“Life is a mosaic, made up of small pieces of human experience common to us all but lived uniquely by each one of us”
This comes from a beautiful and profound book written by Joan Chittester called “There is a Season“.
She inspired me to understand the sequences of life’s experience in a new way, and I wrote this:
~
Journeying from one season
To another,
~
Soul travels
The way of life,
~
Changing
Its inner colours
~
Like the flowers,
Like the leaves.
~
Her book is a series of meditations on an amazing piece of artwork created by John August Swanson, which you can view here.
The work is based on words from The Book of Ecclesiastes, which is sometimes seen as a gloomy text, but Chittester manages to find inspiration time and time again. Even feath and failure can lead to life, she says, which inspired this:
~
Failure
Made a new beginning
~
In loss
I found a living way
~
Death was a gate
To wisdom and hope
~
Life comes from somewhere
Again and again and again.
~
She goes on to write about the wonders of joy, which inspired the last two pieces of my poetry I will include in this post.
~
Joy
is a taste of the timeless
~
Flying
into the present
~
Sent
from mystery
~
Whose destination’s
unknown
~
Whose moment
is ecstasy
~
A flapping
of wings
~
And then
joy has flown.
Joys fly to us
like the angels
~
But if we close
our minds
~
They sing
for a while
~
Then hasten
away.
Flowering Poverello 