Friday, January 8, 2010

Beyond the Snow Belt - January 3, 2010

Over the local stations, one by one,

Announcers list disasters like dark poems

That always happen in the skull of winter.

But once again the storm has passed us by:

...Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch

Our children running on the mild white hills....

How shall examples move us from our calm?

I do not say that it is not a fault.

I only say, except as we have loved,

All news arrives as from a distant land

I imagine a Buddhist monk wrapped in bright orange robes with a weather map behind him showing swirling snow fronts moving across the continent. He is the weatherman for the local news. Though the scene is what we might expect, his gestures are not. He bows with clasped hands, seeing the divine love in each of us, hoping that we will see the suffering in the world as if it was our own or in our very own backyard. Our beloveds are stranded in the cold, frightened, the world over. The human heart may yet thaw our frozen isolation, this the only news worth hearing, worth knowing.

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