I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
Dungeness Forks
Nothing could have surprised me more than becoming a person who needed the air of heaven – a Christian, who just can’t live without the grace of God – unless it was becoming a person who actually needed the substance of earth. This poem speaks of my growth into a sense of place and rootedness. For most of my life, I lived ‘in my head,’ disconnected to some degree from my own being. As I grew up and sought to become more fully integrated, my body helped slow me down – sometimes through pain – and connect me to the natural world I had so ignored as I sped past.
I had a wonderful experience relaxing beside a campfire, after a hike through Pacific Northwest woods, at Dungeness Forks in Washington. I listened – practically falling into the depth of sound – to the power and energy of its thunderous running. The water hurtled heedlessly over enormous boulders, but stayed within its banks. I felt my whole being was filled with this torrent. Every physical and mental and spiritual space overflowed with the beauty and rush and shout of this water, of God’s gifting of this place to me in this moment, of the YES to my own being it elicited from me.
The river’s seeming delight in that unstoppable movement inspired me to fully be within my own boundaries, to run with river-wild abandon in the paths God had chosen for me. My very smallness, and the particular realities of my own life, are all the scope I need for pouring myself out into life with crazy joy. Without this body, this place, this constraint, this boundary, I would lack the groundedness and gravitas that are the ‘river banks’ of my freedom.
Dungeness Forks
I am come late to geography,
to consciousness of ‘where’.
But place has waited patiently
to meet up with me there.
My disembodied self displaced,
by panic motion rent,
speeding like stars in empty space
till, youth’s momentum spent,
my body settled down a while
beside a wise old tree;
the soul abstracted from a child
was reconciled to me.
The contours of created clay
constrained her to be still;
to wait as in a sheltered bay
for love to overfill.
That superflowing river then
united head and heart,
and quickened all my senses
to come home and do their part.
To claim, to know, to love one place,
one child, one oceanside,
is to love all and see love’s face
by limits multiplied.
I came late to geography,
to specificity,
and now, particulate, am whole;
earth-tethered, finally free.
All the poems are now in one volume, and I’d love for you to have a copy! Click on the cover to buy it, and click here for the recordings of all the poems.
You must be logged in to post a comment.