Knowing the PEARL OF GREAT PRICE When you see it.

A POEM BY A WONDERFUL WELSH POET.

 The Bright Field

 
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
 
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
   —R.S. Thomas

This poem amazes me. I read it  several times a day. I find it so simple and so sublime.

This poet tells us that each moment hold treasures and wonders but we pass them by.

We don't recognize the pearls of our lives when they are right before us.

I think this is one of the gifts of old age. I find myself thinking of people, friends, lovers,  even relatives that I loved but did not cherish enough.

Surely my father was one of those people.  He left us when I was just nine years sold and I sought him. I looked for him .  I went to the tracks near  us  Narraganset Raceway  and Lincoln Downs in Lincoln, Rhode Island. I even went to two bars that I knew he frequented  to play the horses and play poker.  I asked for him and I go the same answer. 

"You know.  Your Dad Norm follows the horses."

And I got this image of my father walking down a country rode following a pack of horses.

There were other amazing people-- great teachers who were Sisters of Mercy like Sister Michaeleen and Sister Audrey, and Sister Madonna  and Sister Incarnarta, and Sister Marjorie, They gave me so much and I wonder if I gave them back enough of a sense of how special they were.  They gave me my love of teaching and learning. They actually gave me my calling.

They were the pearls of great price in my life.

My mother was  God's greatest gift to me. She gave me poetry and her boundless love and good nature. She was  so loving and accepting of my two sisters and she loved them without measure.  I cannot imagine a better mother or role model. She had it all  and yet she had so little in the material world.

Another great poem by Mary Oliver that puts things

 in perspective---

 The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

PRAYER AS AN ACT OF PAYING ATTENTION.

And PAYING ATTENTION AS  THE HIGHEST FORM OF PRAYER.