A Fragment of Bright Sky

Morning. Light makes its way in, twisting and turning through the net of new, tawny maple-flower, ducking under the porch ceiling, backing cautiously up to the narrow window, and falling inside. It's Spring. God knows what time it is – it will be another week before my time-instincts synch up clock time again – but at least it's light: the cloud cover is pulsing with it.

I'm of an age, maybe, when most sweetnesses carry twinges with them.

Some have seen a likely lad

Who had a stout fly-fisher's wrist,

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl who knew all Dante once,

Live to bear children to a dunce...

And so one's pleasure in likely lads and learned girls is tinged with that, of course. So much seed falls on barren ground. Still the Spring does come, each time more gloriously improbable than before, and you realize that the current behind it has to be much huger than ever you knew or dreamed.

And I? I stretch my fingers, crack my knuckles, feel the strength and cunning of my hands. I'm stronger and more certain every day.

Despite my poem about visitors, I have had wonderful visitors recently, and one more treasured friend coming this weekend. I am deliberately not learning whether hugs are against some monastic precept, so that I can plead ignorance. She gave me a bit of sky, once, as a bookmark. Sometimes, after a dry season, the blessings come as thick as a blizzard of snow.

The sacred joy that is without suffering. Even to imagine it is to carry a little fragment of bright sky with you.