The Graze V.144: Beauty and Uncertainty

Dear Friends:

Last night, as I walked down Mission Farm Road with my dogs (Simone who is a dutiful young Bouvier and Hildegard who is close to 20 years old next month), we all stopped and looked up into a snow covered tree that leans over the road. There were 25 turkeys sitting above us. While I know that turkeys fly - seeing 25 of them all sitting on a wobbly branch above me was unexpected!

Living in a transitional age such as ours is unsettling. We do not know what to expect. The future is unknowable and doesn’t always make sense. Despite our desire to control and codify, we were never promised an ordered universe. I love that line from the poem, Vocation, by the late William Stafford, "Your job is to figure out what the world is trying to be.

As we make our way through the wobbly, uncertainty of life, we are on this journey together. This is where we learn that grace, mercy and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. The frozen ground of winter reminds us that there is more to life than what appears before us.

How do we rise to meet our ecological, racial, economic challenges of our time? What would it mean to seek healing and wholeness? Waiting in that uncertainty and discomfort is necessary for the birth of something new. It requires holding the tension of seemingly opposing realities: birth and death; pain and hope; beauty and uncertainty.

Who knows what the turkeys are scheming up in that tree?!!!

Blessings together in the beauty and the uncertainty,

Lisa+