The Very Heart

Though I am technically on break, I still wake up at about the same time every morning. Sometimes these days I blissfully chuckle, roll, and burrow deeper into my warm and ever so comforting pile of blankets...and other mornings, as happened today, I rise, pad into the little kitchen area, make a mug of hot welcome, and return to my room to pray, to think, to write, and witness the day's becoming in the company of God.

I wrote a friend this morning ...
I have been awake since 5:15...I've read and prayed with the readings while sitting in the corner of the sofa. I wanted to wake early today to...well...in a manner of speaking, to present myself before God. A knocking on the celestial door with a desire to be in God's company for the arrival of the sun. How I love this subtle process...each moment growing, changing, being its own work of art.

And oh, it was lovely this morning...blues, rising deep against the bare branches and filling the windows with golden rays that painted the morning on my floor. Spectacular, really. I was so taken with the variety of wonders...the reflections, the contrast of branch to sky, the clarity of the light, the feeling of being in the intimate middle of something so large, so vast...I kept saying quietly, "Thank you, God! Thank you for showing me these parts of yourself, for loving me as you do!"

As I roused myself from prayer I thought "Augh! What might a day hold after a beginning like that?"

After getting ready for whatever adventure I might encounter, I went downtown and tucked into a favorite spot on the third tier of an independent coffeeshop. From that seat, I can see the whole shop, part of the street, and the Missouri river...again, a diverse assortment of revelation.
I then took note of the group on the tier just below me...two women from Spain, a woman from Thailand, two grandparent aged folks from around here, and a baby who was being passed around, loved on, tickled by, and rocked in the arms of, the whole group. I have no idea what the connections were among everyone, but they were certain and strong. The two women were speaking intermittently in Spanish and English, someone else had a translation website up on her cell phone, the husband and wife were expansive in their smiles and gestures, and everyone was making sure that each person was part of the same conversation.

More and more people were coming in to take off the chill so I gathered up and headed out on a quest to find the nearest Trader Joe's. Not only was I successful in locating it, a cruise of the aisles allowed me to hear Russian exchanged between a father and his young daughter who was pushing a child-sized cart and delighting in the reverberating Bump it gave her when she ran into the rubber strip along the bottom of the wall and German and German baby-babble being spoken between mother and son while choosing bananas. I saw brussel sprouts sill on their stalks, fennel bulbs, and knots of ginger...

INCREDIBLE!

My heart has been Aching to find here such cultural/linguisitc diversity as all of this! Oh, how it speaks to me of God! God is unceasing in revelation, certainly, but I have missed this tremendously...the sensory awareness and experience of God's diverse beauty, diverse facets, languages used, cultures, ways of being, the laying out in such creative generosity of the Fullness that drawn together is the Whole of Love; that drawn together is the infinitely unique and beautiful Image in which we are all created; the Fullness that drawn together was spoken in Word at the Beginning, and born human and divine in Jesus. This is the Fullness from which we can not be separated, that nothing will overcome, that is Love without measure or limit of any sort...


I have missed this experience of what I knew daily in New York City and other recent lands of my journey...and it has been revealed to me here, now, in this time and place...



As I was this morning, I find myself so aware of being in the intimate middle of something grand and vast...

The very Heart of God.