I Sing of the Slow Melt

Yesterday I walked to the old fire pond. Rain was beginning, a cold spit just this side of ice. I was alone and glad for it, and gave attention to gladness, and to wholeness, which at that moment seemed so distant and impossible. How I long now for order, for simplicity, for service.

And brought no one with me, nor wished that I had. Several times I stopped short, feeling the nervous eyes of the deer, and wanting to see them in turn but could not. How precious to want only what God gives. A very light cold rain fell, and the dog wandered in circles before me.

At the fire pond, one percieves the way thaw proceeds from the shallows inward, to where the pond is deepest. Wood ducks floated across open patches, pale silver streams in their wake. I thought of stars shining behind clouds, and of the love I long to give but cannot, and of the ones upon whom I selfishly project the lesser fragments, and it made me angry. Sometimes we cry but sometimes we want to rage against the disappearing light.

Who knows the trail can choose to deviate from it or follow it quickly home. How slowly I go, being in love with the rich silence of the forest, the last song of chickadees in shadowed pine trees, and near the little feeder brook the muffled thrumming of an owl taking flight. What are my twenty sentences - what I have been scribbling now for more than thirty years - but a form of resistance? When one hears the sounds of the village, something settles inside, something goes back into its interior glade and rests, awaiting still its truest acceptance.

Oh put no faith in my broken and misguided heart, because I don't, not anymore. What is the mystic really but the one who can say finally - honestly - that they don't know God and despair they ever will. It is the nature of love to humble itself into unimaginable poverty from which it can then offer itself endlessly to all. I sing of mercy, I sing of stubborness, and I sing of the slow melt despite the apparent dark.