it is a serious thing
just to be alive
+ Mary Oliver, from Invitation, in A Thousand Mornings
on this fresh morning
in the broken world
I am feeling the tug of place again. To understand what it means to be here, now, and fulfil that calling.
So I go back to Thomas Merton’s words:
Humans have a responsibility to their own time, not as if they could seem to stand outside it and donate various spiritual and material benefits to it from a position of compassionate distance. Humans have a responsibility to find themselves where they are, in their own proper time and place, in the history to which they belong and to which they must inevitably contribute either their response or their evasions, either truth and act, or mere slogan and gesture.
I want to be open to what this calls forth because it is not mine to own.
Instead, it is ours to become in this time of bright sadness.