When this world is not enough.

I am a believer in the world. That is, that creation all around me sings the music of the spheres and that if I align the angle of my gaze along the glories all around, I will be brought again to a love for the One who made all. Really, all of them. C'mon, soul. Remember those things, how they crown your life.

Yes. I walked home last night from the grocery store, because he gave me two strong legs and breath to do so. When the sweet red juneberies reached down and said "hello" behind the Home Depot, I reached up for them and accepted them as total gift. Sweet red juice over my fingers and in my mouth, and imagined in future tarts and muffins in the weeks ahead. 

Flesh and blood friends show up at my doorstep today and we break bread together and crack the covers of a dog-eared book that took us all by surprise and storm over the past few weeks. What words! They flow and gather in little pools around our feet, after the initial torrent of reading and thought. We skip along the beachside, pointing out little scrambling things and gorgeous, overarching themes like a sunset going down big, round and orange in the watery west.

The breeze through an open afternoon window frame. Rest.

These are the gifts, and I am naming them today. I do this because sometimes there are moments of quiet desperation. And it's strange, but they come at the most unlikely of times, when all seems broad, bright and well. Suddenly, inexplicably, I am brought up short by the reality that I am a whiff of grass sent flying by the slightest ache. I am but dust.

Dean Young's recent poem begins with "If bodies weren't so beautiful" and ends with "If only my body wasn't borrowed from dust." Indeed. But then again, the Creator of all spits in the dust, rolls it between his fingers, and effects the messy miracle. I see again, brought clean by the mud-of-the-world-made-holy.

When this world is not enough, He remakes me.