Jul 03, 2022

  Living in Unconditional Love (69)

“Love flows from God to humans without effort:

As a bird glides through the air without moving its wings-

Thus, they go wherever they wish united in body and soul,

Yet separate in form.”

–Mechtild of Magdeburg

 

My wife Eileen died from esophageal cancer in February 2020 one year after being diagnosed, 60 years to the day that we met on Long Island. Then my brother Tom became ill, and I spent a total of six weeks being with him in Ohio, but he died in October 2020. My sister-in-law Sue Mahoney died from Covid-19 in January 2021. On top of it all stood the pandemic, locking everyone down almost two years, and even though it is abating, I wear my mask anytime I am out among people, unlike many.

 

07/03/2022                             Today (6/3) is the 2^nd anniversary of burying Eileen’s ashes in the cemetery. Writing this on Saturday (6/2), I plan to visit tomorrow and plant the remaining gladiola bulbs (3). I will put a marker by each, so they are not weed-wacked off, as happened before. Luckily those will still bloom as only the tips of the leaves are missing.

This is the deep breath before the blooms of summer begin. My first daylilies are just starting with many bloom stalks waving about, and my early Asiatic lilies are starting to show color. The next month will be filled with color and beauty from the many blooms that will hopefully be there, barring any natural disaster such as chipmunks that decide to eat the blooms, as occurred before.

We often talk about the beauty of nature, but seldom talk about (or even think about I suspect) the shadow side of nature. We blithely talk of predators, but those have a job on nature – to keep the number of leaf-munchers down to prevent loss of habitat. Yes, the killing process is scary and painful but quick, and it is better than death by starvation that happens without predators as we see with deer in a bad winter.

This is part of the great mystery of God: the creator of untold beauty, but beauty bounded by means to maintain and change to bring more beauty, meaning the death of the beauty to make way for the next wave of beauty. All of creation is thus controlled, each in its own way. Stars are born and die, sometimes exploding and creating and scattering new elements into the universe to start the creation of new and deeper wonders, including eventually life as we see it today after 13.7 billion years. It took eight billion years of star creation and annihilation to present the proper balance of elements, especially carbon, that allowed the evolution of our planetary system to occur. On top of that, since stars are born in clusters, (no star forms in isolation, but in groups or clusters) something pulled our star out of its cluster (believed to be a passing star that has wondered off) into the isolation we have today, so that radiation from adjoining stars would not fry anything in our system that could lead to life as we know it after six billion years, unperturbed by any intense radiation within a star cluster. No, they do not know what star cluster we came from, but that is what some cosmologists are working on. As I understand it, each cluster has its own signature even though they are very similar, and several nearby clusters are candidates for being our sun’s material birth area.

When I think about that, it is awesome indeed that we are here today, and the life and death of all is a beauty unto itself. In many ways, the shadow side of nature is what makes the beauty of nature possible, and that includes our own finite life as part of the pattern to make way for the new. Death and birth are the natural pattern of all of creation.

Eating dinner on the deck and then sitting out on the deck with my glass of wine into the evening leads to many interesting thoughts, even as I look out over the breath-taking beauty before me. I never get tired to looking at that sight, even after 50 years. I am indeed grateful to God for leading me to this wonder of being.

Mediation

Gentle One, You have shared this wonderous world with me. I am in awe that I have been granted the favor of such beauty and wonder, even as I ponder the mixture of light and dark that our woven into our lives. I place myself in Your care and will enjoy all that I am given to feast on during these brief months.