The Real World is beautiful and inspiring and sustaining. It is also brutal and unrelenting and deadly. It provides for our daily sustenance and takes it away. We find solace and comfort in it and are then laid low by its power to devastate. We are part of it and yet stand alone on it struggling. in an endless attempt to overcome the paradox of existence. One of the most important gifts we can receive from living is to accept the existence of this paradox; not by giving up facing the challenges it brings but by acknowledging it is through the wrestling we do that we are able to experience the deepest aspects of being human . All these things taken together,
are the way of the world and our lives. That is the moment we move from simply existing to being. Christmas steps out of the mire of marketing and touches our powerful, dark need to accept what we cannot understand. When this happens to us, we come upon the truth of this season: that the paradox is redeemed only by seeing God present everywhere.
I am the blossom pressed in a book, I am the heart contracted by joy...
found again after two hundred years... the longest hair, white
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper... before the rest...
When the young girl who starves I am there in the basket of fruit
sits down to a table presented to the widow...
she will sit beside me.. I am the musk rose opening,.
I am food on the prisoner's plate... unattended, the fern on the boggy summit...
I am water rushing to the wellhead, I am the one whose love
filling the pitcher until it spills... overcomes you, already with you
I am the patient gardener when you think to call my name...
of the dry and weedy garden...
Jane Kenyon, "Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks"
I am the stone step,
the latch,and the working hinge...
