I'm back

I haven't posted here in almost a year, and I am not going to go out of my way to advertise that I am writing here again, but I have been feeling called to it for several weeks. I am not sure what I will be writing, maybe just a bunch of ramblings about the Royals and Spurs.

I had training the last two nights at the Children's Bereavement Center of South Texas; I will be facilitating the adult portion every other Monday night. The training has been okay; I have enjoyed meeting the folks who will be doing the work with the kiddos. Most of the volunteers are students taking practica and so have a different set of life experiences. But they have big hearts or else they wouldn't be there, and so it has been a good couple of days, if exhausting.

The wedding in June came off basically as perfectly as could be imagined. We used a reading from the Song of Solomon that celebrated the coming of spring, since both Kim and I have had winter times in our lives. And so that got me thinking about the metaphor for seasons and the metaphor of a garden, and I wrote the following poem to myself in winter. I guess that the impetus more than anything is that though it is again springtime, it is delusional to deny that winter preceded it.

Garden in Winter

You seem such a waste, muddy and unkempt with rotting leaves.
Can you even see what had been?
Do you hear the echoes of her humming as she worked, planting, pruning, arranging?
Joseph's coat is faded and threadbare;
the ark is abandoned to the breeze.
The stones that line you mock you.
Why were you set apart when everything is cursed by the absence of her care?