Commitment

My dear friend Nadya at her dacha near the Volga, picking flowers.

***
THIS SACRED WAY 1. September 21,2008
 

–Walden, Henry David Thoreau, p. 25-26

The equinox air cools the fruit,
slows both ripening and decay.
Summer breathes out her relief,
hitches her skirt above the knee-high
grasses and retreats to a forest glade
to doze. She’ll rouse later, when the
leaves shimmer gold and red, to warm
the late figs and raspberries. I let her go
and welcome chilly mornings, early dark.
The turning earth, revolving sun are
friends to my old age. Not everyone
who adds years adds wisdom, but the
earth does if we know how to read her.
What does it mean to align oneself with
the Universe’s rhythms, to serve God,
to know oneself, to love wisdom, to be
like water? The answer resides in the
daily rituals of listening, serving, giving,
adapting to change–some barely
perceptible, some sudden, catastrophic.
I feel my frailty more these years, but
my limbs are sound and whole. My work
in garden, orchard feeds all my hungers
and keeps me universe-aligned. This
yellow blaze of September suns along
the roadside companions my daily walk
to keep all my moving parts working
smoothly. They make any way sacred
with their artless beauty, their earth-rooted
light. Our future is unknowable because
we shape our fate. Even catastrophe can
be molded into a way of loving and learning.
May everyone and everything teach me.
Then my every thought and act will count
in the long history of the Universe. I’ll be
an indisputably important grain of sand.

Judy HoganThe cost of a thing is how much life is exchanged for it.