Weary

Honestly, we’re growing weary. Some days the weight feels heavier than others. It’s challenging to see delights which, of course, makes finding them even more important. But some days the effort takes more energy than we can summon.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Lilacs buds in the backyard are fat with promise. Or so I’m told. Flower pots dragged out of their winter home stand waiting for me to pull out dried and dead things to prepare for planting flowers. I’ll get to it one of these days.

How long? We ask. And we realize it’s a question we’ve posed a thousand times before. It’s different now. We’re all asking the same question, and kind of scared of how the answer will unfold. We feel the burden of countless others on our shoulders.

And the words of a woman called Teresa of Ávila who lived five hundred years ago serve as light.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.

And the breath prayer spoken by a modern Canadian songwriter, Steve Bell, during a Friday afternoon livestream become a companion. Yah-weh. Se-lah.

And you see that we’ve been walking through this thing toward home together. And the ripples we make reach places and people we can’t imagine with our fixed and finite mind.

It’s still heavy. Real heavy. But the weight seems easier to bear with companions such as these. It’s not the politicians, the news reporters, or the armchair critics who meet us in the quiet and us help summon strength to walk through another day. It’s the artists and the poets and the ones who invest time to find truth and share it.

Another day of unknowing begins and we resolve to be like those artists and poets and ordinary folk who touch waters of uncertainty and create gentle ripples of wisdom and love both outward and inward. As we are changed, we change. Peace.