Idle and Blessed

There's been something going on in me this semester. Sure, we're only 2.5 weeks in, but the conditions are right, so it's moving quick. Everything is moving quick. Classes are busy, work as demanding as ever, and new things are on the horizon for the next few months. An internship with the ethicist at Grady and a Pilates teaching certification, to be precise. In the meantime, two things are colliding for me that I feel are going to be extremely formative. It's kind of like I'm looking down on my inner landscape and watching it change in slow motion, which sounds so dramatic. But I have perspective on a couple things right now, and it's a profound thing to have perspective on the changing of your own inner landscape. I have a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr and theologian. He wrote a great deal about the church and our responsibility, about social issues like race and politics. He encountered the black Christians of the Harlem Renaissance, and ...

Knife by Mary Oliver Something just now moved through my heart like the thinnest of blades as that red-tail pumped once with its great wings and flew above the gray, cracked rock wall. It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by. Sometimes, when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood and all outrageous divisions of time seem ready to leave, to slide out of me. Then, I imagine, I would never move. By now the hawk has flown five miles at least, dazzling whoever else has happened to look up. I was dazzled. But that wasn't the knife. It was the sheer, dense wall of blind stone without a pinch of hope or a single unfulfilled desire sponging up and reflecting, so brilliantly, as it has for centuries, the sun's fire.