmth on the curb...that is a different sort of gladness.  The gladness of diligence and stewardship, of building a life, of earning my keep and my sleep.  It is part of what made today such a delicious gift.

Day by day, I'm keeping my difficult balance in this beautiful world.  Singing as I go.

"Letter To Gail"--Or, as I would subtitle it, "Variation On The Book Of Ecclesiastes"

Barbara Crooker

You write, "Where has the fall fallen?"
and how time is escaping, leaking like a hiss
from a blue balloon.  Outside, the sky
is that lapidary azure of mid-October.
You rush from meeting to board room,
while each day the leaves shift
in color and tone, red-orange, green-gold.
When you turn, they've already fallen.
You write that you would like to stop working,
but phone messages and faxes pile up on the floor.
This air, so cold and clean you could bite it,
like an apple.  All of our stories have the same ending.
Still, we drone on, little bees, drive while listening
to voice mail, drinking take-out coffee, trying to do
too many jobs in too few hours.  You say you'd like to wake
up in the light, go for long walks with the dog, not answer
the phone for months.  Outside the window, the unreachable
sky, the burning blue fire.

"God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love." -Marilynne Robinson

True Liberality

Marilynne Robinson has done it again.  On my birthday I received her latest essay collection, entitled When I Was A Child I Read Books.  Sure enough: I'm only 83 pages in, but already her scrupulous, uncompromising insights are exercising my brain and stirring me to new interest in areas of life (politics, education, history, theology) that I rarely take time to consider.  Although I am a dedicated reader, I tend to choose literature of the sort that tells a story rather than makes a reasoned argument.  As a result, Facebook and MPR account for almost the whole of my exposure to whatever discourse is going on in the world.  Imagine what a breath of fresh air these essays are!  Also, how chastening.

Today's essay was particularly inspiring.  Entitled "Open Thy Hand Wide", it describes the motivation for and character of liberality in the Calvinist tradition.  It portrays an attitude toward generosity rooted in Mosaic law, an attitude that promotes unconditional sacrificial giving, that shows much greater concern for the poor than for safeguarding personal property.  Citing the law in Deuteronomy 24:10-13 which commands a creditor to restore at sundown the cloak pledged by the borrower to ensure that he may sleep in his cloak, Robinson writes, "So this-worldly are God's interests that he cares whether some beleaguered soul can find comfort in his sleep.  He cares even to the point of overriding what are called by us, though never by Moses or Jesus, the rights of property."

The rest of the essay goes on to describe the utterly biblical and yet embarrassingly foreign liberalism that Calvin and the Puritans, following Old Testament principles, promoted.  Calvin declares that it is every believer's responsibility to "advance in an increasing liberality", describing it thus: "True liberality is not momentary or of short duration.  They who possess that virtue persevere steadily, and do not exhaust themselves in a sudden and feeble flame, of which they quickly afterwards repent. ...There are indeed many occurrences which retard the progress of our liberality.  We find in men strange ingratitude, so that what we give appears to be ill-bestowed. ...But let us remember this saying, and listen to Paul's exhortation 'not to be weary in well-doing;' for the Lord exhorts us not to momentary liberality, but to that which shall endure during the whole course of our life."  

These injunctions are supported by the theology of mankind being created in God's image.  More Calvin: "We must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love. ...Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance.  Say he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a character which out to be familiar to you; for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh.  Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image.  Say that you are obliged to him for no services; but God has made him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important benefits.  Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess."  

While I know and thought that I believed all these things, I find myself rebuked when I look at my life and the choices I daily make, and discover that I am not following the Christian imperative to advance in increasing liberality.  If anything, I indulge in "momentary liberality," and grow weary in well-doing.  And all too often when I survey the image-bearers around me it is from a posture of grasping selfishness, a desire to protect my own rights and preserve my own comfort.  So often I withhold a kindness that it is in my power to bestow because it would inconvenience me, or because I think it undeserved.  I forget that "I was hungry and you fed me.  I was naked and you clothed me."  I forget what it truly means, to love my neighbor as myself.  

I love how Robinson describes Calvin's angle on this matter.  "For Calvin, every human encounter is of moment, the other in the encounter is always 'sent' or 'offered.'  So respect for every circumstance is reverence to God."

It excites me to think ahead to all the people I am going to be sent in the days that remain to me, of all the opportunities to show my reverence to God, honoring him by sharing his gifts with his image-bearers.    

Inspirited

It's the final day of calendar summer.  As I drove home from work, the far bright moon and the far brilliant lights of the Minneapolis skyline begged to be admired: pieces of a matching set, cold and glittering.  I love to inhale this cold and glittery air and then exhale it, magicked into a warm human vapor.

Tomorrow will be the first day of the week as well as the first day of the season.  I have reason to dread it.  There has been a serious muddle.  All week it has been dormant but prominent, sitting like an evil egg in the cozy nest of my community, and tomorrow it is going to break open and release its cache of consequences.  Those consequences will be long-abiding guests that we must accommodate with all the grace and generosity we can muster, for how we receive them will define us much more decisively than any words we could speak about ourselves.  

I think again about the clarity of the air I breathed tonight, how it quickened me. I think to myself that, in all that lies ahead, if only I could be like that to those I encounter.  Just a pure, clean, life-giving presence they can effortlessly inhale, and then, inspirited, generously breathe out as a gracious human warmth.  

Labor Day

Bryant Avenue North: Late afternoon

09/02/2013

Ours is the house across the street from the tattooed blonde gardening beneath the lazy sway of her front porch's American flag.  

In our own backyard, the sunflowers are leaning their faces over the fence and brushing up on their Spanish, mute spectators of the series of volleyball matches that have been conducted by our neighbors all day long.  

Behind the sunflower fence and across the alley drive, the aroma of grilled meat wafts from a hazy back porch.  

Two shouting boys tear down the alley and leap up the curb where our trash and recycling bins are standing.  They huddle beside the bins until they realize that I am watching them from behind the irrepressible sprawl of the tomato plant in our raised garden bed.  A moment's blinking surprise, a flicker of sheepish grins, and they are bolting back down the drive, leaving me to continue my happy work of harvesting the perfect ripe grape tomatoes from the drooping vines.  

Once indoors, I arrange these fruits on the counter beside my harvest of four juicy beefsteaks and a clutch of dusty carrots.  

Within the mission-style interior of our home the sounds of the neighborhood drift in through the open windows: an ice cream truck's ditty weaving through the streets, cars blasting music, voices of children and voices of adults, a rowdy array of accents and tones quarreling and laughing and hollering.  They keep me company as I do my afternoon housekeeping: loads of laundry, menu-planning, floor sweeping, dish-washing, food-preparing.  

Soon enough the food will be eaten, the laundry folded into closet drawers, the dishes air-dried on the kitchen rack.  I will take Janie out to the back stoop and watch the horizon-hugging lights of Orion signal the advent both of twilight and autumn.  

like bread

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

[Ursula K. LeGuin]

Two Years

Shocking that this anniversary has passed unnoticed except in afterthought!  The promised two years of vigilance following my final days of chemotherapy are over, and according to my oncologist I can now consider myself "cured."

Perhaps the forgetting of the anniversary is its greatest memorial.

I had expected to meet the day with fanfare, but as I reflect on it I now think it fitting that I celebrated by simply doing those quiet little life things that I had been deprived of for so long: curling my hair, shaving my legs, drinking (and enjoying) a cup of coffee, doing an honest day's work.  Feeling healthy without even really noticing it.

Even so, I must remind myself that taking notice is important too.

Today isn't any particular anniversary of any major life event.  Therefore.  As it was good that I kept the anniversary of my cure by overlooking it, so it is best that I observe the quotidian perfection of this dripping May afternoon by pausing my day for a moment of glad commemoration.

excerpt: "From The Distance"

The wheel of eternity is turning
in time, its rhymes, austere,
at long intervals returning,
sing in the mind, not in the ear.

-Wendell Berry

Vermiculite tea

I've just tucked a seedling or two into each of the homely newspaper pots on my front porch.  Stepping backwards and ardently sniffing their aromatic cargo of potting soil and vermiculite, I survey the three trays of uneven and patently homemade pots.

Am I satisfied?  Not yet.  Expectant and optimistic I most certainly am, but I will not be able to make true peace with this day's light labor until I see green.

Until then, I'll drink it.  Reaching for my mug of green tea, I intend to make a solitary toast to the seedlings in their newsprint houses...but catch myself in time.  While I worked I must have accidentally shaken some vermiculite into the cup: flecks of it swirl against the porcelain edges.

Instead of a toast, then, a libation!  I unlatch the front door, glance over my shoulder significantly, and douse the threshold of my home with a mugful of lukewarm vermiculite tea. It's a grander gesture anyway, and one that seems to encompass not merely the humble potential of those inhabited pots, but also the many broader, deeper, less tangible potentials that the home itself holds.

Janie doesn't bother getting to her feet as she witnesses this odd ritual, but she pays homage to my little ceremony with a few lazy sweeps of her tail across the carpet.

And it is spring.

At home

It is a March evening in Minnesota: the lingering light surprises me still, only a few weeks since Daylight Savings reset our clocks.  7 pm, and the windshields of the cars that line our street still wink up the last glow of day. As the sun sinks, the room I most enjoy is the kitchen, which faces west and soaks up the sunset.

And it is Friday: a good one, although not THE Good One...that's next week.  Friday means more to me now that I no longer work weekends.  Two days out of seven to spend as I please!  What luxury.

Tonight Friday has meant preparation, which is a favorite form of work for me, since in this particular instance it means very little actual labor.  I just sat at the dining room table with my french press pot and a plate of french toast and bananas and did some planning for tomorrow: research into when my local farmer's market opens, a few tasks related to the church bulletin, and the composition of a mighty spring cleaning to-do list.  Then some garden daydreaming as I looked ahead to spring's arrival.  Also some brainstorming about the impending visit of my family in just a week: sights to see, food to prepare, beds to magic into existence.  (See also the aforementioned mighty spring cleaning to-do list.)

As I anticipated their arrival, I spent a few moments trying to conjure up how my new home and hometown will appear to them during their stay.

It has been three months since I changed my last name and moved into my husband's home--now my home!--in Minnesota.  Part of me protests that surely it cannot have been three months already.  How new and fresh everything still feels!  Another part of me drowsily smiles that it has surely been much longer than that.  How comfortable I am, how natural it is to be here!  Perhaps that is what the honeymoon period means: the excitement and security of sharing a fresh start with someone who is also strangely new to you, and yet who feels familiar enough and is dear enough to make any new place feel like home.  At any rate, that is what it means to me.

With one out of four seasons of my first year of marriage behind me (at least I trust that it is behind me: the calendar says spring has arrived and there is the matter of the daylight, even though my morning walks with Janie over icy snow-banked sidewalks remain treacherous indeed), I am peering into the season ahead, the goals I hope to accomplish, goals that would've surprised me years ago.

Aspirations to better stewardship: to gardening enough to bring a significant portion of our own food to the table this summer and autumn (and perhaps even winter, if I dream big), and to seeking out quality foods that will not burden the world in which I live, but will promote ecological and personal health.  This topic, which meant so little to me that I rarely gave it a first thought, let alone a second, is now one that increasingly stirs my conscience and imagination as I learn more through online courses and personal readings. Such stirrings are at times uncomfortable, but they also gladden me: they remind me of all the good work before me, the myriad ways that I can quietly do my part to thank and serve my Creator God.  That blend of excitement and security again: the newness of learning about this world and feeling called to act on this knowledge, while at the same time resting in the assurance that He controls all things, that He is the Provider as well as the Creator.  Active faith and passive faith.

Then there are domestic aspirations, particularly in the culinary realm.  My limping efforts in the kitchen (which have been complicated of late by my turmoil regarding the groceries we consume) daily remind me of how very much I have yet to learn.

And there is my work with vulnerable adults, which gives me such joy and satisfaction, and also ample room to grow!

Along with all these good things, I aspire to deeper relationships here in this new home.  Relationships that are true and pure and have the radiance of God's love saturating their every demonstration.  I aspire to a generosity that invites all to the table to taste and see that the Lord is good indeed: a hospitality of heart as well as home.   To faithfulness in all these enormous little things.

I have work to do, praise God.  But now it is dark, and the day is done, and I am ready to lift my soul to heaven for an evening blessing, and rest awhile.  

Like Snow

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

-Wendell Berry-