33

If God is in all things and all places, can there be a place where God is not?

Only the idea that God can be other than what God is can actually obscure God, she says.

And the obscuration is not of God but of awareness of God.

She was the one who taught me that attention was in the nature of a gift, not scrip.

She was the the one who taught me that attention – gently and steadily given – yields awareness.

At night she sits by the window and watches the sky.

She folds and refolds the quilt she uses for sleep, when she consents to sleep, which is rarely.

God is the trillium and the bluet, when one is aware of God.

God is the lover and the husband, when one is aware of God.

I make a small pot of tea and we drink it in the barn.

Rain falls quietly and swallows arc and swoop above our heads.

When the desire to know God is awakened in us, it is an actual manifestation of God, because what is indivisible and eternal is not particular about name or form.

Trust what works without fail, and do not allow yourself to deviate.

The history of the barn is a form of resistance – the stall where the horse was shot, the stall into which the last Massey-Ferguson was retired.

When I close my eyes, voices filter out from the past – men's voices, sometimes harsh, sometimes tired and slow.

She begins to laugh.

Looking at my face – on which whole stories are written – she laughs.

First you seek, then you find, she says.

And in the meantime there is tea.

In the meantime there is rain.