2.15.13          One Small Moment

Fall Over Friday. Resplendent early winter morning, a rush of great variety and numbers at the bird eating station in front of our broad living room window, with only momentary hungry Red Tail Hawks of various sizes looking on, at times to have the coup of a delicious well fed morning dove... 

Old dog Shiva Louisa blindly wanders  along her snowblower paths, relishing all the smells I can only dream of detecting, happily bumping into the powdered snow walls of her passageways, mosses softly living underfoot, one young Crow perched on the top of a nearby Aspen as scout, catching sight of the blue plastic bowl that does daily bring compost...I mean crow and coyote and possum food...to the compost, and startles suddenly in their grasp of branch- when I walk out the front door, identifying the blue bowl, the inhabitant of the home, the impending food source, and quickly sets off the call, enhancing it by soon taking flight, calling calling, as, if one is a crow, one does not ever ever dine alone, so off they go and soon will follow their adolescent cohorts to arrive overhead, to soon perch upon oak and maple, scanning down, waiting for human and dog to pass by, so the breakfast may begin. 

Gazing at Shiva wandering slowly by, enticed by the early morning mist and the softness under her old pads, her belly full of both dry food and freshly cooked meats, to finally turn at the end, unable to ford the distance this year between path and mounded up snow, to turn herself and enjoy every 15 year old moment as she makes her way back and finds one more path to choose and wander along, as I follow, inhaling the clean small mountain range air. 

As I imagine the individual who became Pope and had the responsibility to not question but to provide protection and succor and accessibility for injured harmed Priests continuing an age old tradition, perpetuated far and wide, in the past and present, of sexually harming small young people, the Pope following rules and orders and providing leadership for years and years, with this knowledge somehow uneasily eroding his very heart, beneath all that he willed himself to assert, with his faith and belief, all of this sidling up to each other, the rotting of deep lasting wrong, the hand in enabling more deep lasting wrong and destruction of lives, together with anything good and true and full of God's love he worked to support. 

I am walking and imagining the meteors and otherworldliness of life far and away from we small individuals in our clans and villages and gatherings, known or unknown, alike or not alike, the image of in billions of years the sun overtaking the earth, ultimately dust unto dust,  as I stroll, on Fall Over Friday, along a mossy land that lies, ever, beneath any drought or pile of snow, that has lain here for as long as this earth has spun in its inimitable orbit, my self a small moment, the moment mine.