Alone is Grace

Can I spend too much time studying deer tracks in the forest? Breath in cold lungs, sun a red fire falling, muttering and whispering to God? One perceives a valley which is to perceive as well the faint blue ridge by which the valley is made. Or, asks J., is ridge by valley made?

Well, semantics. Semantics and paradox perhaps. We scale house-sized boulders pocked with ice and frozen moss, slipping and laughing to get to the top. The mind is always in motion and its movement is our home and that is why where we are going matters less than with whom we go.

Say what you mean, as plainly as possible, without investment in response, mine or anyone else's, and allow that that alone is grace. The desire to write is simply another appetite and yet. Cardinals abound, which is to say that my willingness to remember God abounds, which is to say - this being the part I tend to forget - that God abounds as well. Also, who dwells on definitions misses the point.

In my dream, I am told - subtly to be sure - to stop being stingy with words. At two a.m., blurry with fatigue, I keep going in spite of confusion. Maps work until they don't, like everything else. Two swans pass overhead, land and kiss me, then turn into old men who walk happily into the forest, unafraid of death.

In darkness one recalls other lips, other curtains that briefly parted to reveal January stars, and the great loneliness that one cannot solve but only love in a broken but worshipful way. S. has taken to long walks at midnight she says, and makes no allowance now for what happens in Texas. Anyway, another sunrise alone is no crisis. As so many tiny lights gather to form a radiant spiral whose point of entry we eclipsed together a thousand times a thousand lives ago.