Back Again

May this also be a wish for all of you as you begin the new school year:

And Back Again

It is almost time to go back again. Wind’s shhh sound through pines is visible on a contoured field. Light bends around blue mountains, their familiar shapes appearing now in dreams, now in a chance pebble. This has become the textured boarder of our life.

At the center of Dante’s paradise there’s an ordered rose, complex, structured, beautiful, but we find God in small, jumbled moments—in soccer and sweat and wordless songs. We venture out like forest creatures into a new day or night without answers, but with stories. We speak to each other and God simply with small words—sincerely.

We feel the dust of our mortality in Rome, in farming, in ancient tombs, our faces painted, in chapels, domes, street corners, shop window glass. We find our shapes proportional in space—a landscape, cathedral; we are small and grand.

Were we overawed by trumpets and fire and gold—on nights of contagious laughter, on nights of twisting pain? We grew together in cracked places.

It is almost time to go back again. Do not fear familiarity or strangeness, a place too small to contain you. God is in the miniscule and vast. We carry a world within which can never be lost. In a world of noise and traffic and half-price deals or plate glass and death and fear, we hold together. We sit silent. We listen, and once or twice or three or four or over and over, little by little, piano, piano, we do right to one another. 

{you are all simultaneously in my thoughts and affections}