#MicroPoetry|July ’20 Reflections

What was left to you that those who followed never saw?

As we watch the children in our lives grow into the blessing they are meant to be, how do we feel that we shall likely never see them fully awaken?

What gift are you nurturing to give to hands you shall never touch?

These questions are never easy to answer and can take a lifetime to consider, need alone answer. In this Verse, such ruminating is engaged in the space that sometimes only the poetic can hold.

Faith is a nebulous thing. It defies being defined, pinned down, or trite descriptions. I sometimes wonder about understanding it as less than a thing or an idea, but a state of being. Faith, as an act of being in the world, can help embolden us in places of challenge, offer care in times of strife and clarity when others are harmed. This musing explores less about what it is, but those moments or experiences when we might experience the affirming nature of that way of being.

Planting has a long and rich history as a metaphor for the spiritual journey. It is also a useful image in regard to shaping a future that we will never see. One that our intention can influence for those yet to come. Whether on a spiritual or practical level, the metaphor engages us to ask fundamental questions about the choices we make now when we recognise they have the literal impact of lives and beings we will never know.

Being humbled often occurs when what we have spent so much time planning simply does not happen. There are too many reasons to name why, but often when we are so invested in an outcome, not realising it feels like failure: it feels personal.

It has been my experience and in my vocation that these moments possess significant import. They can reveal to us a teaching that allows us to awaken to wonder and possibility, as opposed to self-defeat and judgement.

Body, mind and spirit.

This trinity of the self can enable us to do amazing things. They are dance partners supplementing one another at times, carrying the load on another and sometimes acting in a way that might seem independent. When we are aware of our call, clear on our task, aware of where we need to get, aligning them to our intention can help the impossible happen.

When has such alignment helped you depart from the unlikely and arrive at the possible?

This call of faith, often experienced in different ways during the spiritual journey, is fraught with challenge, struggle, and doubt. There is often joy, wonder and imagination. How to navigate this path, when shadowed and obscure, becomes a discipline of remembering that each of us is a blessing. This spark, which resides in all of us, sometimes requires we be reminded in order to continue to awaken to the possibilities we are invited to birth into reality.

Patience and strength, I think, are amazing conversation partners. Some might see them as opposite or in tension with one another. I find, however, that considered as connected or two threads that weave together, they take on a more robust way to understand them. Strength, when patient, endures, waits and listens until it is time to release great weights. Patience, when strong, holds all with compassion that requires fortitude to hear that which, at times, can be unbearable otherwise.

If we can think it, imagine it, conjure it, can we then create it?

When you consider this question, does it excite you or frustrate you? Does it strike you as real of mere fancy?

In my vocation and work, whether with individuals or in community, the power to harness our imagining as a source of creation is an amazing thing to watch as life is given to what some might only have once considered a daydream.