Journal of Sacred Work

Presence to the ordinary helps us see the extraordinary.
-Erie Chapman

   Inside any given day we have countless tiny encounters that are random and forgettable. How can these brief glimpses inform the texture of deeper, more meaningful meetings?
   At dawn, we awaken to some kind of light, we brush aside the covers, our feet touch the floor. The news comes to us that it’s Monday. We are seconds into our waking and there is nothing, yet, to mark the day as anything other than ordinary.

   In first light, we glance out the window as a light breeze scuttles a leaf across the driveway (click on photo to enlarge.) We see nothing special and the leaf leaves our life, never to be thought of again or spoken about. On the way to work, we see a woman at a bus stop in a worn purple coat. She smiles gap-toothed at someone. But we are already past her and she exits our lives. Driving by a self-storage company whose outer wall is painted with a long wavey blue line like the surface of the ocean, we see a man in a corduroy coat walking the sidewalk as if immersed in those waves. He too, will join the endless list of those we forget, bit characters in the drama of our lives…

   But there are those we encounter in ways so meaningful to us that we remember special things about many meetings. They are the ones with whom we have shared such a profound presence that they live integrated into our hearts.
   In between complete strangers we brush past and people who live so close to our hearts we feel they are a part of us, we, as caregivers, may find some understanding of what it means to be present to someone who may only need our gifts for a brief season of their suffering.
   I thought of all of these – the dying leaf, the woman in purple, the man in curduroy, people I love, and those I have yet to meet – after rising one Monday morning and driving to work along the route I take every day…

Autumn Acquaintances

I will not speak of you again,
  your brittle back
curling so that your leaf tips
  fingernail the brick

of my back yard. You scramble-scuttle
on your calloused toes, shooed by gusts
past the frozen tree that was your mother,
running from me forever. I will not speak of you again.

Nor will I speak of you again,
you that are benched at the bus stop
bunched in your purple winter coat,
tonguing your
divided teeth.

Perhaps the ancient blood of Bantu kin
threads the
rivers beneath your skin.
I want to grant you an honored place
on the tiny stage of these lines,
for you look old-poor & deserve,
  at least,
this recognition before your exile to,
I hope, Shangri-la.

Nor will I speak again of you, my corduroy-
  coated man, as you parallel the waves
undulating the long wall of the Abbott Self Storage
Company on
your way to somewhere
far beyond the brittle leaf in my yard;

or of the cars blurring or the voices singing
on the wire strings that sag
post to post to wooden post.

   & who would speak,
even once, of that fire hydrant’s stubbed arms?

But you I will speak of again,
for I remember when
the sun caught the left edge
of your suddenly chatoyant eyes

as you curled cat-like,
sun slanting so that I needed to stroke
          the
landscape of your soft back,
ease your loneliness,

& think of you again, again,
again.