“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved
and where all your yesteryears are buried deep,
leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.
Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour
because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones,
vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud,
formidable from a distance.”
Beryl Markham
(a misty rising of the superman / Julie Cook / 2017)
(a timely tweaked re-post from 2017)
Whispers slip out from scented branches…
all while caught lingering between twinkling lights.
Each bauble, each ball, each special tangible memory calls out from ages past…
transporting the now to the then.
Broken, chipped, bent or faded…it matters not–
the flood of what once was cascades down upon the unexpected.
Voices long since silenced are suddenly as clear as a bell…
as a clock chimes upon a stocking draped mantle.
Each box, now reopened once again…
as each unearthed trinket is removed…
dusty and now worse for the wear from the years of in and out,
dangles precariously on a needle encrusted branch…
bridging both space and time…yet caught between a sea of red and green.
A story line begins to unravel….as a tale of love, loss and even hope sits
arranged, ever just so, inviting all to come behold.
For better or worse, we begin again…
Carrying on with and without…
and if we’re lucky, year in and year out…
a Mystery breaks through the barriers of both life and death.
And we are the better for that Mystery…
“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty.
A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery.
We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery.
Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes,
because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery.
They are not yet finished with this world;
they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do.
We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary
of our being,
because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal,
and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…
Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life,
nothing of the mystery of another person,
nothing of the mystery of the world;
it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world.
It means remaining on the surface,
taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated
and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation.
Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of
life at all and even denying them.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas
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