Wednesday, December 2 – “while I was making other plans the wind drew circles around this town”
Outside my room at 7:34 our parking lots begin to fill, residence hall students wake to late semester deadlines and rub sleep from their eyes. Work requires our attention, keeping track of commitments, while all along an entire city breathes in and out, millions of women and men tending the commitments and burdens of their lives. Call it morning traffic maybe. All along, all this sleeping and waking, hustling and waiting, opens to a day alive with sheer beauty and the mystery of . . . of what? Of human depth, longing for stillness. For Christians, this season invites Advent contemplation, a pause in the pace of the city’s humanity.
Joy Harjo’s meditation on Worcester, MA makes a fine read early in this early December day. Read it out loud, pause here and there, and she may anoint your day. Have a good mid-week day.
john sj
Today’s Post: “Climbing the Streets of Worcester, Mass.”
Houses lean forward with their hands
on thin hips.
I walk past their eyes
of pigeon gray, hear someone
playing horn, and there’s the wind
trying to teach some trees
to fly.
It could happen.
LA is tempted by the ocean.
And sleeping storms erupt the weakest hearts.
I scan the street. Know up one hill.
groans a sacred fire
and down the next
could be a crazy trick:
three crows laugh
kick up the neighbor’s trash.
Telling jokes
they re-create the world.
All night
while I was making other plans
the wind drew circles around this town;
scraped clean the dead skin
of its soul
but left three crows, a horn
some trees
to talk it back again.
