Ok - today's "line" is from my youth - Bob Dylan/The Byrds - "Hey Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me." (My mother achieved sainthood by listening to me play and sing it over and over and over!)  I was doing an MRI (always a little intimidating) in Green Bay (they have BIG magnets there!)  and they asked what kind of music I wanted to listen to, although once the machine gets going you can't hear much anyway.  I said "Folk"?  And the next thing I heard was the opening riff and Roger McGuinn - "Hey, Mr Tambourine Man...."  Yeah, I thought - I got this....

Sky-flower stars and 

 night winds play a song for me -

        Awed, I hum along. 

The "night winds" were last night, the "sky-flower stars" maybe tonight!

 Bonus - it's really snowing and blowing in Mqt today -

 

Fine snow, fiercely blown

blankets branches, shrubs.  Nature -

       gently tucks us in. 

So we might walk to the store - or maybe not!

 

The radical, divine choice is the choice to reveal glory, beauty, truth, peace, joy, and, most of all, love in and through the complete divestment of power. It is very hard – if not impossible – for us to grasp this divine mystery. We keep praying to the “almighty and powerful God.” But all might and power is absent from the one who reveals God to us saying: “When you see me you see the Father.” If we truly want to love God, we have to look at the man of Nazareth, whose life was wrapped in weakness. And his weakness opens for us the way to the heart of God.      - Henri Nouwen

Mighty God, your son,

Whose life was wrapped in weakness,

     shows us your true strength

 

Or morphs into -

Creation shows a

powerful God; Powerless -

     the Son shows true strength.

From The Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York.  They're having a "Plentiful Pancake Supper" tonight -

 Join us for a fun-filled night of crafts, live jazz music, a hot cocoa bar, and a pancake relay in the Nave as we take part in the Christian tradition of feasting on the night before the penitential season of Lent begins. There will also be a parade and burning of palms.  

"a pancake relay in the Nave"!? - I want to go to that church!  

So -

 Live jazz, hot cocoa, 

pancake relays in the Nave   -

    last day of life's start!

Or     last day of first life!

Kind of trying to bounce off the "First day of the rest of your life" thing.  This is the last day of frivolity before a new part of life begins tomorrow. 

Or

 Live jazz, hot cocoa, 

pancake relays in the Nave   -

    last day before dust!       (laissez les bon temps rouler - and flip those pancakes!!!)

 

(If you are looking for just the haiku - scroll down to the bottom.)   

Ok - here it is, we're doing "Who said that?" week.  In which I take a line, from a favorite author or just from the universe, and form a haiku around it.  For today it's a line from Godric, a novel by Frederick Buechner.  Godric is a hermit who remembers his life as kind of a "traveling monk accompanier" I think.  Haven't really read all the book - parts of it in the daily Buechner email. 

 So - ALL THOSE YEARS ago Tom Ball blessed my ears to hear the poor cry out for help, and I still hear them right enough. I hear them when the mouse squeals in the owl's cruel claw. I hear them when the famished wolf howls hunger at the moon. I hear them when old Wear goes rattling past in weariness, and in the keening of the wind, and when the rain beats hollow on my roof. In all such sounds I hear the poor folk's bitter need and in the dimtongued silence too. But when melody wells up in thrushes' throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery's drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric's glad in spite of all.

It's the line "misery's drowned in minstrelsy"  - and you have to say "mis-ery" in 2 syllables!  I love that line - the only other place where I've encountered the word "minstrelsy" is in Gordon Lightfoot's song Minstrel of the Dawn - "If you meet him you must be a victim of his minstrelsy" 

 So here we go -

 

Sorrow's silence, then

misery's drowned in minstrelsy -

     Music of the night   (comes easily to mind)

     Music of nature   (fits more with original text)

    Music of the world

     Music of God's love

     God's musical love.

    The music of grace.

     The music of life.

    Nature's old sweet song.

Yeah - I like that last one best. 

Sorrow's silence, then

misery's drowned in minstrelsy -

    Nature's old sweet song.

 

 

 

    

    

     

 

 

God of prophets and priests, patriarchs and matriarchs, disciples, and us -

we so often drift through the clouds of life

not understanding what we are seeing or saying,

unable (or unwilling or in any case, failing) to cast out the sorrow and suffering we encounter.

Give us the faith to see the light of your love in the face of each person we meet

that may we stop being faithless and perverse,

and might live all the moments of our lives in your goodness and grace together.

 Snug in flannel shirt,

long underware, lined blue-jeans - 

     Geezer looks at 10  (degrees, that is!)

 

This is a re-working of an autumn haiku I wrote a couple of years ago (well, on 11.6.23 to be exact) that went

Temps, leaves start to fall -

 snug in his flannel lined jeans

     Geezer waits on fall.

(and looking at it now, I'm not sure I like the two "fall"s.  Guess I did back then?)   I always used to scoff at old guys wearing long underware for everyday activities, when they weren't out tramping through the snow. You could see the long underware cuffs under their regular shirt.  But flannel lined jeans are really nice!