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This place I sit every morning—
An angel wakes me up with a smile, every morning,
Whether I am sad or glad, it does not matter to her, smiling
Saying, “Here, here, my dear, my beloved,
How glad I am to see you!”
And I did not know
I was held in her arms all night, and that face
Awaited my eyes, like the grass outside waiting for the Sun
To kiss it in the morning; her patience like my dogs staring out the door,
Readied to chase a squirrel up that same tree, again.
This place I sit every morning—
To me, I do not need to bathe in the Ganges,
Or bow before a wall in Jerusalem, or even go
To the sanctuary next door and kneel at the altar—though to do
So, in itself, would be a blessing—this recliner,
With coffee and books, song, and softness, becomes Mount Tabor,
and she takes my hand and me to the curtain, saying,
“My love cannot take you in there.”
And, then, Someone calls me in, by name, and my hands part the purple curtains:
Oh! Should I go on and tell you what happens then? Or, should I remain silent about this?
This place I sit every morning
Opens to a Holy of Holies.
I wonder: Would she who dropped
This old recliner off at that yard sale,
Ever have dreamed the mysteries of my Love that would unfold
To me by just sitting here?
God once baptized the Universe
With one drop of rain…
And no priest was present,
And no place to call holy…
Such is this common Presence…
—Brian K. Wilcox 022806
A French prayer reads:
O lord, your ocean is so great,
And my boat is so small.
Writes Roger Housden:
This making love with the divine, this plunging into the truth, requires what human love does—a falling away of your defenses, a recognition of your vulnerability, a willingness to acknowledge that you are on the wave of an ocean far bigger than you are. Yet in the same moment that you cry Yes! to the immensity of life, you share in its power and beauty.
(ten poems to change your life)
Falling in Love does not require a special place or time. Sacredness can pull you into Her Self with the simple rites of a daily morning time, with music and coffee and books, and an old, cheap recliner. That recliner, small like the boat on the ocean, becomes a church, a wailing wall, a cathedral, a stupa, a mosque, an ashram, ... Or, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, in “Postscript,” that anything can be enough to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
(The Spirit Level)
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