No one tells you in church that heaven ain’t all at once. Heaven is in stages and over a series of years and so quiet you caint always tell til it is gone.
And all the good and saved memory glowing.
A sweet satsuma off of a tree.
Reading back through so much writing it seems all last year i was lookin for rain and here it is just the same.
This house out here a heaven of overwhelming, light leaking up in the clouds, we see but never knew, it seemed. A quiet rooting to all of a sudden be so planted this way.
Roots carefully dug up, a summer garden, a summer tomato still making offerings. Roots dug up again ad again, hands knowing & gentle, that it is bound for a better place.
Knowing like all of earth knows when it is spring here in this hemisphere, and the pecan tree knows to blossom last thing.
The azaleas around here wilted, some of them dropped, after the cold. It feels like fall outside, sitting on the porch in the dappled sun.
Little bursts of flowers on bare branches. Winter left them for dead, but the ground and sun been all preserving through and through.
Ferns, each kind, and all of them, little fuzzy fists bursting from the ground, from the bayou, unfurling again from the trees. Strange dinosaur plants, shelled as they unroll into the sun. A garfish with roots, a season with leaves.
Green darlings sprouted over night, everywhere, steadily studying. Easy to get caught up in their capturing, once you are noticing.
No stop to stopping, once you start stopping.
All the sun seeking creatures coming out now. Me too.
There is light in everything here.
Peace & penance & prayer moving forward & watching everywhere.
Lists & listening.
Talking, a lot of talking, a lot of writing, a lot of barking. Silence broke up quicker than it falls.
Spring slow and steady though at first and in the moment it seems like lightning, but it is a month or two months and then maybe summer isn’t so quick as it used to seem, either. Always looking up the road instead of down, where we came from.
Done the workshop, and it was wonderful to see the house filled with warmth and smiles and patience and listening. The light was good and the people were the best, and family gets held close and we get to speak all of our names proudly.
Art under the oaks. Mother Nature and Providence partially present and smiling, they knew these Twelve Oaks had us in good hands. A sunny and warm and cool day fell into night and into Sunday, again sunny and overcast and kind. Running these roads and helping folks and seeing all the lives living out here.
Walking to the truck, i believed they were car lights from the road at first - surely. Some strange new light like sometimes happens out here in the darkening of dusk.
They really was there - it really were lightning bugs. Buzzing, glowing, blinking. In a trio, all alone, little paint spatters of phosphor, little sulphur butterflies for night. A dozen, thinking of Georgia, then Oxford, Mississippi, out near Faulkner’s grave, and Providence might be Providence or she might be God, too, and we all slowly moved by a gracious and knowing hand to land.
The lightning bugs began on the leap year day, in their own timing, in their own planning, and it is a dream all over again to be here among them.
