SEASONS KEEP MOVING IN THE BUCKET

SEEING THE MOTHER-ROOTS

 Even though we may still have some hot days--the air has changed and the light will soon follow. We are coming up to the EQUINOX.
It is that brief delicate time of balance when light and dark are equal. And then we start towards more darkness until we come to the Winter Solstice in December.
Although we do not like change --we humans--we also are  ruled and are ourselves constantly changing
SEASONS OF OUR LIFE
Today when I opened up my volume of poems by the dearest of poets George Herbert, I  came upon one called  "The Flower".
I am only including two stanzas here.

  Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
     Quite under ground; as flow’rs depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
                 Where they together
                 All the hard weather,
     Dead to the world, keep house unknown

This image of a perennial flower underground  for the  harsh winter is so cosy--the  flower has gone to see  her mother  root. They keep house unknown--dead to the world. So Herbert sees the depressions and down turns in  life and  health as seasonal.  There have been times -- long  hospital and rehab stays after-- when I have felt dead to the world and the world dead to me.

  And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
     I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O, my onely Light,
                 It cannot be
                 That I am he
     On whom Thy tempests fell all night.


So I have known  the dreadful  feeling of being buried alive and then the re-discovery of my  mother and poetry and my father and his energy and gambler's elan.

I too "relish versing" again and the verses come again and I don't know  how or whence.
But I am grateful.  This is my Spring, when  I begin  waking in the earliest morning hours 3 and 4 AM with a  line or a thought in my head or a question.

IS THAT  how BOBBY SANDS  came back last week and took up a central place in my consciousness?
And I thought-- this has something to do with the mothers.

When I googled his name --Bobby Sands and recent news --I came up with  stories of his  mother's death and photos of her funeral  in January 2018 .  
So in my  over-active imagination I picture  Bobby Sands' mother  meeting with the other mothers-- including my mother. And they decide  to  intervene on earth to salvage and enhance Bobby's memory.  
Hence my night thoughts.
Now when I wake up suddenly with a thought --a line, an image, a name, I see it as a prompting of grace from the Holy Spirit. And I do not ignore it.

Here is how Herbert closes his poem--I changed my mind I am including  his third stanza--

     These are Thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flow’rs that glide;
     Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide.
                 Who would be more,
                Swelling through store,
     Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

VERY ROUGH AND PROBABLY  INADEQUATE PARAPHRASE

I find this to be a dense and difficult  conclusion. But my paraphrase would be:

these  are the mysteries of human life and they come to us from God as a sign of love.

He is showing us  by bringing us through various seasons of growth  and decline

that we are like flowers  and he has prepared a garden for us.

Can we accept that  we are small but special?  

Because in that acceptance we will find Paradise. 

 To deny or  hate the seasons will cause us to forfeit  Paradise.

Now I do not totally agree with this line of thought because I believe in Origen's teaching

of Universal Restoration .

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines ... And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.” (Isa. 26:6-8)

Today as so  often happens there was a great solace in the Epistle which seems to be Paul  instructing the  Christians in Corinth on how they should treat a Public Sinner:
"you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit can be saved on the day of the Lord," Cor 5:1-8
Even Paul seems to be preaching that souls are not made or destroyed except  by God,
I do think that the poem is telling us to accept as part of our humanity and that of all Creation: the basic experience of change as central to our becoming one with God's Will.
There is an old Universalist saying: 
GOD DID NOT MAKE SOULS TO LOSE THEM
I would add:

 HE DID MAKE THEM TO  CHANGE AND TO BECOME PERFECT.

That is our job here in what Keats famously called--
 this vale of soul making.