One evening, on a trail above the Chickakoo lakes,
we heard Amazing Grace played on bagpipes,
coming across the wide valley and over the waters.
It was like the scent from water lilies filtering up
through high-bush cranberries, or like the shape of a soul,
if you could see a soul, or like when a door opens
to the light of day, and for a moment you are blinded,
and all you can do is swim in the shine of it.
And as the last note drifted up and away,
I was aware that I was leaning against a poplar tree,
my legs shaky, under the weight of all that love.

And now I am old, like a child tottering through very tall grass.
Its green is beginning to drain and I smell the colours of rust.
The ripening heads are over my head. They sway and shatter.
The grass stings my face in the wind. I receive a light flaying
—a final anointing.

I am alone but unafraid. And unafraid, I’m never alone.
I hunger. I’m a disciple. I eat grain. The grain of life.
I thirst. It rains. I rest.

You can walk or leap. It matters not.
You can sing or scream. It’s all the same.
Your inside is outside and your out is within.
You are poured out everywhere.
Your everywhere is a prayer, your prayer is love.

i

Slow down, my colours are blues and aquamarines,
my friendship is unassuming, like a buttercup;
and wherever I go the quiet comes stealing in,
as on the soft pads of house cats.

This morning two hot-air balloons rose
in the copper light above the difficult city.
And in the wake of a receding prairie train
the silence came stealing in again.

I will tell you a mystery: I was there, in that copper air;
and I am here in your morning, no matter
the human weather, the false positives,
the misguided urgings to cheerfulness,
the depressing constellations of human disguises.

Do not be startled when I say I love you.
The stars are still there in your daylight hours,
and are present, all the nights when you chose not to look.

I am a word, waiting and watching from the pierced side
of a sacred mountain; and I am in you like light,
luminous and moving, incarnadine to tangerine,
healing blues and aquamarines.

ii

Yesterday, we received word that a friend had died.
And in the mail, came a watercolour painting
from the four-year-old daughter of dear friends.
And I was sent a book of Merton’s contemplations
from a person I’ve never met. Oh, the painting?
Of course it was a rainbow: impossible broad stripes,
alive and resplendent.

In Calgary, in the Shaganappi Golf Course by the Bow Trail,
the coyotes are singing above the city’s sirens.
At 5 o’clock the robin begins, at 5:30 the house finch,
and with it, the blunt rumble of the city rises like a giant bubble.

Close your windows to the noise, and you’ll miss the songs—is what
I tell myself. Sometimes I listen.

Above the sovereign Rocky Mountain horizon,
a helicopter beats out prophecies of traffic.
By a calm watercourse, under the elms and spruce,
the first golfers have arrived; one stands apart,
studying a place in the distance, unconscious
to everything but the arch of his swing and the flush strike.

The entire scene, not unlike these birds,
single-mindedly singing at the edge of the freeway,
like they have this voice of knowledge,
and they can’t keep quiet.

There are crowds of orchids yearning in this alkaline city,
like the bodies under blankets, slumped near the C-Train,
or the steely couples in the corridors of money, who do not
go out to the foothills and wait into the evening,
beside a small fire,
smelling the river and feeling the loam beneath their legs.

Alright then, sit here with me, in this abused park.
The finch is not forensic, the robin is not revelation,
There will be no examination. There’s nothing to conclude.

Only to wait. Perhaps a taste of enchantment in the purples
of crocuses, or a flash of holy on the wing of a pigeon,
in the cant of a street light—and if not, well enough.
Wait, listen, sooner or later some Francis-like saint
will come whistling, like those birds, to gather up
all our troubled applications for hope.

But even among the molecules love was the building power that worked against entropy, and under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.                                -Teilhard de Chardin

Start with the understanding that all matter is a concentration of energy,
and that the physical world of mass-energy, within all dimensions
of cosmic life, is under a force of attraction, where all elements
grope their way towards union.

What is this force of attraction? Science gives us the mechanics, but can say
nothing about its presence, which escapes our laws of mathematics.

It is here, where you and I might ask, is it God? which is to say, is it Love?
is it Agape? that’s rooted in, that is, the fundamental nature of reality,
in which we, the human person—among this vast cosmic array
of elements—lives and moves, is given being?

Science, in devotion to matter, is indispensable as part of our evolving
understanding; that all life is intrinsically communal
(confirming what the mystics long since knew).

But science cannot tell the whole, cannot propel the heart. Here
we enter the unifying domain of spiritual insight, the I-Am-the-Light,
that searches our hearts and invites us to trust the Us of love,
the healing We of divinity.

We are the stuff of creation, ineluctably partaking in its gathering
evolution. You and I are a we, before we are I’s. Only in union with you,
am I an I, only in merging, do we emerge.

And here, in this divine entanglement, even a not-yet-I—who serves
and employs the entropy of only-me, who as a child was hijacked
by joylessness and dissolution—is not beyond the reach
of divine compassion, the love-energy of community.

Love is all, and in the absence of love,
there is only human devolution,
and malignant disenchantment with nature.

Give us capacity to hold, to have, to be, love, without needing to agree;
to love the hard way: to resist, to speak, to stand against all forms injustice,
without losing our souls to the voids of resentment and hate;
to stretch our hearts toward the unfolding universe,
the unfinished struggle of Light, of Love.