A Wintering Reflection . . .

 

A Psalm of Icy Awareness

 

The earth around my home

       is now locked in a winter wrap

       of bone-chilling snow and ice.

Water, once clear and liquid,

       a joyous, flowing community,

      Is now frozen into crystals of ice.

 

Recently in humanity’s long history

      there has arisen an isolation,

      a separation of those who share

      common human flesh and bone.

While once upon a time we gathered joyfully

      in families, tribes and clans,

      we now so often live divorced

      from earth and from each other,

      with loneliness as our only company.

 

All isolation is ice-olation,

     frigid to human flesh, cold and lifeless to the touch,

     untrue to our most basic unity, comm-unity.

And whenever I act single-handedly,

     apart from an awareness of my sisters and brothers,

     I become a deformed divine disciple.

 

And tribeless, O God, how can I tread the Path

     which you have designed as a companion course?

Ah, the wisdom, so divine, in your Genesis words,

     spoken to the perfectly made, fully automated Adam,

     “It is not good for one to be alone.”

                                                                

       ~Edward Hayes, Prayers for a Planetary People