August Day

You work with what you are given —
today I am blessed, today I am given luck.

It takes the shape of a dozen ripening fruit trees,
a curtain of pole beans, a thicket of berries.
It takes the shape of a dozen empty hours.

In them is neither love nor love's muster of losses,
in them there is no chance for harm or for good.
Does even my humanness matter?
A bear would be equally happy, this August day,
fat on the simple sweetness plucked between thorns.

There are some who may think, "How pitiful, how lonely."
Other must murmur, "How lazy."
I agree with them all: pitiful, lonely, lazy.
Lost to the earth and to heaven,
thoroughly drunk on its whiskeys, I wander my kingdom.

By Jane Hirshfield

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I love the lines of Jane's poem, “Lost to the earth and to heaven.”
An incredibly poignant moment occurred the summer when I was nine.
It was late afternoon, but sky was clear blue–the kind of blue where you can almost taste clean oxygen. I, in my childlike exuberance, was running from the barn to the house. That was back when running was easy, fun, and came naturally.

I came out of a dip in the dirt road and looked up. There, pure, simple, white, hung the crescent moon in the blue sky, almost like a cloud. But it was not a cloud- it was the timeless moon.

If I had seen this before, the moon out during the day, white against a blue backdrop, I did not remember.

While I was running, I had been thinking about my age-how I was nine and after summer was over I would be ten. Ten, at the time, seemed like a big deal (double digits). I had been wondering if I was growing up, if I was changing, and wondering if, and how, I would be different when I was ten.

But, when I saw that moon, all thoughts of age and time stood still. Perhaps time itself stood still. For in that moment, for what I think was the first time, I recognized something within myself.

That moment in late summer I was 'lost to earth and heaven,' time and space, in the astoundingly simple recognition of my Soul. It was if my sense of self stopped, turned around, took a look at itself, and said, “In this way you will always be the same. You will always have an undercurrent, a stream of self, that is inherently you. You always have; and you always will. This solid yet fluidness has no name. It transcends time and space and simply IS.”

This was more a feeling than it was words. Once the intensity of this flash of realization had passed, I felt the same, yet different. It was almost as if I had gazed upon something which was always there, but I had really seen it for the first time-like the pale white moon upon the great blue sky.

Photo Credit: @jasonrussell - Thank you SO much!!!!