I found a poem today that I love and want to share...

because I was doing the dishes this morning and the sun coming through the window set my yellow kitchen aflame and made me find beauty in the most mundane thing...household chores....

I can't believe the moments of Grace I find sometimes. It's so strange to be doing my dishes one moment and running for the camera the next, then pouring over pages of poetry to find words that might match my moment.....

But that is how I have lived much of my life...Once, when I was in a college course(at a slightly advanced age) that had something to do about human relationships(don't recall the name of the course but it was like NO OTHER course I had ever taken and was the start of my Real Life, my life of being aware that I am OK, after all), there was a question posed by the instructor and an answer from someone far braver than me that knocked my socks off....He said, "Imagine you are driving down the most beautiful country lane, the sun is glorious, the weather is magnificent, the perfectness of it all(the moment, the emotion, the grandness, the ever-lovingness of it), and you come across the most pristine field of clover and grass, sun and wind, and emotion, perfect, with two magnificent horses grazing....what is your reaction?" This Very Brave Soul, who was ten years younger than me, said "I would get out of the car and get down on my hands and knees and graze with them."

I couldn't imagine being brave enough to say words like that...though that is what I would do...then and now. It just sounds CRAZY....doesn't it? Kinda like finding Grace with the reflection on a porcelain sink or a stove top from a Pyrex measuring cup and a 1950's bar glass. Right? Especially at a time that I find doing dishes the absolute HARDEST of chores to do...

That was the same course that the instructor had this to say about the day I walked in with brunette hair after months of Fuscia...he asked why I had become so "average" in front of the class, why I was "buying in"....I told him it was because I was up for a promotion at my job...a promotion for a job description that I already DID with my Fucscia hair. He said to the class...."isn't that just the way of the world, thinking our appearance has anything to do with anything? As if Fuscia hair has anything to do with someone's intellect or worth..." And I will forever be thankful to that man, and that class that taught me something not usually taught...

It's a gorgeous poem....and full of life, the love of life, even in something so simple as doing the dishes, mulching the garden, sweeping the floor...the prayer I once told myself I would never forget...to love and give thanks for every day that I am here...no matter what. There are things so much more terrible than a sink full of dishes.

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash

In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,

Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,

Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving

From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,

Have run their course?

O parents, confess

To your little ones the night is a long way off

And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them

Your worship of household chores has barely begun;

Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;

Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,

That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;

Explain that you live between two great darks, the first

With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest

Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur

Of hours and days, months and years, and believe

It has meaning, despite the occasional fear

You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing

To prove you existed.

Tell the children to come inside,

That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,

A family album that fell from its own small matter

Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,

You don't really know.

Say that each of you tries

To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear

The careless breathing of earth and feel its available

Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending

Small tremors of love through your brief,

Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

Mark Strand