ANCIENT WORDS

The silhouette of the bare branches of the tree outside
my window shows a lacy mist made up of new buds;
amazing to suddenly see that, to register that Spring
may, indeed, be at the threshold.

I can re-think how to approach my day, can I not?
A new wind, a sense of magic, for I have done nothing
to cause this to happen.

Because this makes me think of the days beyond
counting that this has been happening for us, I went
to the bookcase and pulled out an old classic:

“When a lawyer said, But what of our Laws,
Master?
And he answered:
You delight in laying down laws,
Yet you delight more in breaking them.
Like children playing by the ocean who
build sand-towers with constancy and then
destroy them with laughter,
But while you build your sand-towers the
ocean brings more sand to the shore,
And when you destroy them the ocean
laughs with you,
Verily the ocean laughs always with the
innocent.

But what of those to whom life is not an
ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-
towers,
But to whom life is a rock, and the law
a chisel with which they would carve it in
their own likeness? ….

What shall I say of these save that they
too stand in the sunlight, but with their
backs to the sun? ……

But you who walk facing the sun, what
images drawn on the earth can hold you?
You who travel with the wind, what
weather-vane shall direct your course?

People of Orphalese, you can muffle the
drum, and you can loosen the strings of the
lyre, but who shall command the skylark
not to sing?”

……… KAHLIL GIBRAN, from The Prophet,
written in English and published in 1923.

Those buds on the trees, revealed by the
lights of our parking lot before the day starts,
are a song. Seeing them is my heart’s song
for this day.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

"..but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"

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