Springtime in the garden

Hello friends. In 1540 the Jesuits began revising monastic ways without losing their core beliefs. This was a dramatic Western turn toward recognizing the physical world infused with God’s divinity.

Ignatius said: “our manner is ordinary — immersed in the fabric of everyday life, to find the divine in all things.” Lao Tsu adds a dimension of time and completeness in nature: “nature does not hurry yet all things are accomplished.” I find this Tao verse echoes of my Jesuit days of finding God everywhere.

But my own view of God has changed: yes, the divine is beyond knowing (which places me as an agnostic), yet it is as close as my body, and within nature as an all-pervasive mystery (which marks me as a pantheist). I’m still learning how to include both these ideas in my everyday walks. Best, Gene.

Cosmogenesis in the Garden

Modern life separates us from nature
like the hard surfaces at this McDonalds.

The morning began with garden softness,
so much Spring budding, rosemary’s
blue-gray flowers calling bees to breakfast,
and offering its fragrant branches
for thumb-forefinger rubbing and
that special scent in this moment.
My hand on the rusted rail assists
in replacing birdseed and suet,
as I answer the wren’s antiphonal call,
caught up in divine embrace.

Late in the day two old cancer survivors
sit on the porch looking west,
Siamese Max and I, watching a circle
of moon-like orange sun poised on the horizon
behind blackened trees for its daily
plunge, playing gently on elder eyes,
companion of every journey.