By Allen L Phillips
“Paying attention to being alive” is a line from a poem by Jack Gilbert borrowed for its applicability to our more or less voluntary isolation. We seem now to have the time to pay attention to being alive. How many of us, when the threat is over, will go back to a life too busy to pay attention to being alive.
Pat and I, now spending more time outside, saw our first baby bird recently. You can tell when you see two birds playing an apparent game of tag that one is the offspring of the other. Mom is flying from bush to tree to bush again as though trying to elude her slightly smaller pursuer. Junior catches up and sits on a nearby branch, opens his mouth and shakes his wings like he did in the nest, and you can hear him squawking “FEED ME!”. This prompts mom to take off back to the tree where the scene plays out again. Junior catches up and screeches “FEED ME”, and she says “You can fly now, feed yourself!”. “HOW?” he screeches. “The same way you learned to fly – by watching me”, she says as she flies back to the bush. He catches up and says “BUT MOM, YOU HAVE ALWAYS FED ME”. As she takes off again she says “This is the new normal”.
Our new normal is really weird, a once in a lifetime event. We avoid people when we need fellowship the most. We are bombarded on TV and social media with truths, half-truths and outright lies and it is difficult to know the difference. Pat and I will follow the advice of our leaders and pray that those who suggest that this thing is somehow a hoax are right and that it will end sooner rather than later. We take solace in our faith and are constantly rewarded by new flowers blooming – our Clivia by the front porch are in full bloom and our recently planted wisteria is blossoming on its arbor. Our glass is still half full.
While cleaning out some stuff we ran across a poem written by Janie Seltzer, our former Pastor’s wife.
Flowers grow outside the window of my prayers.
The Message I hear again and again: New life ahead!
Trust Me in the darkness: your loss will mean gain,
for each Door that has closed, a Window remains.
allenlphillips 