Don’t you love how when you’re really tired, that’s when you slam your hand in the car door, or trip and bruise your knees (or break a bone), or forget to make that important phone call, or burst into tears when your coffee cup dances off the table and smashes on the floor—

Or when you roll over onto your glasses (glasses which you virtually NEVER take off), distorting and cracking the frame beyond repair. As I did last night.

Every year the days of spring and early summer take me by surprise. I imagine they will be soft and delicate like the earliest spring blossoms, but instead they abound with splashy color– end of school celebrations and graduations, weddings, outdoor social events, and frenetic gardening… in addition to all the usual activities of daily life. While the flowers simply bask and stretch out luxuriantly in the warm sun, we humans run around like ants, as if the sun were a stick poking into our hill.

I’ve also had travels, funerals and grief over world events, so I am too tired right now to write many more words. I hope you are not so tired.

I intend to take the advice of this poem, The Word, by Tony Hoagland to heart, and perhaps you need it too:

Down near the bottom

of the crossed-out list

of things you have to do today,

 

between “green thread”

and “broccoli” you find

that you have penciled “sunlight.”

 

Resting on the page, the word

is as beautiful, it touches you

as if you had a friend

 

and sunlight were a present

he had sent you from some place distant

as this morning — to cheer you up,

 

and to remind you that,

among your duties, pleasure

is a thing,

 

that also needs accomplishing

Do you remember?

that time and light are kinds

 

of love, and love

is no less practical

than a coffee grinder

 

or a safe spare tire?

Tomorrow you may be utterly

without a clue

 

but today you get a telegram,

from the heart in exile

proclaiming that the kingdom

 

still exists,

the king and queen alive,

still speaking to their children,

 

– to any one among them

who can find the time,

to sit out in the sun and listen.

 

 

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