Not This Way But Another

What moonlight we are becoming! Or so I think at 1 a.m., leaning on the window, scratching the dog's head, contemplating yet again the descending  gracefulness of all light. Love what presents itself as needing love and remember that details are simply a form of resistance.

I remember eating cupcakes in Lenox, and later drinking coffee outside on a bench, and later yet wandering through tiny galleries, feeling as always the fiscal impoverishment that rises in vain to block the happy expressions of Christ. It is the last morning of 3 a.m. and - for all his complaining - the man without shoes already feels nostalgic.

Oh dawn, you never don't reveal the continuous gifts of God! Often, when relative strangers inquire into my spiritual practice, I say something about giving attention to apples and refusing to refuse to swat mosquitos. The monastery goes with us and we are always "on retreat."

Darling will you tie my string? Pushing 5 a.m. I go out again, this time to check on the chicken shed, for no real reason other than the moon has set and darkness as always makes me do little dances. Little glistenings here and there, little glimpses.

Sooner or later we all begin a rambling journey to the interior. It is okay to take notes and okay to read the notes of the ones who went before. Scraps of birch bark, blue jay feathers, and Robert Frost poems at last understood as saying "not this way but another."

Oh camera, what lies do you not beg me to believe? The trail emerges in part as we go, as our going joins the goings of others. We bend to the real work, we allow another to gift us in a soft way, a moist way.

Yet another minute passes. "Hold on," I say to God, scribbling madly, "I just want to say again how happy the two note spring song of chickadees makes me."