i am melting

overnight, while i was sleeping like the grateful weary dead, the world turned  back to cold and snowy. the park where i  go to walk every morning before dawn looks like the spring faeries got sloshed and threw Her a birthday party.They definitely got carried away with the white frosting they had left over from winter’s last Bash. The north side of the tree trunks and street lamp posts are plastered white, and the south sides are bare.  The wind was still blowing hard from the north as i trudged through the ice encrusted fields and tried not to cry about the parallels in my life right now.  I felt  and watched the air change from heavy darker gray to the day’s muted brighter gray-light. But the sky was still swollen with clouds of pent up snow, so i never saw the sun that was no doubt shining unseen beyond the planet’s atmosphere on my side of the earth again. It never ceases to perplex me, how the fundamental spinning hurtling rotations and rhythms and revolutionary movements of the earth i inhabit remain imperceptible to me. I can only see certain things around me change in orderly, incremental and interconnected ways. It would never occur to me on my own that i was careening through black cold space on a hunk of molten rock and ice at thousands of miles an hour. I guess i have a lack of imagination! along with my lack of other important things…. I see such a tiny piece of the whole shebang, and draw such strange and limited conclusions about what little i know and think i know. In fact , i was talking to a friend of mine earlier this week, nearing the tearful befuddled end of his 20+ year marriage, and we both laughingly and sadly concluded  getting older has meant that we used to think we knew what was going on, but now we know we dont know a damn thing about what’s really Happening.  As i neared the end of my 5 mile walk this morning, the muddy ground was  becoming visible through my bootprints and the icy snow was beginning to melt from the branches of the ash trees. I thought of the things i wished were different in my life,  and about myself, that still plague me. I dont know how long they will take to change, and i dont know how imperceptible the changes will be. But as surely as the snow eventually melts when the sun finally comes back around to my side of the world, and the seasons change in ordered fashion,  so do we, as we move through our allotted space and time Here.  Nothing stays the same here. Mountains turn into sand, trickles turn into rivers, night turns to day, marriages turn to bitterness, people turn to dust. And nothing stays the same Out There. Even stars die.  So, since i am melting, too…and just hurtling through, i wonder… what invisible astonishing things am i actually up to, more so than i can even imagine?

Hello world!

The first day of spring… has begun for me with a funeral for one of the best police officers i have ever known, Captain Eddie Rhodes. He was Pueblo’s Night Watch Commander for the graveyard crew. As one of the other officers said at the funeral this morning, “Eddie loved life, and was a happy man, but I am not one today.” If he had lived to be 105, instead of just 55, we would still have not been ready to lose him.   The snow melts from the sun, even in the northern corners of the park today, but it is cold in the shade and wind.  That is like my heart today. There is Light all around us still, but it does not always provide the warmth i would like. I am standing in the shadow of Captain Rhodes’ sudden death, and the sorrow from so many other deaths this year is like a cold north wind blowing through me. My own life wont amount to that much, and i dont imagine there will be hundreds at my funeral when i die, as there were for him today. He was a real leader for the law enforcement community here, happily married for more than 3 decades to his best friend, a family man,–and so he made a huge difference in many many lives. I am not that important! But my life still matters. I am important to a few people, who also mean the world to me. And since I don’t know when I am going to die, and the day is here for the living, I’d best do my part, and do what he said to do before he sent the graveyard shift out for the streets: “Prepare for Glory.”