Happy Birthday

We spoke of the 'Secret Garden' today, that place we all go to that only we know of--and God.  Isn't He the one who built its walls, gave us the key, the one we're hoping will find us there?


Meet me in the alfalfa field when the moon enters and exits through velvet-lit clouds, some shy white eye.  I'll be the one wearing purple flowers and baling twine.

I am grown in the quiet hour "stolen" from sleep--the place entered secretly so far from the world but somehow still in the world, made for each of us, the gift (if we will receive it and even if we don't) of our very particular and good life, so good we could not afford to spend one cent of it at The Dream Store.  So particular that no pawn shop would know what to call it.

Tonight I receive (how I am beginning to see what is at stake when I refuse it):

the gift of such good work: mother, teacher, gardener, reader.  (The ones I wasn't shy to say out loud) and the others, those things I am that I could not speak yet to you about.  That I whisper to Him in the field.  ("If it's so deep, you don't think that you could speak about it...just wait and see.  Someone will come to help you.")

The blushing, rushing.   And I did speak about it.  I did.  Let me pass along those words that comfort, hold, heal.  The warm breath in a palm pressed against the wet face, chewing the orange twine that bound you:  erasing, recognizing.  Can't you see in all of this, I love you?

I have refused the gift before.  It's too ugly, too hard, too big, too tight, too boring.  I like what you gave someone else better.  But now, somehow, through the fellowship that does not fail, I am seeing it for what it really is and it is none of these things.   Of course, wouldn't the one who made me know exactly what to give me for my birthday, which occurs daily and even in the night in an hour that does not exist?