WHO MAKES THESE CHANGES?
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
-Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
So many newly sprung buds and flowers to be seen around here — also some not so lovely, even ugly things in my garden. One of the most pure and fresh is the bloom on the plum trees:
I spent hours in the garden over the last few days; one task was to provide some more strings for the snow pea plants that keep growing up and up and have even formed two infant pods so far. Why do they keep on – how do they do it, on the stems that seem rotted and dried near the ground?
I wouldn’t be surprised if I go out one morning and find that they have keeled over, but strangely, life flows through those brown and emaciated tubes. The sugar snap peas did not survive long enough to get flowers, and I removed them yesterday as well.
Evidently being beaten down by rain and then frozen every night is not their idea of seasonable weather. Truly, October is the month we are supposed to plant peas in our area, but this hasn’t been a typical year weather-wise….
For a week we’ve been having more frosts, so I brought the Christmas Cactus indoors by my computer table and it is giving us Christmas in March.
The arugula and pak choi have gone to flowering, so I pulled them out and planted some parsley and new pak choi, purple this time. From the flowers you can guess that it is in the Brassica family.
This first week of Lent we have so many wonderful services, I’ve been at church a lot, and am glad to have my phone with me so I can save images like this. Somehow the camellia escaped getting brown spots from being constantly wet. It is giving us a picture of the purity and beauty that is God’s will for our souls.
“Blessed is the man who acknowledges his weakness. This knowledge is the foundation, root and beginning of all virtue. For when someone knows himself and truly feels his total lack of power, then his soul recoils from the sloth that darkens the conscience…When someone realizes that he needs God’s help, he pours forth a multitude of prayer.
“Until the heart of a man is humbled, he will not cease flitting about, for humility gathers the heart. Once man is humbled, he is immediately engulfed by mercy and his heart senses the divine aid. All of these virtues are born in man through knowledge of his weakness. But the righteous one who does not know his weaknesses hold his deeds on the tip of a razor and is not far from a fall, nor from the destroying lion -— the demon of pride.”
—St. Isaac the Syrian
“So much did the apostles realize that everything which pertains to salvation was bestowed on them by the Lord that they asked for faith itself to be given them by the Lord when they said: ‘Increase our faith,’ for they did not presume that its fullness would come from free will but believed that it would be conferred on them by a gift of God.
“The Author of human salvation teaches us how even our faith is unstable and weak and by no means sufficient unto itself, unless it has been strengthened by the Lord’s help, when He says to Peter: ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan has sought to sift you like wheat, but I have asked My Father that your faith might not fail.'”
–St. John Cassian
Gladsome Lights 