Beautiful Day

Just listened to U2, “It’s a beautiful day”.  Don’t let it get away.  I walked Gilbert. Cloudy skies. A touch of rain.  Would have preferred sunshine for the weekend, but it’s a weekend. Vacation time.  Work relief. Friends and dogs and children.  Cabins and lake.  A change of scenery.  Laughter.  Light heartedness.  Away from fentanyl deaths and politics.  I’m thankful and grateful for the moments of grace.  Little cracks in the vase repaired in gold like the Leonard Cohen poem.  Friends and family dying. Curtain calls.  I noticed an older person is trembling with Parkinson’s. Another is wheezing.  Another carries a cane. I think of time in a different way. Wonder if I’m doing God’s work. Is this where I am supposed to be. Today. But I think of pilgrimage most days.  Then I think of my dog. He likes this life where I go out with him and we work together. He’d not like churches and temples because so many don’t like him.  We are restricted.  Laura, Hannah, Mida take care of him when I go off alone to places which don’t like dogs. But I return.  I imagine youth bicycling across europe visiting castles and churches. But it doesn’t work with a dog.  He prefers the woods.  We’ve been sailing and canoeing. Defines my places of prayer.  I meditate more in the open than the closed man made spaces of worship.  I am like Jesus that way.  Outside, seeking God in silence in some out of the way place.  I struggle with bureaucracy and theatrics.  I do mountains of paper work.  I see people all day long. I listen and challenge and encourage and promote.  I’m life’s salesman.  I beg cajole plead that people put down the weapons of destruction.  Sometimes I’m okay.  Every day I grow more weary. I face such hatred in low and high places.  It’s what I see but all around me there’s love and kindness and caring. It’s perception. It’s so much in the perception. Choosing love or fear.  Inviting God into my life.  Be Still and Know that I am God. Holy Spirit Come.
Thank you for all the positive and uplifting and memorable.  Thank you for the joy.  Now I must get ready for work. I love showers. They are immensely under rated. Even indoor plumbing is taken for granted.  I love soap and shampoo and clean clothes. I’m so blessed and yet these little things I take for granted. Thank you for my fingers I say at this computer though Paul Simon said that in a different and better way.  I like the old songs. I like the Beatles Sgte Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I’m having flashes of past times of peace and joy.  I’m under attack daily. I live with constant threats. The man who wanted to kill me and my dog has faded into the past but now others take their place.  I work in the most hostile of environments.  I called a killer recently. It was close. He was enraged. He’s big.  I struggle with understanding his reality, once a drug lord with jets and helicopters galavanting with bikinied beach beauties and mansions, now post decades of jail, resentful, in rage.  All that time in solicitude.
She lies.  Her lies are bigger every day.  When she was young her lies were less lethal. But now she is old she kills with deceit.  People still do her bidding. They are her pawns she places like an evil queen on her chessboard.  Rallying stupid men and women to serve her nefarious schemes.  In this country she is heads about them. Her Homolka gets to volunteer at schools after killing children. In her country, a much older culture, there is no time for such deceit. There are so many good women and men around. They contain her rage. But here there are loop holes. She can scheme.  All she does is scheme.  Hurt and angry, she doesn’t like to work with others.  She doesn’t join the greater game. She is her own queen. She wants men to kill for her.  She has a sneaky grandiosity that insanity conceals. She is creepy without the mask.  She is really creepy.  Women don’t want her around children.  She is dangerous to men.
I was telling someone about working with the dangerously insane. The wards of people with life time Governor General Warrants. Mothers who killed all their children and family because the daffodils were yellow.  The men who thought their brother was a tractor.  I saw these folk with cap grass syndrome. It’s discomforting at times. When they look at you like a bird.  They lack a quality of human but have retained a bird like look in their eyes. Curous. He screams and yet is kind.
She is not kind.
I am frightened a lot, in moments when I let the reality sink in. We are all vulnerable on a spinning planet in a corner of a universe with limited time and aging reminding one of the close proximity of death.  I have trouble leaving my home. I fear another liar. I fear the psychotic psychopaths seeking money by using the system.  I tremble and stutter some days. It’s not bad. It’s only some times. I want to curl up fetal position and never see another human.  I pray on my knees beside my bed. My dog cuddles beside me.  It's fleeting moments now.
I have flashes still.  I could go down the rabbit hole. I could suck on the tit of self pity. It’s such as sour milk though.
But instead, I’m thankful. I make gratitude lists. I open my perception to see beyond the tunnel vision of fear and thank my lucky stars for all that I have been blessed with. This breath. The beating heart. The joy of senses. Hearing. The bird songs have been such a joy. Since I got my hearing aid I’m hearing them so poignantly again. They bless my morning.  I smelled a pine tree yesterday. I don’t know why that pine tree but the fragrance was beyond any chemical. A regular ice cream cone pine taste for the nose.  It was incredible.
So now to shower. Thank you for all the good times. Thank you for moments of encounter. Thank you for the peace and the refreshment. Thank you for silences. Thank you.

It’s a beautiful day.