a crown upon their foreheads

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I will be adding another ring to that finger in just a few days, that is, on All Saints' Day, which seems so appropriate—this calling forth to the wider community of the Church to pray and guide Austin and I into the covenant of marriage. A feast day indeed.

And, my favorite words from the marriage rite in The Book of Common Prayer: "Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads."

[photo from the day we got engaged, in Balancing Rock, NC]

the heaped ashes of the night turned into leaves again

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I love mornings in this house.

And these words: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou." (St. Ephrem)

And this: "How can I live now with my heart open to the things that memory will call lovely?"

[in my kitchen, these days of living alone]
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we are always in medias res

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From Karl Rahner: "Flesh means that person who is on the one hand the frailty, the threatenedness, the inexplicableness, the weakness, the obscurity of this individual, concrete, specific entity, and who at the same time knows this and is afraid.”

Also, this lecture from Professor Samuelson, which I return to again and again. Especially, this: the difference between seeking transformation and seeking escape. And this question: what is your feast?

And these poems.

[photograph from the Basilica of Saint Francis, Assisi, Italy]

for grace

A few things, recently:

Jessica Ingram's Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial at CDS. Such a beautiful, haunting exhibit. I still cannot believe I get to work at this place that I love so much.

Elephant Micah + Joan Shelley at Dear Hearts a few weeks back.

Today I tasted a sweetness long forgotten, something I have not known since those days of fierce independence, when I was in step with my own longings, attentive to the world, patient with myself. It is what I have been praying for, wanting back, feeling as if I had perhaps lost forever amidst these months and years of saying for grace, for grace, for grace.

And these words, from that summer of forgetting long ago:

Walk

Some things are solved by walking
in the night alone, striped by light

in the corridors of unknowing, you walk
down the street, past the rosemary hedge,

the wet hydrangeas that eat your shadow,
your shadow like a cookie that the sun

cut out of you—sun-stalker, you say
to the blue mouths: but then there is

the ping-pong moon, the warts of the
weeping willow, the uprooted crack

waiting to fault you for lack of confidence:

this is the world of Walla Walla,
of couching black blistered beetles—

don’t even try to run,
the only way is to walk.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm film, balancing rock, nc; words from seattle]

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