day 19 - in this light.

The very rainy month of March is coming to an end, and at last the sun has come out. The whole world seems different in the soft sunlight: awakened and bursting with life. It's as if we are all emerging from the cocoons of winter rains, stretching our newly grown wings for the first time. Days like today make it easy to praise: easy to see God in the joyful fresh faces, and the dewy green of the grass. There seems to be light everywhere, as if it has always beens just beneath the surface of things, waiting to break open the dim. Instead of fighting against the harsh edges of things, we are all softened in this daylight, able to see with the eyes of hope and compassion that we should have been gazing with all along. For at least a brief moment in this spring air, we are able to pause the constant battle to change one another, and just see all this battered beauty, and hold it in our loving gaze.

William Meredith's poem seems written for just this sort of day:

Consequences by William Meredith

ii. of love

People love each other and the light

Of love gilds but doesn’t alter,

People don’t change one another, can scarcely

By taking will and thought add a little

Now and then to their own statures

Which, praise them, they do,

So that here we are in all our sizes

Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes,

Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves,

Human, the beams of attention

Of social animals at their work

Which is loving; and sometimes all dark.

The only correction is

By you of you, by me of me.

People are worth looking at in this light

And if you listen what they are saying is,

Love me sun out there whoever you are,

Chasing me from bed in the morning,

Spooking me all day with shadow,

Surprising me whenever you fall;

Make me conspicuous as I go here,

Spotted by however many beams,

Now light, finally dark. I fear

There is meant to be a lot of darkness,

You hear them say, but every last creature

Is the one it meant to be.