We’re getting settled, and easing into summer here.  Things are good.  I’ve been experiencing a great deal of peace, for which I’m thankful.  I also started yoga and acupuncture, both of which I love, and both of which I believe are contributing to the calm I feel within myself. 

I attended a conference where I met Barbara Brown Taylor, Billy Collins, and Marilynne Robinson.  I would have been thrilled to meet any one of them, but meeting all three was nothing short of a delight, albeit somewhat overwhelming.  I enjoyed the trip immensely, and I’m still processing all of the information and emotions that I took in while there. 

I also think I’m in love with Billy Collins.  But that’s another story.  While we’re on the subject though,  here’s a poem of his that I find particularly poignant for this journey we are walking:

(detail)

It was getting late in the year,
the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room . 
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.

She was turning the pages of an expensive book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.

Men had entered there but no girl or boy
had come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,

even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.

This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
in her place in the enormous mural of the world.

I have more to say here, but it’s hard to say much after that.  What a perfect and beautiful poem.  I love the word he uses, “enough.”  I am enough.  Things as they are, right now, are perfectly enough.

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