We give thanks for all that sustains us.

We give thanks for this food. May we be fed, and may we feed others.

We welcome in the Teacher, we welcome in the Dreamer, we welcome in the Mystery.

May we see them in one another. May we see them in ourselves. May we see them in all things.

And so it is.

He is beautiful, through and through, in a way that makes everything else beautiful. I can almost see it in myself, too.

I also see his mother, my little girl, when that’s what she was, an autumn many autumns ago looking for the same pumpkins. I see the galoshes I lost in the snow, a little kid playing outside unsupervised, fearful of the trouble I would get in.

It is all there, history not repeating exactly but rhyming, all those moments happening again and forever and a long line of tomorrows happening too. I want to grieve, but what is lost when I can see the whole thing in that little sly smile, those big eternal eyes?

It’s the miracle, I think.

Think about what we have learned how to do, in response to beauty or praise or dysfunction or time, or all of that.

They say the brain is plastic.
It rewires itself all the time, based on what it is asked to do and what goes on around it.
I suspect this is why I can love my kids but have no idea why they do what they do.

Different stories, different software.

So tell me your story. I want to know your big idea.

Your mythic sensibility is your operating system. If I know that I know you in a way more fundamental than knowing what you wear or how you vote or what the various algorithms think you want to see or buy, which amounts to the same thing.

The machines can know our commerce, but they cannot know our story. It is the difference between knowing where the storm has been and feeling the rain on your face as cleansing tears and new beginnings.

Do the people who love you know the legends that are written on your heart? Do you know theirs? Is your exchange one of obligation, or of mythology? What matters, and what is replaceable?

Will the story be passed down?

What happens in a world where there is no time for myth, no value placed on legend, because it cannot be associated with a price? What happens when stories are not allowed to be told?

What would HR say?

Here’s what I know:
We are not biological or economical or physical or geographical or material or literal.
We are mythopoetic. We are art. We are the song, singing itself.

You are a poem.

So the story comes out. Comes in.
Create a mythic vacuum, and your heart will fill it. Remove stories, and you will find one, even if you do not know you’re doing it. Even if it does not match what you know to be true.

There are lots of places to hear bedtime stories.
Convenient lies and handy scapegoats.
I have stumbled into those churches.
I have praised and worshipped and testified
Insensate, unconscious, asleep
I put money in the plate.

People say they are not religious.
But everybody is, all the time.

We are all of us high priests. Every moment is a ritual reenactment of our myths.

Are they the stories you want to be true? Are they tales worth telling?

Because we are telling them.

An implicit myth is harder to interrogate and upgrade and replace than an intentional one. Bad software does not know it’s bad.

So choose what you know to be good. Pick a true story, and watch the upgrade kick in.

Tell me the legend of you.

Do trees deserve the rain?

What will it take to win?
What does it mean to be right?

Does the moon earn the sunlight
That we in turn earn each night?

Nothing works that way.
Lies are exhausting.

If it is all just one
Maybe trying to win
is stepping outside the unity
Which is an automatic loss.

If it is all just love
Maybe trying to be right
Is wrong.

I know you are tired
But you do not have to be.
You are not meant to be.
That’s why it feels so wrong
To work so hard
At something that gives you no pride.

It does not have to be this way.
It is not meant to be this way.

Repeat after me:
I have decided
To enjoy
My life.

You know
What happens
When you play
By their rules.

You have been doing it
For so long.
So long.

What happens
If you let go of rules
And just play?

Remember?

Of course there is work to do.
Enjoy it.
You are here to grow.
You have to grow.
You are meant to grow.

Does it grow you
Even if there is growing pain?
Enjoy it.

If not,
Say it again
And make a choice.

I did not, and do not, know if the old man in the Caterpillar hat was telling me the truth or not. But I wanted to believe, at twelve, that some part of me could see something so far and high and fast and utterly removed.

My Florida wardrobe was no match for North Carolina Novembers. I knew that space would be colder still, but my secret wish was for this middle school class trip to never return home, whatever that was, but instead be only a stopover in a journey that would take me somewhere far and high and fast and utterly removed.

“You can’t see ‘em back home. Light pollution. But up here where nobody goes, you can see everything.”

Everything.

I guess that’s what I wanted to see. Everything new, everything hidden, everything invisible. And for a moment, I could. For a moment, I was up there, not on some mountaintop, but in space, hurtling through the eternal dark that I’d just learned was not as dark as I’d feared.

What I wanted was Escape Velocity. Enough orbits around a given center of mass, picking up speed and perspective along the way, get the angle just right, and you’re off.

Or sometimes the center can’t hold. The star explodes or implodes, the planet collapses. Mass becomes less of a rule and more of an observance. Our hero has to leave and venture out into the galaxy with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men. Or something.

I did not and do not really have a plan. I suspect that real adults do, but I’m no longer sure I want to be one of those.

My journey through the night sky has never been a straight line anyhow. Just a series of fits and starts under my own steam, fighting against the centripetal tug of heavier things. Up close, jagged and jerking and violent.

But from some mountaintop somewhere far below, a gentle certain arc.

There were things I thought were important or unavoidable or indelible or unstoppable. There were things I thought would define me forever. So I orbited. For years, for forever, for as long as it took.

But where are they now?

Sometimes I didn’t even register their cooling and retreat into black dwarves. Sometimes I rode the supernova. Sometimes the release felt like rebirth. Sometimes the dismissal felt like death. But there was always, is always, a new system and star and planet and pull.

Somewhere a child gasps at the beauty of blazing trail through night sky.

Somewhere down the mountain in a VFW hall there is a contra dance. Callers guide the steps, and dancers move from partner to partner and reel and laugh and maybe fall in love.

So He

Wasn’t.

I was fresh out of seminary, doing my Monday nursing home visits. Like always.

Like always, I sat in my unkempt car under an oak tree in the manicured parking lot.

And took a deep breath.
And another one, this one more like a sigh.
And tried to fix the awkward knot in my polyester TJ Maxx tie.
And grabbed a fresh copy of that month’s Daily Word from the stack on the passenger seat.
And headed through the heat into the air conditioned lobby, through the lobby to the reception desk.
And a receptionist with worn out comfortable shoes gave me a worn out comforting smile.
And checked my ID and wrote my weird name in a careful hand on a name tag sticker.
And handed it to me.

I could never get those on straight.

“He’s in room 14b, but he’s not in his room. He’s over there, with his family.”

The receptionist pointed but did not look.
I followed her finger across the room to a mismatched sofa and chairs
And a frail man in an unreclined Barcalounger. Feet flat on floor, gripping the armrests, watching a family, his family, talk to each other.
They were mismatched too.

Two sets of parents, I thought, and maybe an unattached uncle? Three kids playing on the floor. Coloring books and crayons and Hot Wheels.
The frail man watched them all like they were in a behavioral study and he was a scientist in a white coat behind a one-way mirror. His expression was alive. Curious, interested, but uninvolved.

Uninvited.

I did not recognize their expressions until years later, when I’d left the ministry and went to work in a labyrinth of cubicles and clock-watchers.

“What do you want to do with Pop?”

I interrupted the presumptive uncle to introduce myself. I felt as welcome a drop of water in the living room, introducing the possibility of an overflowing toilet upstairs.

I was uninvited, too.

I leaned against the armrest and looked Pop in his amused eyes. Handed him the Daily Word and told him I’d call on him later. He grabbed my Daily Word hand in an awkward crumpled handshake and just said “thank you so much” before returning to his research.

It is so much later now. I should call on Him.

Beech, birch, maple, hemlock, pine.

But they have their own names.
Secret names.
Listen close and deep and true.
You will know them.

A tawny owl makes his home in the knot of this one.
Was the injury
That fostered the knot
That fosters life
bad
or good?

And what of your scars?

Root down.
Reach up.
Let wind sway you.
Let light feed you.

You have lived and grown
Through fire
Through drought
Through lightning
Through torrent.

Are you less perfect
For your storms?

You have twisted
Stretched
Out of darkness
Into life.

Are you less beautiful
For your yearning?

You have known autumn.
You know what it is to stop giving
To what will not grow
And let it go
Back into Mystery.

Are you less eternal
For your seasons?

Are you here
To solve problems
Or to be solved by them?

You are not bark or burl.
You are not storm or season.
Deep down
Past rings
Of time and circumstance
You are unblemished Love
Growing
Going
Where it needs to.

You are scarred and bruised
Because you dance and fight and shout and sing.
Would you set that aside for safety?

Child, be alive in this life!
Run
Stumble
Rise again!
Glorious and graceful
For the fall!

Two kids, not experiencing youth as a joyride
The way that old people remember it and sell it
And begrudge it
But as a long hallway of locked doors.

I tell her
I think our dreams are secrets
Like words you say once and say wrong and get made fun of
For mispronouncing
So you set them aside in favor of roundabout acceptable synonyms.

She says all dreams are secrets
Until you do something about them.

What if this is a dream? What would you do?

We pull over to steal an irresponsible lucid moment
Walking along the Atlantic.
Time’s Arrow
Suspended in midflight.

Nobody’s here.
Too early. Too cold.
Not even enough footprints for a postcard in a Christian bookstore.

We see a singular rag and bone beachcomber.
Grey beard and green sweatshirt
White rolled up Prufrock pants
And a cap folded in half in his back pocket
Like Springsteen’s on the cover of Born in the U.S.A.

Something about the warmth, the depth
Of his dark eyes makes us think he’s seen us somewhere before
Makes us welcome
Makes him officiant.

We take off our shoes like Moses
And leave them with our plans
In the sand
And step into the sea.

The horizon calls. Pulls.
Curved like space
Curved like the way that promises end up keeping themselves
Curved like love
That knows and cannot lose its own.

We dive deep. Full immersion.
A vocabulary of absolution
Like a native tongue forgotten
In an attempt to assimilate into a foreign land
Where they only speak separation.

We remember now.
We remember dreams
Can’t be crushed
Only compressed
And pressure
Makes heat
Makes fire
Makes life.

Let them press.
Let the diamond density of our dreams compress down into a single infinity
And explode out in a Big Bang beginning
And carry us back to the shore
Gasping and laughing
Hand in hand
At the reckless inevitable forever of it all.

There are lots of footprints now.
We make out the impressions of our grandchildren’s grandchildren
And ten thousand more
Like laugh lines on the face
Of the loving Earth.

Is life a matter of homeopathic reckoning
Where the aim is to microdose a little cruelty
A little ugliness
A little pain
To build immunity to a cruel ugly painful world?

I think it’s more like a garden
Where small things
Become everything
When loved.

What hymn is there
But the dawn chorus of Blue Jay and Robin,
And Mockingbird, and Dove,
And heart,
And knowing that they sing deep in praise of the promise of a new day,
They long for it,
But more than that
The Sun races, aches to hear the new song,
In a yearning that is not unrequited,
Not even reciprocal,
But one?

What prayer is there,
But the honest involuntary sharp intake of breath
When life is so true and beautiful and real
That the body demands a reckoning,
A cardiopulmonary reconciliation of within and without,
Immanent and transcendent,
And knowing that it is the breath of the new baby before any cry,
The sign that true love knows itself,
The inspiration that moved out across the waters,
All one breath,
Placeless here,
Timeless now?

What faith is there,
But the way we are instinctively silent in holy places,
From Stained Glass sanctuaries
To Big Sur
To the Bodleian
To this garden
And knowing it is all one
Shared holiness,
And in it
Teacher and Dreamer wait,
Longing
As long as it takes
For quiet recognition?

What worship is there,
But knowing the Sun and the Birds and the Breath and the silence do not labor
But just are
And all there is to do
Is shine
And sing
And breathe
And be?