

To plunge headlong into
the heart of a blossom, its amber eyes
inscrutably focusing on your own,
magnified by a lens of dew.
Whose scent, invisible,
drowns you in opulence, and for which
you can find nothing adequate to say.
You sense that you are loved wholly,
yet are quite unable to understand why.
But then, you lift your face,
creased with the ordinary, to a heaven
that is breaking into blue,
and find your contentment utterly beyond
telling, unspeakable, uncontained.
~Luci Shaw from “Speechless” from Sea Glass

my heart panics not to be,
as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.
~Mary Oliver from “Blue Iris”

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee, last stanza of “From Blossoms” from Rose.

… it seemed as if the tiniest seed of belief had finally flowered in me, or, more accurately, as if I had happened upon some rare flower deep in the desert and had known, though I was just then discovering it, that it had been blooming impossibly year after parched year in me, surviving all the seasons of my unbelief.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss

To live as if
death were nowhere in the background:
that is impossible right now
when death stalks every headline.
Yet, to emerge and blossom,
even when we are drying in the desert of discouragement,
is to respond to Christ’s call to us.
We are not dying,
but alive in Him,
an amazing impossible flowering.
So I allow my eye to peer through
a dying time such as this,
needing a flotation device
and depth finder
as I’m likely to get lost,
sweeping and swooning
through the inner space
of life’s deep tunnels,
canyons and corners,
coming up for air and diving in again
to journey into exotic locales
draped in silken hues
~this fairy land on a stem~
to immerse and emerge
in the possibilities
of such an impossible blossom.


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Sad, but beautifully and succinctly noted, dear Emily. Thank you for your always -sensitive insights to our societal issues and deep concerns.
There is a grim pall hanging over us, not always visible to our sight, but existing deep within our minds and souls. The darker and more insidious it becomes, the more we read of more vicious ‘joy,’ let’s get our kicks’ killings — particularly of our innocent homeless persons-: among others. Now we witness wantonly perpetrated killing attacks with seeming, sick glee and sadism by young teenagers. What will these emotionally depraved young people be when they reach adulthood is the urgent question that we, as an already morally imperiled society, must answer — not next month, or next year —but immediately.
It is totally impossible not to notice the drastic increase of sadistic, ghoulish, gory violence and decreasing value of the sacredness of EACH God-created human life spewed across the TV screen –particularly on the Cable and Pay-for-View channels.
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Thank you for another brief but incisive comment from Mary.
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