Often when I awaken and am immediately arrested by anxious thoughts and cannot seem to move toward a calmer contemplative state, I remember the Wendell Berry poem and metaphorically “lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” The Peace of Wild Things              by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. But lately that poem has not provided the solace it once did as though my anxiety broke through a vaccinated immunity anyway. I ne...

  “…he marries heaven and earth in the church of ordinary life, here where we all are, with the sacrament of the imagination.” Roger Housden The quote above was written by Roger Housden about a poem describing an ecstatic experience, albeit in ordinary life, in fact on a cold, snowy day sitting in an old chair by a stove. The phrase “sacrament of the imagination” caught me up short. It seemed so full of possibility and hope. Perhaps grace invisible and eternally gifted can be glimpsed, caught, construed in a moment of imagination.  What is actual or real in a physical sense becomes less inspiring than what is felt and discerned. What is factual and reportable becomes fodder for what might be as our imaginations transport us from chaos to peace, from disease to ease.  These are Velveteen Rabbit like thoughts, of true reality versus socially constructed acceptability. I find it quite reassuring to sit with grace and invite my imagination to sing. In that singing imagination...

  “And a little child shall lead them…”Isaiah 11:6 When I think of Epiphany and the dawning of a new light, which I believe is an awareness of something almost miraculous and certainly sacred, I think of Owen. This beautiful, imaginative, autistic 5 year old looks at artificial canvases depicting jungles or deserts or forests, and calls them “maps”. Let’s find a way into the forest today! He shouts with glee. I look and at first all is see are flat green trees and shiny brown painted underbrush. Then I notice the figure in his hand. Is that a dog I ask? No! Ok no more silly questions on my part. I decide to simply observe and go with the flow of some extraordinary way of seeing the world. A few minutes of tapping the “not a dog” on the plastic canvas later he exclaims, as though to make sure his dull grandmother can awaken to a brilliant reality, we are in the forest now! And I think we, he, it, and I have arrived. Something like blinders fall away. It is as though a new way of bei...