PATIENCE, hard thing! The hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is he who more and more distills
Delicious kindness? — He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. 46.
for a smile
October 22, 2009
The three-year-old with whom I spent today did not want the carrot from my salad that I offered him at lunch. So I ate it. He then turned his large brown eyes to me and said, in a persuasive tone, ”If you eat that other carrot too, you can have dessert.”
Nice of him to give me permission, wasn’t it?
As it happens, we did not have dessert, because he did not eat his chicken. But, even before I tried the dessert bribe on him, he passionately declared, “I don’t want dessert!”
And so my second carrot was eaten in vain.
good things
October 2, 2009
*Gingerbread with lemon sauce and lemon-ginger tea with the perfect mixture of sun, shadow and breeze.
*The swirling, golden shadow of wood-smoke on the afternoon grass; the scent of wood-smoke coming in the afternoon windows.
*A sunset that faded into a moonrise.
*Sausages blackened above quivering orange flames.
*Smoke in the silver slant of moonbeams through the trees.
*Wading through moon-lit shadows toward glowing windows.
*Being under a warm, red blanket while chilly air and cricket-song drift in from the out-of-doors where a fire winks itself into a mound of coals.
