Sounds, Symbols, Sights
Today I am grateful for birdsong and moonglow in the early morning, and for solar lights and our water fountain. I am sitting outside composing this post. It’s breezy, a little chilly, and the fresh air is invigorating. Treasures to begin my day.
The picture below was taken at a park my family and I were at last weekend, just around the corner from Easter this weekend. It caught my eye easily, as the leaves and underbrush are just getting a start for this season. It measures about 8 inches long and 6 inches wide. It also caught my imagination—who created it? What were their motives? How did they do it?
The cross is a key visual in Christianity and is said to symbolize “triumph over death.” Billions celebrate Easter around the world each year. I looked back on my previous blog posts and found this one to offer some of my thoughts on the special day and season:
From Habitual Gratitude Sounds that Stir the Soul (April 1, 2013).
I was raised Catholic. Though I say this with some level of guilt, I would guess I am not alone; Holy Week was drudgery for me when I was young. There were a lot of church services and they all seemed long and sad. The Stations of the Cross were part of Lent too, and I recall them being long and sorrowful as well. Then Easter would arrive. I looked forward to Easter services. In part, I was probably already sugared-up, so that helped. Easter Sunday services were shorter than anything else I had attended since and including Palm Sunday. That helped too. But I also always looked forward to the uplifting hymns that we got to sing after all the mournful ones of Holy Week. Those Easter hymns stirred my soul as a child, and they still stir my soul today.
Early morning birdsong joined by joyful hymns. Moonglow made brighter by the light of faith.
The cross on the tree in the park also brings thoughts of the crosses we each bear. Burdens we carry over our lives, or only for a time. Difficulties. Challenges. Hardships. What are my crosses? What are yours? Do I make my own crosses weightier with pride and self-righteous stubbornness? Do I add to your difficulties with my insensitive lack of compassion and presence? Important questions to consider and to bring to my faith exploration and practices, which are less Catholic and more universal in my life today.
Writing, and the many ways I put it into regular practice, is a key part of my faith journey. It reveals me to me. That taps into my humanity, which helps me be kinder and gentler to all I encounter. Little shifts matter, small gestures have large impact.
This beautiful poem from one of my favorite contemporary poets—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer—touches on this idea of a broader, less traditional and rigid, faith. It makes for a fitting closing for today’s post.
How I’ve Started to Pray
And if god is in everything—in the bend of the river
and the apricot tree, the song of the blackbird
and the awkward smile of the little ballerina
in purple who wandered out tonight onto the stage
to join a dance recital already in progress—
a dance class that wasn’t even hers— yes, if god
is in everything, and I believe god is—
in the dishrag, in the man who throws
bottles at the people marching for peace,
even in this angriest red sliver of me,
if god is in everything then maybe that is why
I have started to want to pray to everything—
or maybe more truly, to pray with everything—
the wave, the blossom, the awkward smile,
the dirty cotton, the broken glass, the rising ache,
the wonder that opens in me when I trust
there was never even a half of a moment when we all
did not deeply, fully, wholly belong to each other.
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/
(A Hundred Falling Veils “there’s a poem in every day”)
