Just Write the Double Espresso

I have been thinking about this post for days.  When I posted the poem from Martins River, I happened to notice—Oh geez, the next post is #500!  The 500^thpost…eleven years after starting this blog.  (And I had been worried about whether or not I had enough to say to sustain it…Ha.)

Part of me thought—Oh, this should be about something big. Something monumental, something befitting the imaginary neon banner that runs across the top and flashes 

***F I V E H U N D R E D***

And then I thought about my loyalty card for a local coffee shop.  When drink number ten rolls around, it’s on the house. They don’t put a limit on the drink—It could be any sized splashed out bit of goodness they offer.  But I never really think about that…heck, half the time I don’t even know what number I’m on.  I order the drink I want (usually a double espresso) and every now and then, I get the good news that it’s free. 

In other words, there is no neon banner flashing….and no fussing with inventing a monumental topic simply because I’ve reached a milestone that does in fact surprise me.  I’m just going to write the double espresso.

I was reading Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places this morning and he spoke of balloons on strings describing circles in the air.  I love that use of the word describe.  You give shape to something else…you create parameters for something so that it might be imagined… The balloons were moving in such a way that the shape within the path was a circle.  Balloons also describe a quantity of air.  

For 500 posts, this blog and its whole variety of themes and contents, has helped me describe the wonder and mystery that is God in my life. For eleven years, this blog has helped answer the dream of a kid who used to look hard at things and think it might just be possible to see inside if she could let go enough; a word-loving kid who wanted a way to tell other people about what she noticed or thought about because somehow she knew that every now and then there was something important there…there was a connection to something beyond her that was a source of consolation and wonder and wow.  Decades on, she calls that God.

Thanks to those of you who stop by and read the posts here, who share the posts and comment upon them… Thanks for sitting across from me and sharing in the conversation and the quiet; the curiosity; the poetry, the prose, the photographs.  

Cheers. ‘Tink.

Retreat at Martins River, 2018

Martins River, 2018

Church bells to lean against;

Cape Islanders, sailboats, and dories

in reunion before me.

You, silver-winking in your delight

with the lot of it: with the purple house 

and the teal one next door;

with the boats and their sleep nodding prows; 

with the masts trying to reach you;

with the gulls who play tag with you; 

with the syncopated pealing of carillons;

with the lemon rhubarb scone

that is the taste of every springtime color 

and a sticky hum of summer’s freedom.

I don’t bother with a napkin

even though my fingers

are lightly tacky with delicious.

At best, maybe

that is what awe and wonder are…

Not the experience itself,

but what remains

to allow us to enter into,

to open out onto,

your presence

over and still again.

—Kimberly M. King, RSCJ—

Wingspan

The other day I looked back at a poem I wrote a while ago and re-worked it a bit....

Wingspan

Oh glory what can gather

in the wingspan of my voice…

the bite of a color, 

a wide-sky ache of longing, 

the song inside a stone.

These wings, my voice-

oh the pleasure 

when it flies,

when it smooths and when it

pauses; when it rises;

when it follows a sonnet’s contours,

when it wails and when it laughs;

when it is freed on the power

of a spiritual truth and wakes

the word from the page

and conforms to it, tastes

the story and speaks the feast;

These wings, my voice.

Oh, what I do not yet know, 

what I consider in awe and curiosity,

is how far this voice

can stretch.

I want to use these wings until

at day’s end they are weary

and can go no further.

I want to feel

syllables of life upon my feathers

and be able to describe how they catch, 

how they lift, how they weigh, 

how they waken the fireflies 

when they skim past at dusk-hour.

Kimberly M. King, RSCJ

Evening Light at the Public Gardens, Halifax

Evening Light at the Public Gardens, Halifax

I’d thought I’d had enough for my evening meal; Then this. This spectacle of indigo feasting that leaves me at the table, unable to move away.  This hour in this place is such evidence of God's delight...I'd call it magical, but I know better.  It's so much more than that, so much bigger than that...Augh...it leaves me with a feeling of such grandness and such humbleness... The words feel too heavy, yet at the same time, I longed to try...

Diaphanous radiance of evening glory

that settles the in-between spaces

of dandelion glitter.

Light that skates the sharp ache of edge

where new green meets the unbound blue

in a bold proclamation of 

I AM.

Evening sun that wakes the day 

with a sea of reedy candles,

while waiting for the comets to dance.

Kimberly M. King, RSCJ

Trinities

 It is Trinity Sunday today…and it is beautiful here in this part of the Maritimes.  Stunning, really…at least, insofar as I understand that.  It is warm enough to not have a jacket on and cool enough to not get hot when you walk; the sky is nothing but a wide blue invitation; and the textures of nature are busy about shaking free from the last vestiges of dormancy and stretching their freshness toward the brilliant new day.

I knew that I wanted to go over to the Public Gardens this morning.  It is one of my favorite places, rain or shine, truth be told…though it is especially welcoming on days like this.  I wanted to go there to feel both embraced and set free; I wanted to steep in the wakening glory of its beauty; I wanted to be still and to notice, to feel, to sense, the different kinds of trinities that come together there…

Trinities of bird and branch and shadow; texture, hue, and sound; bend, path, and cradle; living and dying and waiting; apartness, a part of, and whole; azalea, tulip, dandelion; resident, tourist, wanderer; peace, letting go, and groundedness...

All of these different combinations, different qualities, aspects, appearances, working together to make a place where people gather, sit, talk, dance, sing, walk, cry, hold hands, hold canes, push chairs, skip, sip coffee, have lunch on a bench, and dribble ice cream down their front without a care in the world.  It is a space that can hold a diversity: of life; of activity; of beauty, emotion, reality.

So too--and much more--the space of faith in which I live and move and have being thanks to the Trinity that will be honored especially at Mass today; the Trinity I mark myself with, bless myself with, daily; The Trinity of mystery, grace, and challenge; The Trinity that beckons, receives, and journeys with; A Trinity of Love, of Love, of Love.

The Thrilling Incompleteness of the Journey

I read a reflection by Saint Augustine this morning and he's been on my mind ever since.  While there are a multitude of worthy quotations and many writings about him—to say nothing of his own Confessions…I return time and again to the line I once heard in a class.  It was one of those ringers: a line you hear that doesn’t ever really leave you, a line with the lasting reverb of truth for you and a resonance that stays swirling in your rafters.

Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A funny representation of this truth is made known when I see the other two books keeping me company as I type here on the fourth floor of the public library:  Pilgrimageby Annie Leibovitz (AL) and A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf (VW). Something I was reading earlier today about the color blue led me to those two books.  In flipping through them, I felt the warm dawn of sense-making. Augustine-Leibovitz-Woolf-King…yes, of course.

There is text to accompany the photos in the AL mid-size coffee table book.  For it, she traveled to the textures of life and place for the likes of Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, Marian Anderson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, and many others and saw this geographic facet of their truth through her lens—literally and figuratively both.  She wanted to be there, to see, examine, sink into…in some ways, remove the barrier.  Totally cool. And, glory, I get it.  To be so close to something that believing we might become a part of it—or perhaps already are—seems not impossible.  The desire to do that… It is an extraordinary intimacy, a longing…a longing to connect with what is most essential or fundamental…A pilgrimage. 

In her diary entry of 30 June, 1927, VW describes her experience of a solar eclipse two days prior:  

…we joined them, walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond.  One light burned down there.  Vales and moors stretched slope after slope, round us.  It was like the Haworth country.  But over Richmond, where the sun was rising, was a soft grey cloud.  We could see by a gold spot where the sun way.  But is was early yet.  We had to wait, stamping to keep warm…There were thin places in the clouds and some complete holes…We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds.  Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping—-it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed from fast to the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze…

 And on it wondrously goes for pages.  The detail, the intimate description in Word.  The desire to put it down in language on a page so that this nearness to something that cosmic could be experienced anew; entered into a-new…

And then there is the conversation I had the other day with someone about “The More” of Saint Ignatius.  To seek it, long for it… Part of the conversation—at least internally—I honestly can’t remember if I spoke this aloud—was me thinking about how that longing for the More has elements of both here and now and there and tomorrow. Sometimes we need to go to find it, sometimes we need to stay and learn to see the fulfillment of our longing exactly where we are.   That there is More, however…no doubt.  That there is within me an insatiable curiosity, wonder, desire, for that bigger image of God…oh my soul, YES.  Do I long for that fullness of knowledge, being, and glory?  More than anything, yes…   

 

In the thrilling incompleteness of the journey, I reach…for others, for lens, for pen, for art, for work, for listening, for learning, for ways of growing in freedom and grace, for sharing, for love…as ways of drawing that much closer…to the Heart of all, to the Centre, to the Essential Inspiration,  the Origin and End, that is You.   Yes, my Heart will be restless and longing…until it rests in you.

This Common Humanity

This absolutely fills me with joy.  This has me thinking about the Spirit and its different images/manifestations.  It’s like our best, deepest, greatest, inspired  humanity…flowing in harmonic waves and making music.  And it is happening Together.  Not alone…it’s not about my humanity…but Together…and it is a witness to Our Humanity.   

It seems to me that we are organically wired to respond to Bobby McFerrin’s invitation. We are creatures of pattern and rhythm…eyeblink, footfall, heartbeat……and we respond to each other in pattern and rhythm as well…finishing one another’s sentences among friends; the comforting recognition of the footfall of someone we love; breathing in time; reading aloud en masse—who teaches us to do these things?  

When we hear the traditional beginning to a story...whatever that beginning might be…Once upon a time…Había una vez…we ready ourselves to hear something that follows the dramatic curve.  Intro…rising action…climax…resolution.  It’s the pattern we know.  Around the world.

We listen for and follow the inherent rhythms and contours of language;  Everything from limericks and haiku to hip-hop depend on this.  So do leaders of protests, cheerleaders, and advertising departments.

We follow physical patterns and rhythms.  Someone on the street looks up, what do others start to do?  Just the other day, I was talking with someone about soldiers marching in step and how when they cross a bridge, they are to break step lest the power of the waves created by walking in rhythm with each other cause the bridge to collapse. (Engineers claim that modern construction techniques render this unnecessary.)

We are creatures of pattern and rhythm.

When watching this video, I am in awe of how Bobby McFerrin reminds us that we know this about ourselves.  He reminds us that we know this, interprets knowledge into notes, and he says “Enjoy it with me!” Enjoy this common humanity…let it become music.  Let us become music.  Together.