Waxing In The Waning

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I have not sought the moon this Spring. Intentionally looked up and made mental notes of its stage and size. Cycle and rhythms. Dimness and brightness. Color and stage. But I should be. Marking and noting. There are lessons there for me in the heavenlies.

Rather I have been looking down and to the side. Over and under the small spaces. Seeking the growing. Cataloguing the seed, the bloom and the fruits of the earth and of the the sea. Miniscule milestones in the garden and broken pieces of shells coughed up by the sea. Roughed up and beaten up and then honed into the beautiful.

Waxing in the waning is a banner over my life. Growing in the dimming. Increasing in the lessening. Smallness is wearing her beautiful crown. She is royalty and majesty. The paradox is grand. The center is a whisper, faintly wooing with her call to pause in the now.

I live on the cusp of exploration. Steps from the salty marsh where so much mystery hides in the folds. The waves weave a hiding place. The tides will unveil, pulling the curtain back for peaks. But stand guard, awake and present. Or you will miss much in the changing of the guard.

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The dolphin break through the glass ceiling that is the glassy sea. Looking at us as we  strain to study their graceful acrobatics. A day is labeled wonderful if we have spent time with a pod. Or even a mother and her young. We are students of the sea. Since I was a child, I have been near in my soul or body or both to the place of salty mystery. Everything is new. Again and again. I remain a child at the seeking of pieces of joy hidden, then revealed. Revealed and then hidden.

Before I even touch the snow pea to my lips I have savored goodness with my eyes. This is just the crescent. But the crescent is enough. The moon in all her fullness. The pea at her ripest, cooked or raw, eaten or not. Archiving the now, fully alive, fully awake fills us with His goodness. Seeing the holy moments. The holy in the moment. Touching and smelling. Seeing and tasting all that He has created brings us closer to the Creator. And that is where abundance is poured out. Every blade and seed, He made. Every dolphin nose. Wet and sleek.

There is a waning to my years. I do not recall the glory-filled details of much of my living from long ago. I come from Dementia. My mother, my grandmother and my aunt have known it too well. And I may be traveling toward Dementia. I may well be in the line of that fiery disease.

But I am going down fighting for a magnificent, magnified view of the poetic now.

And there is a moon and there will always be a moon. And she will meet me in the heavens tonight. This I know.

For now.

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Awake At The Wheel: Eyes Open For Beauty, Wonder and Miracle

I have always been intrigued by the beauty of the middle places. The after birth and before the end. The in-between and still in process. And plays a role in this scavenger hunting and archiving. There is always more in the hidden places. Nuances are found in the unveiling, uncovering, and unwrapping.

We are all in the middle of making and doing. We are birthing projects, dreaming dreams, and living out the calling. We are seeing anew, forgetting the past, building bridges to broken places, moving on and healing wounds.

I fell into a place of slow wonder. And I am staying there. The South shows me well its old tradition of living and moving slow. She is the matriarch of my love affair with my new-found wide-awake-ness. I cannot travel back to a time of inattentive living.

I shall not fail to record, remember and ingest. I will not not live aware. I accept the invitation to open every gift of wonder. Every drop of beauty. I am headed into the days of the waning. When the memory fades. But I have come from a faded story. So I am ready to fight to see and record it all.

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I confessed to my daughter that I did not remember. Forgetting may be in my DNA. So for today I am recording well and I am searching like a woman in a desperate desert search for a cool we drink of ordinary life. The mirage of beauty is gone. Holographic beauty is reaching out and grabbing me by my senses.

I found a letter in a trunk. The one I keep of old and yellowed letters. Post marks from ’58 and forward through the years and through the times, forgotten. I can go diving into my past there. And I do. I am a stranger in my own understanding. In my remembering, the doing is dim. I am the stranger meeting a woman who is stranger too.

And I told my daughter that I do not remember if I went to the Eiffel Tower at three o’clock as the letter asked me to. A simple rendez-vous for a young woman. I do not remember. Yes, I was living in Paris at the time. And the letter, I explained was written in the days before cell phones and social media. He, an acquaintance traveling abroad, asked if we could meet. The letter leaves me wondering.

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I do not want to miss the recording of the living. The bignesses. Who misses towers in Paris and a rendez-vous in the heart of France. I want to record the intricate, miniscule parts of my life. The beauty, the miracle, the wonder of the small and ordinary will not escape the sieve of my collecting heart.

Determined to live awake at the wheel. I am paying attention. And life is grandiose in its slow and ordinary wonderment.

Join me. We will discover small things.
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Joining Laura Boggess

January, Please Stay

January, Please Stay

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Reveal the hidden
Within the frozen
Pockets
Buried deep within the arctic tempered
Earth
January, you give us pause
Cause us to hunt
Long and hard
Beyond your surface washed in
Battleship and slate
You seem to keep your brush in tones
Of every shade of grey

But I believe you have secrets
Mystery buried
In these monochromatic days

Coded and encrypted
Shrouded
Covered
Still hidden
Blanketed
Earth’s cumulus horizons wear
Her clouded smokey veil
Once we decide to see
The beauty in the shadows
There is glory all around

The lens of longing
Melts mere grey

Revealing nature’s song
Her symphony
A hallelujah chorus
Rocks sing out
In harmony with
Trees, naked, stripped
Bare

January
Quiet preacher of cold truth
January
please stay

January
Pour out your liquid silver
Let us cherish it as gold

January
Linger longer
In the cold with lessons of the Truth

Sit us by the embers of a January hearth
And teach us once again
Your January lessons
School us gently
In your mysteries
For
We are a people slow to learn
The truth

January, oh January please stay
If only one more day

Joining Laura

The Element of Surprise

The Element of Surprise

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And I heard
Bold prayers exploding from my lips
I wondered
Did another
Hijack my mouth
Borrow it for a moment
So I stuttered them again
To listen to myself in disbelief
Self reflecting, I checked
And
Made sure it was my heart
Leaking out around me
Rising up to Haven
In honest, humble ways

I came upon the narcissus in my yard
And felt how un-January of you
Bold and tender, white and frail
You seem more like Easter new to me
Yet I find
Your unique voice
Is  welcome here
Sitting, singing in the winter’s cold
For I know this is the time
Marked for
Blooming forth in honest ways

I almost called the manager
Suggested there was some mistake
So much beauty could be mine
For  $2.99, bouquet of luscious greens
As though the eucalyptus
Said pardon me and asked
If I would take her fragrance home
Where
She made promises
To sit by me while writing
In sweet and pungent, honest ways

Cancer news comes through the phone
Loss and disappointment crawl scrawled across my screen
My insides cry in wrenching sympathetic pain
For them, for all mankind
The earth is spinning wild and fast
And I am, yet still surprised
By the mix of joy and pain

But I will stand on hope
And recall the roses’ thorns
Small tight blooms, hold wonder
Unpicked, not ripe or ready yet
Hold their secrets, tucked
Still growing, on
The well-armed bush

Yet
In time’s fullness
Our moments will come
Birthed
In radiant fullness
Glory’s
Extravagant beauty
Poured out on the Earth

We will sing Hallelujah’s loud

And  bow in holy gratitude

Weep wet oceans of our humble thanks
For the pregnant
Waiting
Laced with scared hope
And rejoice in honest ways for
The unveiling
And

the mysterious
element of surprise