A storm blows in from the east. You can smell the rain.

In an hour or less, it will be here
and unpredictability will reign. The seas will roil
and flotsam, so well hidden by the water
will be tossed on the beach like ragdolls.
And the driftwood around you, dry
from yesterday’s sun, will drift once again.
The landscape will change.

It has been a season of storms,
the kind of storms that rattle windows
and leaves behind damage, ripping at roofs,
tearing away foundations, unrelenting, terrible storms,
one after another. You have survived them all,
but just barely, your faith and those you love,
have not let you flail for more than a moment,
when the winds were at their worst.
Your landscape has changed. And changed again.

The earth is a solid thing, so they say, but
that has not been your experience.
It is a wild thing, uncontrollable, a raging mix
of beauty and betrayal, a seething sea of madness,
waiting for the next wave, the next gust of wind
to tear at you and test you and see
whether you hold fast or fall, A test
of your ability to not walk, but dance on the water.

A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.

It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.

The house is built
on posts and beams.

Thick, hand-hewn posts of local cedar,
the beams as big crossing space,
held together by a single peg
since the early nineteenth century.

You’d not know it’s age to look at it.
Windows have been replaced.
Walls torn asunder and replaced.
There is plaster and electricity,
all the modern conveniences.

But in the end,
it is post and beam.
Incredibly, solidly constructed
in such a way that space is spanned
and everything between and underneath
can be ripped out and replaced,
renewed and reworked,
becoming new again
without losing its strength.

The sanctuary is empty, cleared by fear
that has sent us each into our temples
seeking solace and safety.

The holy elements gather dust that shows
in the sun that pours through the stained glass windows.
The ***** is silent.

It is not the only place. Temples are empty.
Mosques are empty. The vast caverns
of the mega churches are empty.

Still, you come. A solitary pilgrim.
You sit in a back pew and pray.

It is hard, praying at such a time.
There is too much, too many, you are overwhelmed
by the vastness of loss and pain and fears.
There are too many to be grateful for,
too many helpers, too many blessings that remain.
You are fine until you begin to pray,
and then suddenly, you feel small.  Overwhelmed.
Your helplessness in the vast world of need
seems infinite.

And so, your prayers lack words,
They are what the bible calls, “a prayer of moaning”.
And that is enough. It has to be. It is all you have to offer.

In the day to day, you are fine.
There are dishes to wash. Poems to write.
The cats need to be fed.
Books to be read.
You can pretend it is normal, until you bend your head
and call on your God.

But then, that is why we pray, is it not?
Because we understand this is beyond us.
It always was, but suddenly our weakness has become real.
We can no longer pretend that we hold the answers,
that we have the strength, that we are enough.

We are not.

Perhaps that is not entirely true.
We are indeed enough.
We are enough to be loved.
We are all we were made to be,
but not all we aspire to be, never content
to be merely human,
we want to be more,
to pretend we are God,
when in the end we are children playing at it,
suddenly overwhelmed and frightened
when things go wrong, looking to our father to save us
when our humanness proves its limits.

You pray in the stained glass light.
There is wind outside and the bones of the church moan with you.
The building creaks, as if God is restless.
When you are done, you leave.
You go back to your home, a different kind of sanctuary now.

The cats greet you at the door.
The woman you love hugs you as you hang your coat.
This is your sanctuary now.
Here you can pray more coherently,
for the neighbors, for the farmers at the edge of town,
for the children next door playing basketball in the afternoon sun.
You feel more sane here. Less overwhelmed,
able to far better accept what you can and cannot be.
There are things you can do here. Now. Small things,
but, as you always say, they add up.

You sip coffee. You make a call. You write a card.
You prepare for the next days work.
God is with you. You believe this.
It allows you to do, when there is not enough of you,
a power beyond your own.

If there is greatness to be had, .
if there is humbleness, this is where it lies,
in knowing what you are and are not,
and living in faith that there is more,
both in the world, and in you,
than you can see,
that your truest sanctuary has no walls
to hold God in,
or let him out.

This is what you do.
You mourn.
And mourn more.
For as long as you need to be lost in it.
There is no timetable to mourning.

You do not.
Can not.
Will not
lose the loss.
That is not how it works.

You live it
and in time,
when you are ready,
and not one minute earlier,
you find room for something else.

Something small.
But something nonetheless.
And you let it in.
And then something else.
and yet another.

You decide.
When.

You learn. That’s the thing in it all.
you learn that it never fades, the mourning.
It will always be there, just behind the eyes.
Always.

But you learn there is more to you.
Room for more.
That hearts are far larger than the cavity that holds them.
Hearts are where eternity lives.
They are infinite.
But only
when we are ready;
for mourning has no time.

Here in Vermont, the winters are cold,
sometimes brutal, never gentle,
a teasing sort of punishment for those of us who stay.

And so it is at the end of April, snow is blowing
and there is a sheen of ice across the quarry
and you find yourself indoors in what should be a season of sun.

There is no normal here. That is what you discovered.
Behind the bucolic scenery and towns postcarded
like 1955, every ill lives here that lives in the cities you left behind,

hidden behind prettier backdrops perhaps,
but we are excused nothing for the privilege of living
in a land without billboards.

That is not a complaint. I love it here,
and since we all suffer in this life. (It is sure as seasons.)
better to choose your place of pain.

The snow falls. The sun shines. It is cold again.
No matter. You have fresh flowers on the window.
Coffee brews. You are in a good place in a bad time.

Who could wish for more?

This too shall pass. So says the bible.
Only it never did. We did, and we believe it so fervently
we gave it biblical status,

proving at that at times we can uncover
wisdom on our own, and so, give our suffering
meaning.