ENOUGH!

Photo credit: Max Teo

If it please God, let less happen. Kay Ryan

I’m pretty tough. I have handled with grace a great deal in this past year or so: car accident, scary illness and surgeries, COVID changing my entire work scene just as I am getting back into it. Now there is heat, smoke, power outages, financial insanity (to go with politic same), homicidal racial injustice, and shut downs of businesses that I love, as part of the backdrop for us all. These latest fires have taken a deeper toll: it’s the evidence of the calamity of climate change, and promise of more to come. “We’re not even deep into fire season,” is a horrific statement and it came from my lips, thinking about October two years ago and again last year. I started to make a joke about getting ready for locusts and frogs to fall from the sky, but now see that Africa is facing food shortages due to unstoppable locust invasions. So that isn’t fucking funny. None of it is. I want to give up, to cry uncle! and hope it will stop the madness. But my safe word isn’t working.

So, I resort to prayers, perhaps better not as a last resort. I ask NOT to have it all stop, that would be a tad arrogant, but rather to be able to bear it, to pay attention for what I can do to support others. And this helps me remember the power of goodness and look for people helping others, like the medical front line professionals, nearly invisible essential workers. Now I am adding firefighters and the people who feed and tend to them, and families who fear for them when they leave their safe homes to save those of others, to comfort those whose lives and homes are not safe, or saved. I pray for calm and peace in my own heart, to remember that noticing beauty and feeling joy isn’t a betrayal for those who suffer. I pray for continuous gratitude for all I have survived, and those who have saved me, and the strength to continue to embrace the challenges with as much courage as I can muster, or that grace can provide.

And, I do pray that the fires and evil madness will ease, to  lessen the grief caused by selfishness and denial. And after I posted this last night, we learned of RBG’s passing. Brave and inspiring as she is, I feel a bit leveled, again.

This seems to be a perfect time to introduce you to this prayer poem, which says so much in simple words, written by my favorite living poet laureate, Kay Ryan.

 BLANDEUR 

If it please God,

let less happen.

Even out Earth's

rondure, flatten

Eiger, blanden

the Grand Canyon.

Make valleys

slightly higher,

widen fissures

to arable land,

remand your

terrible glaciers

and silence

their calving,

halving or doubling

all geographical features

toward the mean.

Unlean against our hearts.

Withdraw your grandeur

from these parts.

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