messages

Moments

/ Fran Haley / 27 Comments

Lines of an old hymn often play in my head:

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while I get ready for work each morning, where, of late, there’s a heavy atmosphere of uncertainty and despair.

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while having to drive through town instead of the scenic route by the pond, where the great blue heron lives, because a bridge is out, I’m told, for maybe a year or more (how can this be?).

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it while noticing and grieving dead animals by the roadside… beaver, groundhog, opossum, squirrel, cottontail rabbit, white-tail deer, dog, cat; a hawk that flew too low at the wrong time, its wide pale wing, patterned in distinctive dark-brown bars, angled up and over its body like a shroud; and so many skunks, their beautiful black-and-white fur rippling in the wind…sluggish from hibernation, they wandered into the road, never to wake again.

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me…

I hear it when I’m running late and traffic in the heart of town is backed up to an absurd degree (of course), making me turn off the main road for a side road, to save a few minutes…

That’s when I see the mural:


An ethereal moment calls for an etheree…

Breathe
deeply.
The moments
are soon passing
from you and from me…
let’s use them, not lose them
for every precious minute
sings unwritten song within it.
Breathe, and appreciate the moment.
Each, in itself, a sign of the divine.

Funny thing…I see the “Breathe” message on a most difficult morning; on the drive home that afternoon, just past the mural, a great blue heron passes overhead, strangely low and close. I have never seen one here before. It looks otherworldly, ancient, sailing along serenely, impossibly, with barely a beat of its wings.

great blue heron glides
on slow wingbeats of wisdom
breathing the moment

Great Blue Heron in Flight – (Ardea herodias). Milazzoyo. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

*******

Composed for Day 14 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

The gesture

/ Fran Haley / 9 Comments

Pure love

Pure love. SurFerGiRL30. CC-BY

Sunday morning at church. I took a seat by the aisle where sunlight poured through the stained glass window, where pale patches of pink, green, blue, and gold glimmered down the white wall.

In front of me sat a young man, a young woman, and a little girl, three years old.

The young man stretched his arm along the back of the pew, nearly but not quite embracing the young woman and child, just an easy drape of affection, of togetherness.

I could just see the top of the child’s head, two pinned-up pigtails coming loose, where his hand rested.

Then a chubby little hand crept up to pat his arm, once, twice, with all the grace of a ballerina. Two slow, deliberate, barely-discernible pats, before the dimpled hand disappeared again.

I watched, pierced by this silent message.

Maybe it was I love you. Or Thank you for being with me. Or quiet reassurance—I am fine, you are fine, we are fine together. Maybe even I’m here, you’re here, all is well with the world.

Such pureness of heart in that simple gesture. Such trust and confidence, such peace. How naturally it comes to a child, reaching out to someone else in benevolence, faith, and belonging.

And I mourned the incremental loss of it as we grow older, that it should fade like the colored patches of stained-glass light against the wall, that clarity of purpose should be obscured even as we accrue the words and language to better communicate our thoughts and feelings, that we should have to think twice about reaching out, or being the first to do so.

Two gentle pats, in them contained the original order and design of things, that together is the best place to be, that we are here for one another.

And so the children remind us.