When life generously offers some time to enjoy the last vestiges of breathable air, one guards those hours or days like Midas with his eyes on gold. It is a gift to one whose head was incompletely closed and whose conscience unequivocally honed to needs of commitments.
So the free time, the private time, the time given when nothing concrete is expected due to age and frailty of body is luxury seldom cognitively experienced. The shelter in place edict has been the wish of mine all my life. Not possible for three quarters of it, but desired. To slow down and savor the salts used always was a wish.
Now it is life’s generous spirit balancing what was needed for so long. Living to see, because of technology, the faces of the new babes entering and the love they are welcomed with is a joy.
Not often is such evidence ours for spiritual solace. Finding all beloveds nurturing in this sometimes sterile world lets me know that life’s commitment to teaching has been done wisely and well.
Commitment is accountability for one’s actions. Some call it a mortgage on one’s life. It is a consequence of those actions. We learn there never is a free lunch in town. Better us to be called to account than for our progeny to hurt.
There always is a cost and it is dear. Life’s forgiveness? Love. . . .
Mortgaged. . .
Our hands brush
the sleeves of our
long coats harnessing
our bodies’ warmth. . .
And meet and twine fingers
giving strength
long lost to the
business of living. . .
the busyness of lives
succumbing to the details
of days usurping
minutes not claimed,
hungry for times floating loose.
Wise is the one hugging closely
as breath to breathe what
surrounds the body as private.
Mine! the toddler shouts,
as he grasps what is his
loudly with force
to claim ownership.
Mine man whispers as he
clings to the privacy of minutes
not already claimed
by the interminable needs
of the innocent. The
mortgaged soul has
needs to replenish
before offering more
from the well running dry.
photo art by
Claudia Hallissey