“Nature is the infrastructure of our communities…Nature enriches us economically and culturally and historically, but it also enriches us spiritually. God talks to human beings through many vectors: Through organized religions and the great books of those religions, through the prophets and wise people, and through art and literature and music and poetry, but nowhere with the same detail and texture and grace and joy as through Creation. And when we destroy nature, we impoverish our children. We diminish their capacity—and our own—to sense the Divine, to understand who God is, and to grasp what our own potential is as human beings.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Confession
Before I started writing in earnest I didn’t know how much I love nature
I should have known by the way cicada summersong stirs sacred memories
I should have known by the certain slant of light on fiery autumn trees there’s hope within which never leaves
I should have known from the brilliant beckoning of silversharp stars on a clear winter’s night or by Venus, glittering bright over the ocean as the sun rises that the soul must keep reaching for what it cannot grasp
I should have known that once I start seeking I will find just as I discover hawks perched high above me every single time I think to look up
I should have known by the poignant scent of fallen pines and freshcut grass that newness returns after the pain
I should have known how much humans have lost by not living close to the earth as we were meant to (as we did, in ages past) or how this void is behind the longing of every soul crying out for belonging healing restoration and peace
I should have known all things are interconnected and sustained
by the voice speaking through nature…
Before I started writing in earnest I didn’t know how much I love nature
but the important thing is that I know it now
I will always know it, now
for, like finchsong at my door, untold glories surround me
weaving their way into my writings so that I recognize holy rhythms of life
spoken into being into my being
—let me listen oh, let me listen.
One of last year’s baby bluebirds hanging out by its natal home, on my back deck
******* Composed for Day 13 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
Last summer, when she was just a year-and-three quarters old, I showed her a clip of a squealing baby otter in water for the first time (I find this scenario confusing but I’ve chosen to accept it for the time being).
Her dad, my son, recorded her reaction…oh, and that’s Dennis, of course. He has to be in the middle of everything:
On every subsequent visit, Micah has asked to see the baby otter.
I’ve played the clip a million times.
Naturally I started buying her otter toys.
Micah’s Mama gave her the CUTEST otter bedroom slippers for her second birthday (I so wish I had a photo; I must get one).
Imagine my delight upon finding this blanket at Christmastime:
Micah adores it so much that she must have it now to go to sleep.
This gives my Franna-heart so much joy, as she’s struggled with going to sleep all of her little life.
When she stays at my house, she will crawl into my lap and say, “Snuggle. Need baby otter blanket.”
So I carry her to retrieve it. We return to the sofa. I wrap the baby otters around her, rocking gently, gently, until she drifts off.
And I will hold her for ever how long it takes, until she wakes.
Once in a while There comes a creature so wondrous That you will hold it close forever Embracing joy, erasing fear… Rest here against Franna’s beating heart Sleep, my darling, sleep.
*******
Composed for Day 12 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
Let them be a memento of the first day I came to see you and of God’s divine grace.
I shall keep them for you until such time that you can understand the story.
I picked them up, brought them home, and washed them. Never mind that we’re not Catholic, your father and grandfather being Baptist preachers.
Considering the significance of my visit, their appearing seemed a rare and holy thing.
A set of rosary beads, right there in the parking lot, with no one else in sight. Perhaps meant for a child, as the beads are plastic, mostly bright blue, with six orange, three green, and a little white crucifix.
When I left the hospital to head home, the rain had ended. The sun sparkled on the wet pavement. My heart danced with the beauty of the day, of the whole world. I stepped gingerly around puddled water shimmering with rainbow swirls, and that’s when I saw it.
Grandparents and grandchildren are a special gift to each other, especially if many years together are granted. Time to love, to live all our own stories, to always be close ’til you’re all grown up and I must go… this is my prayer.
I sat in a chair and your dad placed you in my arms. Joy and awe flooded my very soul…my cup runneth over, and over. I could have held you forever and it wouldn’t have been enough.
And there you were…so little, so perfect…I’d cried when your dad texted the first photos on the previous day. Now, seeing you with my own eyes, I could hear my grandmother’s voice, her narrative: You looked just like a little angel. And that’s exactly how you looked to me, my beautiful Micah. A heavenly being sent straight from the hands of almighty God.
Down came a gentle rainfall, spattering the windshield as I flew to the hospital that morning…once I answered the COVID questions and passed the temperature check upon arriving, I was allowed to go the room.
The end of October is a lovely time of year here in North Carolina, when the sky takes on sapphire hues. I wore a light raincoat because the meterologists predicted sprinkling.
I had to wait until the day after you were born to come see you.
You came during the pandemic. The world struggled with masks and distancing. The hospital limited visitors to two a day…and your dad counted as one.
My grandmother loved to tell me the story of my birth. I shall love telling you yours.
Me holding Micah for the first time.
******* Composed for Day 9 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
For peace at day’s end speak little; hold your truths close. Let sleeping dogs lie.
My granddaughter, Scout, with Dennis the dachshund during a sleepover.
Senryu is Japanese poetry of three lines and 17 morae (syllables), usually arranged 5-7-5, similar to haiku. Traditional haiku is focused on nature, whereas senryu reveals something about the nature of humans in a lively, funny (often “punny”), dark, or ironic way.
Seemed a symbolic way to capture this serene Slice of Life scene.
*******
Composed for Day 8 of the Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
In the fading light on the last day of January, I hear it:
a loud, merry squawk! on the front porch.
First time I’ve heard that precious sound since last April, when the silence set in without warning, when the whole nestful of beautiful finch fledglings in my door wreath died.
Season after season, tiny life came into being on my portal, taking wing from sky-blue eggs to blue-egg sky, until the April day when it stopped.
The hardest part of loss apart from the emptiness is the unanswered why.
For now we see through a glass darkly, wrote the Apostle in his chapter on love. Those words echo in my memory as I look through the etched-glass window of my door, where the silhouette of the visitor perches on the replacement wreath.
I don’t know, but I suspect he’s the father, returning to scout for a safe nesting-place as in seasons past.
I don’t know if I am hoping he’ll choose this wreath as bird courtship goes into full swing.
I don’t know, here on the cusp of Valentine’s Day, if my heart is willing to risk giving itself away after such a shattering
but at the sound of that squawk! it instantaneously leaps
and I can’t help remembering how Grandma used to phone me, saying I just wanted to hear your precious voice.
You cannot know, little Finch on the other side of the glass, how precious your voice is to me or how I marvel at your resiliency.
In the long continuum of things, our stories are interwoven as much as the grasses and tiny flowers and random sweet feathers in all your former nests.
If you dare to build again here in my sanctuary I will dare to love again.
If you do not, I will understand that your new life will go on elsewhere as I go on cherishing every bright memory and the sound.
And so it comes to pass, at long last, that I return to the site of my sun-kissed childhood summers.
My ancestral homeplace in eastern North Carolina. Literally the land of my fathers: My dad, my grandparents, my great-parents, my great-greats were all born within a small radius of a tiny town and crossroads that were old long before my appearance on this Earth.
Thus began my fascination with Time.
In the bend of a dirt road stood my grandparents’ home, where my father grew up. My youngest aunt was born here in the same room where her father, my Granddaddy, would die fifty-three years later at 92. He wanted to die at home. He did, peacefully and “full of days,” as the Scriptures say of Abraham, Isaac, and Job: After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days (Job 42:16-17).
Likewise, my grandparents saw four generations. They lived to see my children. Incidentally, Granddaddy had a brother named Job who died in the 1920s (he drowned, if I recall correctly; this is a coastal area).
So it was that I grew up on stories of the old days and ways, a little city girl mesmerized by my deep country roots. In my time the once-thriving community was already history; nature was reclaiming the unpainted houses, one by one. Some were still visible through the woods (an early memory: a cypress shingle roof in the treetops, if you looked just right) and others were in various stages of falling down with yards still mowed by descendants.
On this return journey a few weeks ago, I discovered that my grandmother’s homeplace from the early 1900s is being swallowed by the forest:
A terrible jolt, as I can remember it having a hedge, a lawn, a porch swing, a screen door. I remember the layout inside and my great-uncle living there, tending to a patch of sunflowers.
And I knew, prior to this journey, that my grandparents’ house, which stood on the corner a little farther on, is gone.
This story is a little different, however. Instead of the forest reaching its veiny green fingers to reclaim its own, a young couple has built a home right in the middle of what was once my grandfather’s garden. I can’t help thinking how Grandma would marvel at the beauty of this new house and its lovely landscaping.
All that remains here from the enchanted summers of my childhood half a century ago (and from time before me) is the pumphouse, one of Grandma’s crepe myrtles (now wistfully draped in Spanish moss, which never used to be in these parts), and the sidewalk that once led to the front porch of Granddaddy and Grandma’s home:
As a teenager I wrote a song about a sidewalk. Haven’t thought about it in ages:
Where does this lonely sidewalk lead? You think by now I’d know Footsteps into yesterday That’s where I want to go…
I had no idea, then, that only the sidewalk would remain in this place I loved so well, where I used to play outside in the sweltering bug-infested heat, where Grandma would sit at her piano in the evenings to have me sing old hymns with her as Granddaddy listened from his recliner, where I felt loved and wanted and sheltered and that I belonged…
The old dirt road remains, too, of course.
There was another dirt road branching off of it here in the shadows to the left; it once led, Grandma said, to a two-story antebellum house with a double balcony. I could hear admiration for that house in her voice. In my childhood the road was just two tracks through grass and thickets. The path faded more and more with every passing summer. Now you would never know it had ever been anything but woods.
From this vantage point, my grandparents’ yard is on the right, and to the immediate left is an old family cemetery. Not my family’s, although I walked it often with Grandma over the years. When I was a child, I was afraid ghosts would come out here at night. Grandma assured me they would not. She offered this dubious comfort: No need to fear the dead. Fear the living.
When I wondered at the graves of so many babies, she said people just didn’t know what to do for them when they were sick.
It’s clear how much the children were loved and mourned. This tiny cemetery remains painstakingly tended and strangely outside of time:
Hello again, baby Leafy Jean and big brother Leon Russell.
These siblings died a month apart in 1917. Grandma was born three months after Leon, almost a year to the day before Leafy, in the soon-to-be obscured homeplace just around the bend of the road.
Four-month-old twins Audrie and Aubrie died a week apart during that same summer.
The greater wonder, in its way, are the children who survived disease and mothers who died giving birth to them, which almost happened to Grandma: her mother delivered a stillborn baby three months before she was born. My grandmother was a twin. Grandma journaled this because I asked her to; in her writings, she says several women in the community who recently had babies helped nurse her while my great-grandmother was so ill that she “almost didn’t make it.”
—Why am I just now realizing that Grandma’s lost twin would have come around the same time as Leon Russell? Could his mother have been one of the women who preserved my newborn grandmother’s hungry life? if so …imagine saving someone else’s child and losing your own…
So many mysteries in this place. I’ve always felt the pull.
Over fifty years after I first walked this cemetery with my grandmother, I’m awed by the good condition of the headstones. I halfway expected them to be eroding into illegibility — after all, these people’s earthly homes have long since crumbled. No greater mystery than Time…
I cannot linger here, ruminating, for there’s another place to visit. Really just a good walk “around the horn” to the church, a journey I’ve made many times.
This was once the heart of the bustling farm community. The church was built on land given by my grandmother’s predecessors. Her father, mother, brothers, and other family are buried to the right of this crossroads.
Granddaddy and Grandma are buried in the churchyard, to the left.
Such a beautiful little resting place, presently bordered by a lush cornfield. An old live oak felled by a hurricane in recent years has been replaced by a new one nearby.
Grandma would be so pleased to see how well-tended everything is.
There’s even a new footbridge over the ditch at the churchyard, for easy access to the little community center across the road. This building stands where Grandma’s three-room grade school used to, she said in her journal.
Here’s where old and new converge most for me, where Time is most relevant and paradoxically elusive. The spirit of this place is old; my own memories are growing old.
My father as a teenager, in the churchyard
I am the keeper of memories older than mine.
But I came for the new.
I brought my granddaughter, you see.
All along the journey, I told her stories. Of the old days, the old ways.
I brought her to dig for fossils at the Museum in town (which is where the phosphate mining company sends its rejects now, instead of scattering treasures on the old dirt roads).
We found a bit of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, and some bony things I’ve yet to identify:
Making new memories from the old… even from the ancient, from time before recorded time.
As we were leaving, I discovered that the old library in this old, old town looks the same as it did five decades ago when Grandma drove me to pick out books to read at her house in the summer. I halfway expected to see her coming out with the armful she had to help me carry…
And I think this is used to be, or is at least near, the butcher shop where Daddy worked as a teenager.
There’s so much more to be said about memory, legacy, endurance, overcoming, and family… about the whole spiritual journey of life. The greatest gift my grandparents gave me, beyond their unconditional love and their stories, is that of faith lived out. I learned long ago that eventually there comes a homecoming so bright, so glorious, that all the former shadows are forgotten.
I expect I’ll recognize my little corner of Heaven, having had such a foretaste here.
Until that time, I carry on in the footsteps before me, praying I walk even half as well.
My now, my tomorrows ❤
From Everlasting to Everlasting: A Prayer of Moses
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night…
Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands! Psalm 90: 1-4;16-17
*******
with thanks to my Spiritual Journey friends who write on the first Thursday of each month and to host Carol Varsalona who posted this reflection and question for July:
Pause and praise God for His wondrous gifts! What are you rejoicing over this summer?
In the season of sickness, of a rattling in the chest that lingers and lingers and lingers I seek your healing power O my elixir
none other will do as well as you
your name is not always recorded on cryptic inscriptions
but I know it’s you
nothing else has that distinctive burn
Alas, you have become such an elusive elixir
I search high and low (on the shelves) just to find you’ve vanished
leaving no trace
it befits you, vaporous thing that you are
I cannot entertain the notion of orange or honey —fie!
These cannot open passages like you.
I wonder what on Earth I shall do
but wait…
memory stirs like ghosts like tendrils like vapors, yes…
my own father pouring your precious substance into a little silver tray and plugging in the vaporizer
there I was suffering child surrounded by a steamy cloud tinged with your cool fragrance
sputtering sizzling on through the long, long night
(you’re no cure-all for childhood asthma, btw but I’m not dealing with that anymore)
and speaking of clouds…
back there in the shroud of Time where sits my father and my mother puffing puffing puffing on Salem cigarettes there, the telltale green carton indicates your presence
I can still smell you on the foil of those packs and in the smoke ribbons curling in the air (aside: salem means peaceful complete safe perfect)
—what a cool operator you are, alternately healing and stealing breath
but then…
far back so far back I find you at your purest, perhaps
sick child that I was struggling to breathe (yeah, it’s a theme)
my grandfather going to his medicine cabinet for a little cobalt-blue tub my grandmother unscrewing the aqua lid and with one finger slathering a good dollop under my nose
(which now no one is ever ever ever supposed to do although clearly I am alive)
and it is this memory these moments that are salve to my soul. balm to my spirit
and so I come to find you like a miracle in my own medicine cabinet
whereupon I slather my own self up good
relishing your mint-oil fire
your vapors like a blanket of love enveloping me
breathing breathing Yea, with a little more ease
until this lingering lingering rattle
evaporates at last…
O, my elixir.
Fun facts: Vick’s VapoRub was invented in 1894 in the North Carolina county next to where I live now. It was originally called Vick’s Magic Croup Salve. From the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources: “The salve in the blue jar is made of menthol, camphor, oil of eucalyptus and several other oils, blended in a base of petroleum jelly.” The creator invented it to cure his son of severe croup…which it did. Spanish flu killed the inventor in 1919 but, paradoxically, that pandemic drastically increased demand for his product. Oh…and guess who worked at the inventor’s drugstore as a teenager? O. Henry.
My ode, however is to menthol, not just Vick’s, seeing as I had to include my parents’ Salem menthols in the mix. I was an asthmatic child, my first attack occurring at age three months.As I grew, I often begged to stay with my grandparents when I was sick; they slathered me with this old remedy, hence my great affinity for VapoRub. Accordingly, my grandparents are ever-present in the healing power of that clean menthol burn…nowadays I am not troubled with asthma but when I feel a cold coming on, or, as in the present moment, trying to shake the rattling cough after a cold, Vick’s DayQuil with VapoCool is my go-to. It works, to which widely empty shelves attest. I finally had some delivered by Instacart (had to show ID, of course) so I can continue burning the rattle out of my chest…it’s the best thing I know of, outside of a certain homemade “recipe” made by one of my old-time church members from the country…not exactly sure what was in THAT jar, but it would’ve surely burned this stuff out long before now… that, however, is another story for another day.
Here’s to the healing power of menthol.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge and to Kim Johnson, whose series on Epsom salts convinced me that I really, really should write about menthol (which, yes, can occasionally be dangerous, so use with care)
First they wanted to know why they have to be in this reading group.
Now they want to know why they can’t come every single day for longer amounts of time.
These kids.
They are so hung up on what is “fair.”
When I ask Why? I am told: Because things are not fair at home.
I say You know I am going to be fair here.
These kids.
They notice everything. They want to talk about nails and where I get my holographic pencils.
They want to know when I will get cooler prizes in my treasure basket (a reward for working hard. I asked them what their favorite candy is. I bought it all and also put holographic pencils in the basket…the first things to go).
These kids.
They want to know if they can have two prizes (-Did you all work hard? -Yes. – Okay, You can have two…yes, all of you).
They want to know what I will do for them when we get to the end of all their reading passages.
They inform me that they want McDonald’s to celebrate. They have already composed their order…although it changes every day.
They want to know if they can eat it in my room with me.
These kids.
They all have stories. Parts I know. Parts I don’t.
I have questions about fair myself.
These kids.
They want to know who has the highest score, who’s going to be first, who’s going to update the group star chart.
That fair thing, again.
I am not going to decide for you, I say. You figure it out amongst yourselves.
And they do. Fairly.
These kids.
They don’t know how much they’re rising above, how many odds they’re beating.
But they can see their own trajectories climbing with every reading assessment.
And they linger in my space when they’re supposed to be going back to class.
When I look up after assessing the last one’s progress, I see why…
They were writing on the board.
These kids.
Love you kids.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge
In Roman times, priests called augurs studied the activities of birds to divine the will of the gods. This practice of reading signs and omens was called taking auspices.
Likewise, many ancient legends depict the language of birds as perfect and divine; predating human speech, it was communicated by deities, understood by prophets and angels. Some say bird language was the original language n the Garden of Eden, spoken by Adam, Eve, and God.
I cannot speak to these mystical beliefs. But I agree there’s something of the sacred in birds.
I assumed I’d developed this affinity later in life. Birdwatching as an older person’s pastime. My mother-in-law loved birds. So did my grandmother. What is the correlation between aging and deriving such pleasure from birds? An acknowledgement that life in this world grows short, and the beautiful should be savored? Or something deeper? Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated, writes Terry Tempest Williams.
I’d forgotten that my love of birds began early in life. It all started with parakeets named Angel and Lucifer (how’s that for spiritual connections?). Angel was blue and white, sky-and-clouds. Lucifer was yellow and green. They were pets of my parents’ friends and after my first mesmerizing encounter, I begged for a parakeet. I got one for my sixth birthday. Solid yellow (although I’d wanted one like Angel). The pet shop folks boxed my bird in a carton decorated like a circus train, with little holes in the sides. Riding home in the car, I peered in to see a red-purple eye looking back at me…
Tweety lived until I was twelve.
I could never have a caged bird now.
They are meant to be free.
Living in a rural area offers daily doses of bird-awe, from the blue herons standing like statues in stillwater ponds to the snowy-winged hawks perched high on power lines…last week on my way to work, I felt lighter than I have in a while. It’s been an exceptionally trying year at school. It helps that there’s actually more daylight now that spring is on the way (I should have my vitamin D checked, perhaps). On this particular day last week, I sensed that good things are coming. I even said it to myself, so strong was the sense: Good things are coming. A little farther on, I happened to notice a large brown clump up in a bare tree by the road. A nest of leaves, maybe? Work of squirrels? But as I drew near, I saw a white head…a curved beak..
An eagle.
For the rest of that day I felt I had wings myself.
And then there is the return of the house finches, which, truth be told, never actually leave. One or two little birds have been sleeping in my door wreath this winter. They startled me a few times at night, flying out of the wreath when I went to the porch. I suspect finches although I couldn’t get a good look in the dark. If you’ve read my blog a while, you know the finches build nests in my door wreath each spring. In fact, I left the old grapevine wreath out for this very purpose.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard the telltale chatter on the porch. Finches discussing the wreath. Probably planning the nest. It was a loud, spirited conversation, hard to tell if the pair was in agreement or not…
I kept checking the wreath, but all I saw was the indented place where a bird or two had been sleeping.
No nest. It was still February, after all.
This past Saturday, the finches were the loudest yet, out there on the porch. My son and granddaughter, age sixteen months, were visiting.
“Is that your finches, Mom?” he asked.
“Yes. They’re talking about making a nest,” I explained.
We listened for a while to the happy trills.
The next morning I went out to check… surely a nest was started, with all that cheerful bird language?
I saw nothing.
Until…I don’t know what made me get the stool and check the far side of the wreath…
This is what the finches were up to:
A perfect nest, so perfectly disguised that even I, who was watching for it, didn’t find it until four eggs had already been laid.
I know this happens every spring across the Earth, but to me, it is a miracle. The eggs, incubating life, laid on a bed so carefully and lovingly lined with soft hair…it is soul-piercingly precious.
As is the father finch’s glorious, glorious song from the rooftop, morning and evening, his voice rolling down and echoing across the countryside. His is the predominant voice of all the birds around, and there are many…I will write of them later.
For the father finch’s song of deep joy is my own right now…celebrating family, life, light.
Good things are here.
******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.
I suspect there will be lots of birds in my posts… spirit-lifters that they are.
Today on the Ethical ELA Open Write, poet Stacey Joy invited participants to read a few short folktales, fables, fairytales, myths, or legends to inspire a poem: “Your poem might be a response to, a retelling of, or a new version of the original piece.”
I wanted to work with a fable but the children’s tale that came to mind first was… well, maybe you will recognize it… my poem is meant to be something of a mythological sequel–tribute.
The Legend of Water Rabbit
In the forest deep upon a cushion of emerald moss Water Rabbit sleeps
and dreams
of the Child.
In his dream he cannot tell the Child how much he loves him
for to the Child, the Rabbit isn’t real
and there is no language for conjuring a bridge across the chasm of unbelief.
Water Rabbit twitches, remembering
the nursery the toys the Wise Horse who spoke of love
and longsuffering.
It was Fate that placed the Rabbit in the arms of the Child that night when a favorite toy was lost.
It was only for a season that the Child embraced him and carried stuffed Rabbit everywhere he went…
Water Rabbit’s whiskers tremble with dream-reliving.
He sighs.
Other rabbits nearby cock their heads and perk their long ears
for in a moment, Water Rabbit begins to whimper and weep and wail in his sleep
—the dream is all too real: the Child’s fever, the separation, the command that Rabbit and all the other toys be burned.
It isn’t fire or fears that brings Rabbit’s tears
but the thought of never being with the Child again.
—Wake up! Wake up! The colony surrounds Water Rabbit, dozens of their small front feet against his shimmery fur, shaking, shaking him
into reality.
Water Rabbit gazes at them through his tears from his emerald-moss bed
and asks…Is it time? The colony nods in unison.
Water Rabbit rises wiping tear tracks from his velvety face.
The colony parts Water Rabbit makes his way through…
he hops and hops with boundless energy until he reaches the clearing
where the Child bigger now (for he’s bigger every Spring)
sits on the blanket spread over the grass with a picnic feast made ready.
Into the Child’s arms leaps the Rabbit.
There are no words for there is no language that can capture love so great and eternal and real
as real as the solitary tear of a toy Rabbit about to be burned for the sake of the Child.
For it was that teardrop the inevitable price of love and sacrifice that brought life, transformation, salvation.
That is how Water Rabbit came to be.
******* -with thanks and apologies to Margery Williams and The Velveteen Rabbit.
lit bits and pieces 