DAILY BITS OF HEAVEN

"Still Falling"

Go outside every day even if just for a few minutes.  Cold and sunny, warm and drizzly, hot and prickly, it doesn't matter.  Feel the air on your skin, your face, your palms.  This is your day.  Meet it, greet it, tell it good morning or good night.  Walk out, hobble out, wheel yourself out or ask for help.  Open a window if you must and stick out your head, all the way, your neck and shoulders and arms.  Feel nothing else but the day.  Savor the air that sits on your tongue, presses your forehead, licks your cheeks.  

"Facing West"

Watch the sun set.  It falls behind trees, behind houses, behind oceans and mountains.  Right where you are, it is dropping every single evening, lower and lower in the sky it slides, millimeters at a time but just turn your head and its gone.  You don't have to be at the ocean.  I saw it dip behind an old Kroger once and see it now in my mind dripping red and orange down the sides of the building, painting it in watercolor, then spreading out until nothing is left but a rim of light.

"Gift of Gold"

"Out of the Night"

Look at the sky.  It's there every night for you to applaud.  Dark gray and cloudy or black and deep or clear and starlit.  The moon, when you spot it, head lifted this way and that, is always new, always different from the night last and the night tomorrow.  Just a sliver maybe or behind a cloud luminous or full and rich as heaven making shadows like noonday.  Put your bed or chair by a window or under a skylight or outdoors and lie awake until you feel your senses up high where they live with the moon.

These joys are not small.  They're big like your heart, sweet like your body, eternal like your soul.

Thanks be to God.  

 

EVERYDAY HOLINESS

It is the rich beginning of a new season.  Some mornings bathed in sunlight, some gray, mild and rainy.  We have no idea how each day will unfold, whether it will become an integral part of our Spring story or a day we barely notice, that passes us by for reasons we soon forget.  On the whole, it's up to us how the day expands.  

For Christians, we have recently finished Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, when Lenten devotions culminate in the institution of the Lord's Supper on Maundy Thursday and the crucifixion on Good Friday.  An emotionally intense week.  But as it's past, I'm wondering if every week isn't Holy, if every day shouldn't be.  Every week we have millions of moments to spend with people we love.  I spend each day and night with the person I've loved since I was 19.  That's a long time ago.  I spend time with grandchildren, family and friends.  Every day has moments when we can look at the sky, feel a sweet breeze, smell the rain or curl our toes in the sand.  Every day we watch our plants grow, pick parsley from our garden, eat a ripe strawberry (almost time).  These days, this week, seem Holy too.  

You know how when someone is dying, we hang on their every word?  We'd give anything to spend just one more day in their living presence.  What if we realized that now?  What if we become people who recognize what they have before it is threatened?  People who see the sacred in the everyday.  Many days we are like that.  We wake up and go into the baby's room where that little hungry, crying person does indeed bring all that's good into our arms.  Or we wake to our lover's touch, or to an aging parent nearby whom we are caring for.  People who we know love and depend on us.  Those are holy times. 

We use words in the Christian faith that may be called terms of art.  They have special meanings.  Grace, holy, sacred, mystery, and others less spiritual like discernment or more technical like Triune God.  Some days I would just like to look at how I live and what's outside my door and say,

Thank you, God, for this holy day.  Thank you for the mystery of the seeds growing in my garden.  For the mystery of my mind and body.  And for the most mysterious of all--the fact that I am loved, by others and by Your Sacred Self.  Thank you for the grace of Your forgiveness of my careless sins that I fail to notice but others may.  Thank you for love and birth and life itself.  May I appreciate all that will someday turn to dust before that day is near.  In the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  AMEN

Nina Naomi