Touching the earth

This image is made up of a photo of light patterns inside an elevator, reflections on the side of a canoe, and a mountain hillside; I think it came out looking the way it did because my daughter's driving back from Montana today.  Fortunately the weather's looking good, so with luck the broken window at the start will be her only incident.

But I did wake up with my mother radar going off, so it was a relief to get her call and hear it was just that the window had gotten stuck down (it's been sort of fixed; it's duct-taped up and hopefully that will hold).  

It didn't help, though, that most of what I was reading in Jack Kornfield this morning was about the inevitability of loss and grief: I found myself wanting to slam the book shut -- I really don't need to be reminded of stuff like that when I'm already a bit anxious.

What did help, though, was tomorrow's poem from Coleman Barks' Year with Hafiz, entitled "When his foot touches earth near me:"

Not like a lone beautiful bird,
these poems now rise in great white flocks,
startled by God,

Breaking a branch,
when His foot touches the earth...
near me.

Not like a lone beautiful bird 
need be your heart when I am close,
like this.

It's a bit of an awkward read.  But once I slowed down and read it through again, I found myself thinking of something said in my spirituality reading group yesterday, about this spiritual journey -- especially if you're taking it apart from a church community after years of church involvement -- being a lonely one.

Maybe it doesn't need to be quite so lonely, and the anxiety can be relieved a bit, as well -- if we can just understand that that foot is touching the earth, quite near; quite close...