winter

Touch and the world of touch bring us out of the anonymity of distance into the intimacy of belonging. Humans use their hands to touch—to explore, to trace, and to feel the world outside of them. Hands are beautiful. Kant said that the hand is the visible expression of the mind. With your hands, you reach out to touch the world. In human touch, hands find the hands, face, or body of the Other. Touch brings presence home... The energy, warmth, and invitation of touch come ultimately from the divine. The Holy Spirit is the wild and passionate side of God, the tactile spirit whose touch is around you, bringing you close to yourself and to others.

The past is past, no need to wonder; the present is now, where our love grows daily. What does the future hold? That's up to us. It seems the best thing to do is what we're doing right now, holding on to each other with love in the calm of the eye of the storm, with only one intent: to love one another as we are—completely—as two people raising each other up, as we move through this thing we call life.

I am remembering a lifetime of trying to map
the shape of shadow and light,
To draw the clean edges of change
And what has made me an oddity
Asked me to live far more closely
To the center of all that awe and ache.

winter garden
deep roots
waiting for spring

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "Jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

In the midst of gathering darkness, light becomes more evident.

Einstein told us that our universe is shaped and defined by light. We live in a visual cage, and what we call time is simply the ever-moving shadow of the bars which confine us....But suppose that...we were able to outrun the waves of light which undulate across the universe. As we leap...across the galaxy we overtake and leave behind the light which left the surface of the earth...the image will travel forever in this everlasting night, seeking its home among the stars, reaching ever outward toward some hypothetical destination at the universe's problematic end. Is light, then, the stuff our souls are made of?

Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.