Parable for Sunday

This is a parable written by my husband, Nathan. It is a beautiful piece for reflection this Easter weekend. I'm honored to welcome him as my first guest post.

There was once path from a village to the marketplace. Along the path, in a small meadow, stood a young fig tree. As the fig tree grew, he watched the villagers travel along the path, and saw that they were often hungry and thirsty.

So he stretched out his young branches and produced figs to offer them.

The villagers soon discovered the figs and would take them as they passed by. As they walked on, the fig tree could hear them discussing his figs, whether they were too small or too large, too sweet or too bland, or just the way they thought a fig ought to be. Some would even take his figs and sell them at the market; the village leaders boasted in how their village grew the best figs.

One day, a man came along the path. He was not from the village. As he stopped to look at the fig tree, the fig tree saw that there was something very different about this man traveling alone. From near his trunk, he reached out a beautiful fig to the man. It was the best fig he had ever made.

But the man did not take his fig. Instead he reached in through the branches, and with his finger wrote the name Beautiful on his trunk.

And then he left. And never returned.

The fig tree wept. Fig after fig fell to ground. And then he died.

A few days later, a group of villagers came walking along the path. They stopped to look at the fig tree.

One of the men, an elder from the village, pointed at the ground and said,

"Do you see why this fig tree has died? It is because its figs were rotten."

The other men voiced their agreement and continued down the path.

The meadow soon filled with smell of death and rotting figs, and the villagers chose other paths to the marketplace. The fig tree stood alone, brittle and lifeless, as the seasons changed.

Winter came. And stayed. And then went. The tears of spring fell, and awoke the seeds of the fallen figs.

The meadow is gone now. In its place stands a grove of fig trees. The path has long since disappeared, broken and buried by strong supple roots. The village has forgotten the meadow and the fig tree that grew there. Only its children come, to climb in the branches and eat the beautiful figs that grow there.

Poem for Saturday

"In a hole in the ground..." -The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm at a picnic table instead of a church pew this Good Friday evening under an A-frame covering with a steeple faintly silhouetted against golden hour amidst budding limbs of spring.  The sky is not dark, rather, its pastel blue dissolves to faint rose warmth.  No one else at the house wanted to attend a service, which helped me realize I didn't either.  So I'll sit with the avian evensong until the mosquitoes discover my perch.  Today's the first taste of summer and again I didn't notice how happy I am to relinquish the cold.

Just a few weeks past I found myself in a tomb.  It's older than the pyramids, 5,200 years to be exact, and the inner chamber is cruciform.  The ancients who built it masterfully crafted a resting place for their deceased while living outside in thatched huts.  The roof has never leaked, a credit to the engineered grooves in the structure for the rain to pass through, and with river rocks and ocean stone they made a burial mound for their dead.  The door is open with a carved monolith at the entrance displaying trinitarian spirals, serpentine waves, and diamond patterns.  This particular grave opens to the winter sunrise.  The ground follows the natural slope of the hill underneath allowing horizons to cross paths with the rolling landscape to the east.  For 17 minutes one morning every year (if it's not cloudy) the sunlight shines straight back into the cave filling the innermost chamber with a persistent glow.  They let you inside with a guided tour and simulate the dawn of that singular day.  If you rest your face on the ground in the interior you can see out the front door.  This place, along with its summer twin, open to the zenith of their season.

I've written for several years now about burial, it's the third to be exact, and never anticipated I'd find myself in a real tomb.  

I bent down to touch the edge of the light as it shone in the back of the cave, then stood, crouching only briefly again to exit the hole in the ground.  

Outside there were birds and full sun (on an island that rarely sees any) a few old stones and just across the hedge, a small pasture with a flock of lambs.  

We left.  And I wrote this poem: "Faith"

Covered up
Rocks kept out fresh water
The door will let the light in
Uphill
In a straight line

These solstice fathers could not see
spring's daughter with a harvest love

They built a tomb
It's beautiful

and empty

"Already it is starting, the getting better." -A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

Beyond

"You know who you are." -from the film Moana, lyrics by Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda

You told me not to post any pictures, because it would make you upset.  I should have realized then, that you were not my friend.  And I wish I'd known later, when you said as much out loud, that it didn't make me any less yours.  Fidelity is the invisible sister to betrayal.

I think I understand now what horizons tell you and why the image is haunting.  They whisper a secret you long to hear but have never stepped out of the boat to discover.  There's too much space and not enough boundaries.

I know the feeling.  When I was a little girl, I used to be frightened by photos of stars taken from outside the earth.  It was as if the atmosphere of my heart was uncovered and I didn't know if I would survive without the pressure.  These weightless glimpses offered euphoria borderline to fear and I couldn't decipher which to believe.

It is odd, one needs a unknown strength to hold infinite space where there is not even breath between us.  What happened is, but might not, matter as we witness the light of the other piercing a void of darkness.

Nothing can separate us; it does, and yet revolution continues in an empyreal system.  Another time around the sun may allow enough breaking of the dawn to crack stone; making belief where there is room.  Here is more space at a broken table than the one you continue to clear and set.  It is not the people that you believe are unhealthy, but what you're consuming.  Making rules to guard eventualities of heartache or harm all the while denying your desire to live.  You said you'd grown up, but don't you know an aging star eventually collapses inward?  The light you're so desperate to give will eventually swallow you whole, as you stay in a place of security where even the photograph of a dream is too much to look upon.  

What if I told you I found what you didn't know you were looking for, beyond the laws of nature we so diligently lived by?

To begin, speak your fears.  Tell the truth.  To the mirror, to your friends, to your lover, to your sisters and brothers, to your husband and your wife, perhaps even to the stranger in the street.

Some will accept.  Another will question.  Most choose unbelief and a few will receive you.  The one you least expect may reject you.  It is in that moment, as your soul falls unsupported, you will hit the ground.  Hard.  On hands and knees like a woman about to give birth.  You will push and the earth will push back.

When you collapse through the scaffolding of a tower of safety you never wanted to build, and find in the dust that it is you.  The real you is still there and the only thing that mattered and was truly alive.  Well.  Then, you let go.  And get up.  Feeling a love so big and wide your heart must keep breathing open to hold it all.  In this space your dance becomes one that is not of survival but with the others you told your self to reject.  We have learned to go barefoot amongst all the shoes that dropped and kick them off the edge of a world constructed without permission.

There's an open invitation to a place beyond belief.

"And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty." -CS Lewis, from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe