Abbie:

What I often want most of all, what I demand, is clarity. In my meager attempts to follow God's Will, He reveals himself to me more and more each day, incrementally, sometimes glacially, in what William James refers to as a “Spiritual Awakening of the educational variety”. And yet it's often not enough, or right enough, or satisfying enough.

Some questions that were posed to me by one of my guides through recovery have stayed with me: “What if you had perfect faith, what if you had no fears, or even the slightest desire to know any more than what your “daily bread” afforded you? What would your life be like if you were that free? Who would you marry? Where would you live? What kind of job would you have?” Just these questions are too big for my mind!

Lately though, I've been filled with the gifts of Grace and Gratitude, and these are enough. My desires go no further than the borders of this day, and I find myself wanting nothing more than what I already have. This is a wonderful new territory for me.

Below is a poem that is very much about capturing a small moment in a work of art that lasts a lifetime. Enjoy.

At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.