Break up your fallow ground.

….Jeremiah 4:3

there’s always trouble along the way, a frustration, a disappointment…..these are the constants, the reason our pause in the day is so sweet, so nurturing, so soul-kissed……funny how the rain washes us clean and gathers in puddles around our feet…

Our lives have their own trajectory. No matter how hard you try to orchestrate your day, it seems to have its own composition. A large or different structure is operating through us. I’m not even talking about the divine here. We run into traffic, rain, our windshield wiper doesn’t work, our son’s teacher wants to meet with us, a rose is blooming outside our door, tuna is suddenly on sale at the local grocery, a headache, a moment we open the back door and flash on our dead brother, other people’s needs, an unplanned phone call, our cat is sick- these are lucky interruptions. For some people, bombs drop, earthquakes rumble, a lump in the breast is discovered, or a hint is detected that our forty-year marriage is about to collapse. This is the daily, seemingly chaotic picture. You also look back five, ten years and see there was an order to what unfolded or a cause and effect. It wasn’t so out of the blue that you stopped speaking to an old friend or the country had a mortgage catastrophe. Don’t fight what you think are obstacles…..Natalie Goldberg

skidding into home

A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley

All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries

off a tottering brown fence

under a low branch with its rotten old

apricots miscellaneous

under the leaves,

fixing the drip in the intricate gut

machinery of a new toilet;

found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch,

rolled a big tire out of the scarlet bushes,

hid my marijuana;

wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each,

returning for godly extra drops for the string beans

and daisies; three times walked round the grass

and sighed absently:

my reward, when the garden fed me

its plums from the form of a small tree in the corner,

an angel thoughtful of my stomach,

and my dry and love-

lorn tongue.

….Allen Ginsberg