Life is breathtakingly beautiful, ablaze with incandescent brilliance AND simultaneously achingly haunting and hard and hopeless.
Melodramatic, maybe. Yet also a maxim of truth.
Wonder stops us in our tracks with a blaze of glory.
Wonder waits with impatience asking when.
Faith offers firm footing.
Faith frustrates us with uncertainites we can’t define.
Delight dwells in hidden corners.
Dismay, too often, edges in, edges it out.
Certainty seems sure-footed.
Until Change drops by and what we knew, wavers.
Control crumbles.
We find ourselves askew asking why we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.
Perhaps we are the anti-hero after all.
We’ve tried and tried and tried again and there’s always more than one person ready and willing to sell us a six-step system to guaranteed success.
Something doesn’t equate.
Some days it feels like there are too many balls sitting in my court and I’m dumbfounded about how to reduce it down to one.
I don’t exactly find myself drawn to in-betweeness.
Unknowns.
Disconcertment.
And yet, we abide there often.
Much of life lies in Do-I-Really-Want-To-Be-Here places.
Life is in the living.
Life is always decaying and dying.
Buds bloom, blossom, begin to fade.
I hold my Right Now Days with a soft and sacred grasp.
The fragments of the details I’m going to miss one day.
A red Camaro rolls in the lane.
A playful puppy rolls on the lawn.
A rumbling Peterbilt, laden with corn, rolls out of our farm.
A gardener girl, in kerchief and overalls, rolls up a reluctant garden hose.
Pages turn slowly, the next paragraph read.
I turn on Spotify and tap Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors.
The turn to listen to conversation over coffee.
I turn on my side, burrow into the mattress, arm flung across my good farmer man.
For it is in this haunting haze of brilliant days, we live and move and have our being.
We did not get a choice about one single detail of our awaited days before our heart started beating and we came to be.
But in our Here-and-Now, our Already-and-Not-Yet we are often inundated with decisions.
Fatigue finds us in assorted forms.
We falter, fumble, feel forlorn.
It is the beauty that prompts us, propels us forward, promises respite.
It is the Remembrance that our Right Now Days will not always be as they are today.
Glimpse the good. Discover the delight. Turn to catch the tears that roll.
Welcome the hopelessness and hope together.
Feel the ache and feel the living as we breathe in deep.