Octogenarian
On becoming an octogenarian on May 27 2015 I wrote a terse account of each of eight decades of one life in New Zealand, with appended poems. Four years later I’ve updated the document with some added notes on the shifting context of life in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
EIGHT DECADES
Boyd Wilson (b.27.5.1935)
1930s
Slump time; twilight of The Great Depression. .
Struggling rural couple yet make joyous love for free.
One cheeky tadpole wins upstream race, he + egg = me.
Birthed into a tiny cell within an undreamed universe: Mum, Dad,
older sister, occasional visits by relatives, neighbours.
Another couple of transit homes.
Then Dad scores State job, State house, new city suburb.
Secure in family bubble as NZ’s first Labour government insists on egalitarian values.
Man-talk overheard of yellow peril, bloody commo’s, shylock Jews,
(social deafness to truths in Germany), hapless horries:
just talk, no one knows any (well, mates are exempt).
Neighbours, local shopkeepers, grandparents, aunts,
uncles, cousins mark the boundaries of this small life.
Half a planet away, war looms again.
Remote but it’s about Empire, righteousness. Mother Country, right?
1940s’
School. No big deal. “A quiet one, they said; “deep?”
Not really, just quiet, stubborn, average is default setting.
Dad called into army reserves, then off to fight deadly Hun and bloody Ities.
A third conception just before sailing; a squalling baby brother.
Hard times for Mum, scrimping, verging on breakdown, getting by with help from neighbours and wider family.
Sunday school. So reckoned the red bits on the world map and the Kingdom of God were much the same.
Gentle Jesus’ meekness and mildness has limits in wartime culture. Yellow peril looms. Bomb shelters in downtown Dunedin, geriatric Home Guardsmen check blacked out windows, rationing.
Life wanders on. War news improves (not in Dresden or Hiroshima). VE and VJ days.
With Mum, sister, baby brother, jostle in crowd at railway station. Hordes of kitbag-lugging men in khaki spill out, as differentiated as a big mob of sheep. One turns out to be Dad.
He resumes work helping returned servicemen get farms, away a lot.
Time for High School at twelve. “You’ve farming in your blood, Son.” So off commuting to a District High offering Agricultural Science, Horticultural Science, General Science, English (little else).
Mates all elsewhere. Steadfastly do enough to be OK.
Dad’s brother suggests he and Dad buy Wanaka’s old general store in partnership. Parents’ hometown beckons. They go before end of school year leaving me, at 15, with distant relative until I join them after exams.
1950s
Find simple jobs on farms in Wanaka district.
Sleep in little huts. Paternal advice: three daily things to keep healthy; wash socks in the creek, move bowels, rub dubbin into new boots.
Begin learning to listen to land. Moments of awe. Also pain, sweat.
Become moderately useful. Rugby, beer, hanging around with most of the lads at back of the hall on dance night while girls not spoken for sit together trying to look demure and aunties’ eagle eyes watch for hanky-panky.
People still remember when most were poor so have yet to diverge into separated blocs of those who reckon, on grounds of what’s measureable in money and who you know, that they matter and blocs of those who reckon on the same grounds that they don’t. The Cold War’s nuclear threat accelerates the trend of social vision to shrink from generations to months and years. Confusing strife in Korea, then Vietnam.
Learn on successive farms that flesh weaker than spirit. But affinity to land remains. Gain skills, bits of knowledge, beginning of wisdom. Flake-outs, hospital as semi-lab-rat swallowing drugs, ECT and shame. Try again. Retreat to parents’ home to succeed self-employed in garden maintenance, landscaping, a bit of market garden. Continue distance learning.
Apply for and get a job as a Department of Agriculture Livestock Instructor. Begin in Invercargill. Surprised to excel in in-service training.
1960s
Work goes well. Transfer to sole charge in Winton, 1960. Board with recently widowed Edna Farrant and family.
Hear of eldest daughter, charge Theatre Sister, Balclutha Hospital. Lesley turns up a month or two later. Romantic floodgates don’t burst wildly at first. During her subsequent visits there is communication at a depth of friendship rare in my life. Love germinates, deepens.
Engagement announced February 1961; married to applause of families and friends August 19 that year; make our home in a Department of Agriculture staff house in Otautau from where my work covers farms and farmers over a big swathe of Western Southland.
Lovemaking soon and easily takes flesh: Bonnie Tim born June 3 1962; bright Phil July 1 the following year; thoughtful Aaron November 1 1965.
I’ve found in Lesley a Christian faith deeper and livelier than the staid Anglicanism so disconnected with awe encountered in the life of land and in the holiness of deepening human love. We grow together, involved in local church. I start reading authors who inspire, challenge, question, offering no trite answers to ultimate questions but confirming that the road for me is earthed and Christological. Life’s not all serious. Lesley and I enjoy much social fun and good experience in Jaycees of whom I’m local inaugural president
Meanwhile, I’ve had work published in the NZ Journal of Agriculture and had talks broadcast on regional radio. My job has become more about endlessly repeated technical procedures with livestock; less scope for imagination and communication. The Southland Times advertises the post of Agricultural Editor. I apply, talk the offered salary up. We buy a home for the first time: 8100 pounds for a solid three-bedroom on an acre, mostly of native bush, at Otatara, Invercargill.
Most newspapers then employed on their farm desks general journalists who strung and pasted whatever turned up to fill the columns. I, on the other hand, have land in my bones, am of the farming community, talk and write its language. So no great plaudits are due to my early success. Readership and related advertising grow; top national prize for economic journalism follows in 1967.
I was, though, developing a tendency to work too hard and too long.
Each of our small boys is a unique joy.
Lesley, pregnant again, becomes exceptionally unwell. Hospital medics fear we’ll lose her until one recognizes thyrotoxicosis. After lifesaving surgery she goes into premature labour on June 7, 1968. I hover outside the theatre until called in to find a 1kg creature resembling a new-born rabbit just pulled from its nest. Medics first give it no chance. Prayer and baptism on the run. Babe lives an hour, a day, a week in its incubator. Hope grows. Mark comes home at nine weeks. Blindness is soon confirmed; no less another wonderful gift in the family.
Life goes on. Tim and Phil at school, Aaron about to start.
Affluent lifestyle becomes more prevalent in society than in any previous generation. Consumption capacity derived from money seemingly flowing from unearthed realities is expected to grow more and more for ever. Meanwhile, the land is coming under increasing pressure. Our young, shallow soils do not grow in response to market demand. Nor does the supply of fresh water. Science, technology and plain old grassroots husbandry achieve much but higher output is also driven by higher costs. The people of the land, too, are stressed as the farming workload per family and labour unit is forced to rise. Much of the output is still marketed as low-cost bulk commodities as in the old colonial days.
Society’s common vision shortens further.
Population movement from rural to urban homes and lifestyle, particularly among Maori, and a big influx of Pasifika families seeking factory jobs changes the nature of both country and town.
1970s
A friend arranges a meeting with the editor of the venerable, independent, New Zealand Farmer magazine, part of the Auckland-based NZ News publishing stable. I’m offered a job, covering as feature writer the whole of the South Island and the lower half of the North from Palmerston North.
A possible move later to Auckland is mentioned. We’re aware that Mark must eventually go to residential school for the blind in Auckland – so far for a small child from Invercargill.
We uproot and move late in 1970. Again, my work goes well – more awards, elected to full membership of the Institute of Agricultural Science despite scant formal education, magazine readership grows in the regions I cover. First overseas assignments: Australia; UK and Europe as the EC impact on New Zealand’s primary markets hits home.
Family life is happy. Lesley becomes pregnant yet again, hoping for a girl. Instead, Michael arrives impossibly premature, breathes a while before dying. Neither of us was offered a chance to see him. Undertaker, a curate and I carry the little white box to be buried while Lesley remains in hospital. Today’s care resources for those experiencing perinatal death were not even a dream. I, a bloke from the “be-brave-move-forward” world, neither grieved healthily nor was there with Lesley in needful ways. The shame and grief remain repressed until, together, we visit Kelvin Grove cemetery and Michael’s plaque 30 years later.
However, there is indeed joy in the morning. On October 26, 1972 a girl for our family, Emma, is born in the same Palmerston North hospital. Healing, gifted delight in the whole family! Happy times.
I fly with Mark (5) to Auckland, abandon him, as we must, to the care of Homai College for the Blind staff. Guess we’ll never know how hard that is for Mark. For me, flying home alone, it is as hard as it gets. He comes home at holidays, and we are able to visit. Then, in 1974, we move to Weymouth, South Auckland, where Mark can be a day pupil. I am variously senior feature writer and deputy to the editor, commuting to the office in Auckland’s CBD. The other boys adapt to new schools and life in the most multicultural society they’ve experienced.
The oil shocks come as reminder that the planet’s base resources are finite and that nations and cultures once prey to colonial rule can awkwardly behave like Western global corporates.
Women gain vastly greater freedom, ownership, of their minds and bodies than ever before.
Cost-price squeeze and acquisitiveness for land mean farms become fewer and larger, the ethos of husbandry seems to be giving way to that of industrialization.
The Waitangi Tribunal is set up in 1975.
I move onto the editorial chair, enjoy teamwork with a good staff: more mutuality than hierarchy. The magazine prospers.
We’ve retained church involvement. I do some worship and preaching stuff as a licensed lay minister as in our previous three parishes, continue to delve somewhat randomly into books that challenge. I grope toward the conclusion that ultimate reality to the extent realizable by us, the big-headed two-legged form of life on one planet orbiting one modest star, is earthed, natural, infinitely beyond trite definition but personally approachable via the current event of Christ. [I fumble, aware that the kernel of the answer to the big question is so devastatingly simple that my words, and all words, are at least as likely to obfuscate as illuminate]. The superficial church, like all institutions, witnesses mostly to its own drive for self-justification, talking around the incarnate mystery but not convincingly walking the talk. The charismatic renewal surge of the time touches, excites, luckily in a catholic (i.e. holding that incarnate holiness embraces everyone and everything, as distinct from insistence on the dualisms of saved/unsaved and supernatural good/evil conflict) form. There have been since Otautau days occasional god-niggles suggesting a more radical personal response. The church is moving haltingly in areas like equality of women in ministry and training of people to live out an ordained ministry as self-supporting “worker priests” not only lending a hand in churchy life but, more particularly, being a visibly vulnerable presence in the loved world beyond the bounds of religiosity. I commence the diocesan training programme.
Emma starts school.
Tim is first to flit the nest. He realises his dream by gaining a cadetship with a British merchant shipping company. I deposit him, before his 17th birthday, into a great, grey container ship in Wellington. He is to become a master mariner.
We (well, the family moves while I sojourn as a studying guest of West Germany) a short distance to a more expansive family home at Takanini.
1980s
Might the ultimate accountability of priesthood (albeit of a worker-priest) come into conflict with the accountability of an editor to the magazine’s readership? Wondering, I move gently toward a rearrangement of work commitment. The audited net paid circulation has risen from 23,500 to over 32,000 during my incumbency, so I’ll be stepping aside at a time of strength. Journalism continues to be good work in an era before truths were as filtered and corrupted through screens of spin-doctoring (often by public servants) and issues were addressed more by a public rather than an individualistic, apathetic and cynical consciousness than today. I become editor emeritus of the Farmer, feature-writing and being available as consultant, working from home. That leads to self-employment, with a third of my contracted work continuing to be for the Farmer, a third as communication consultant (principally to the Ministry of Agriculture) and a third providing the presence of a sort of church outrider in West Manurewa where thousands of families – nearly all pretty much untouched by Christianity or uncomfortable with the sort of gathered life offered at the Anglican parish mother church – have poured into a new housing area.
Meanwhile, Lesley, after all her years of superb homemaking, motherhood and hospitality, returns to her first vocation as charge night nurse at a new geriatric hospital. The coincidence of our daytime togetherness in the absence of family has a consequence: Lesley, at 46, is pregnant. We tell our GP who insists on termination. We seek a second opinion from an obstetrician who guides Lesley through to the joyful birth, on August 10, 1982, of our Liz. Her four big brothers (17 to 20 years older) and one sister (10 years older) share the delight.
I’m ordained deacon in November that year, priest a year later. Between those events I co-lead a farm management study touring party visiting the UK, Ireland and Israel before attending the World Farm Management Congress in Nairobi where I deliver a closing address. I peel off from the group in South Africa where I am guest of the Community of the Resurrection. The apartheid regime is in control. I meet activists and victims, preach through interpreters, am humble in the face such deep, optimistic faith, publish a series of articles in the Auckland Star, am both surprised and delighted later when Mandela is freed, the road to justice for all the people opened.
The tides of culture in New Zealand may still echo Post-Enlightenment but postmodern hedonism along with inequality of material wealth and of hopeful vision are surging. Politically, successive governments have failed to fully address the shift in the nation’s terms of trade dating from the oil shocks and Britain’s joining the EC. People in both suburbia and farming communities privately yearn for sustainable values, including those not measurable in money. An ordained presence both in the gathered life of the Church and out in the world is affirmed in both contexts (even with a bit of perplexity) in my case. Elsewhere, I see people called to outward-facing ministry sucked dry in the inward-facing circles of churches driven by priority for self-justifying maintenance. I share some of this with the bishop, Paul Reeves, who has understood my creation-inclusive spirituality. He challenges me to help seed a more fruitful if vulnerable style of being church from within the establishment of stipendiary ministry. I spend a year of additional study at St John’s Theological College. Then we move to the vicarage in Tuakau.
The parish straddles the Lower Waikato and includes a large, thinly populated area of North Raglan hill country. In a sequence leading to long-term confusion, cynicism and apathy in the nation’s political mandate, a government from the Right (Muldoon’s) has disastrously denied the shift in underpinning economic realities and is replaced by a government from the traditionally more interventionist Left which nevertheless espouses faith (yes, faith) in the forces of the free, unfettered forces of the market. Dismantlement of interventionist help to farming hurts in a district with many marginally economic family farms. I note that my farming know-how is seen by committed church members as a bit strange in the pastoral ministry of a parish priest but happily welcomed by the agnostic majority. There’s lingering belief that religion’s valued place in the wider culture doesn’t include people’s finances and land.
Generally, though, a parish healing from earlier hurt grows in depth and liveliness. The simple faithfulness of people enriches and encourages me. There is a lingering, mostly creative, tension between the vocation to foster a way of faith in community facing outward to a changed and changing world from deepening roots and the vocation as vicar be a pastoral presence to faithful people needing and deserving to simply be loved to death. But I am never to seriously regret the choice of ministry as a stipendiary parish priest. Worship, especially Eucharist, is where it all comes together, celebration of all that’s good in the world and wellspring of life lived by all the faithful out in it.
I learn much from Maori in a region where wounds from a sad history of pre-European conflict, the Land Wars and subsequently unjust handling of land confiscations by Pakeha authorities, with memory of abandonment by early missionaries, are evidenced in a prevalence of unexplored, unhappy behaviour among young people. The deep social memory is lived by Maori, repressed by Pakeha. The back-story bears on our family life. The boys have dispersed. Emma is 14, Liz a five-year-old at school. The family’s wellbeing has to be of first importance.
After two years of fruitful work we are called to another parish, Clevedon. This multi-centred parish is beyond the fringe of South Auckland suburbia; rural yet in touch with the mostly-urbanized culture of the nation. We’ve five happy years there. Again, there’s growth in the scattered communities of faith. We celebrate the launching of Tim’s, Phil’s and Aaron’s marriages and the growth of each in career and personhood; are thankful as Emma gets her act together at school, then tertiary education and as Liz grows in joy; watch Mark grow as he moved into a university hostel to work toward a B.Mus degree in piano performance; grieve as my Dad dies in 1987, Mum in 1989.
The October, 1987 economic crash impacts on people in a city-fringe region someone dubbed “ruburbia:” Jobs and incomes are lost against the background of enormous personal (and corporate and societal) indebtedness that had been growing out of proportion with realities of incomes and creation-rooted resources for at least a generation. Again, the common vision of people has shrunk from generations to ever-shorter spans: an upward trend of a couple of years in fickle finances is projected to keep rising exponentially forever. History, common sense and even higher education fail to prevent the blindness.
There’s a dawning renaissance of Maoritanga; so much for the general assumption in the Pakeha culture that shaped us that the first human culture, including language, of Aotearoa would be extinct by now. But the dominant Western, capitalist milieu strengthens even further, leaving many Maori feeling (and too often acting) as losers in a rat-race.
Computers become a useful tool.
1990s
I’m invited to share my style of grassroots, mutual ministry in rural context in the Dunstan Parish, Central Otago. We’re sad to cut our happy time at Clevedon short but the call to return to ancestral roots in the wonderful space and light of the South with a fresh challenge in ministry is too strong to deny. Liz (10), Mark (who has completed his degree study) and Emma (taking a gap year from teacher training) accompany us to Alexandra. Added grief as we prepare for the move when Edna, Lesley’s Mum, dies in Invercargill. Suddenly, Lesley and I are family elders!
Mark finds outlets for his talent in Alexandra and Queenstown. Emma spends time working in Queenstown before returning to Auckland. Liz falls victim to the mysterious but profoundly disabling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at the cost of much of her secondary schooling.
Lesley has blessedly never bought into the nonsense that a cleric’s spouse must stand in steadfast submission at all times at the public coalface of ministry. She has her own spiritual integrity and her own lay ministry in the church. She also rekindles her first vocation, nursing in a rest home.
Lydia, our first grandchild, is born. Later, Tim and Cushla are to be blessed also with Gabrielle and Jack; Aaron and Anne with Olivia and Leon; Phil and Moana with Finlay. Wait, there’s more!
My work is demanding and satisfying. The Anglican expression of church in Central Otago is not on top of the denominational pecking order as smugly assumed by its fence-sitting establishment elsewhere. There’s complementarity and liaison across boundaries as the cultural context of the faith continues to shift. My job is to help the parish move in the limited time of my presence toward a positive, sustainable way of being church, offering lively relevance to coming generations without being sucked dry by the institutional curse – the mistaken priority given to maintaining Victorian-colonial structures (especially the place of a fully paid and housed parish priest) over mission. There is significant growth of energy and leadership through community processes involving excellent people. There is also a rural economic downturn exacerbated by drought.
My faith-convictions gain depth, a degree of coherence and published expression during a three-month sabbatical of study and retreat. As the decade nears its end I am covering not only the Dunstan but also the mostly-moribund Maniototo – 9000 sq.km. But I can see onward-and-outward movement from the grassroots faltering, beginning to turn inward. In the wider church, a similar story is told, along with fragmentation of resourcing. The inertia is possibly as much an inevitable consequence of the shift in cultural context as of conservatism inside an institution wishing to preserve a delineated “place” of sanctuary from the world’s intrusions. I am to become old enough in 2000 for us to get by on National Superannuation. Lesley and I decide to retire in June that year to the modest Roxburgh home we have bought and are renovating.
The Internet brings enormous access to knowledge but some of its channels encourage the movement toward the “It’s-all-about-me” worldview. Critically objective journalism weakens.
New Zealand is clearly becoming a multicultural country centered in the bi-cultural Treaty.
2000 – 2009
I’m happy with building, gardening and some self-indulgent writing, pretty much immune from the need-to-be-needed disease afflicting many retired people. My work has no doubt been at least as incomplete as others’ but now I easily and gratefully let go of what’s been done and left undone.
We’ve always been careless in matters concerning money so are shocked out of our comfort zone when my brother gifts us an overseas travel package taking in Argentina, the UK, Ireland, Italy and Hong Kong. We return in time to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary with family and friends in Auckland.
Home to the simple life in Roxburgh. Then the bishop asks that I help an Invercargill parish out of difficulty for a brief time that turns out to be two years until it comes to a crunching halt with a near-death heart attack followed by a small stroke. Any latent workaholic tendency is eliminated. Under medical advice we must leave our steep Roxburgh property into which we’ve invested much care. Deciding to stay in Central Otago, we settle on a former Ministry of Works staff house in Cromwell.
We enjoy visits from and to the Auckland-based family members. Emma has completed her teaching degree, worked as a nanny overseas and in Queenstown, developed her talent in an art school and begun primary teaching in Northland. More grandchildren are born. Liz graduates as a natural health practitioner. All six children of parents whose schooling ended at age 15 now have degrees. Each has made her or his own way in life since adolescence. If we have gifted to them anything of much value beyond life and early nurture it has been the freedom to each grow in unique person-hood without imposed expectations. Family ties remain strong. We delight in each and all of our grandchildren.
2010 —
Mark suffers from a brain cancer. It is dealt with surgically with an uncertain prognosis. But he recovers well with support from us and the Queenstown community. He meets the love of his life, Emma (not to be confused with his sister Emma). We with a full complement of family and friends help celebrate their marriage. Daughter Emma, meanwhile, has been teaching in Northland. She meets Roger. Their Ava is born. Another joyous wedding. They later head to the Arab Emirates where Emma teaches and Roger practises law but will return to Northland.
I continue to occasionally strut the stuff in local churches, and to gather thoughts in writing (see other documents archived on https://earthedspirit.wordpress.com/).
We’re well beyond our prolonged late-middle-age phase and must both accept limitations. Lesley, who has remained strong while my heart and lungs misbehaved, needs major abdominal surgery that is delayed by the stretched health system until her need becomes acute. Surgery achieves the central objective at the cost of debilitating complications. Her mobility is also seriously restricted. Accepting our vulnerability we wonder whether we may be wise to make a move rather than await a crisis. We test the question by putting our Cromwell home on the market. It sells immediately. Where next? Our equity is such that we cannot buy another suitable home anywhere. So why not rent in Auckland where we can be close to most of the family? We arrive in Auckland homeless, accept the hospitality of family and quickly find a home that suits us very well. It’s our 11th home. We hope it’ll see us out.
There’s growing frequency of reminders that the human life of this country is not only multicultural but also demonstrates strengthening of non-Christian religions and of agnosticism and atheism. Christianity becomes more fragmented with a widening gap between its most conservative and its most questing and catholic expressions.
Oscar is born to Liz and Warren; our eighth grandchild and the first in whose life we’ve had such frequent involvement from birth. Delightful! Perky Iris is born in 2017, and I “tie the knot” for Warren and Liz, helping complete the sixth and last marriage launch of our offspring.
I suppose the shifting context of my lifetime has been no more remarkable than earlier periods of history (since The Enlightenment, Industrial/Agricultural Revolution and colonization of these islands for Pakeha; the origins narrative and the experience of being colonized for the Tangata Whenua; the narratives of each of the other distinct cultures in our society and of the many who claim no specific roots), but they’ve been interesting and changing times, offering much that’s positive as well as urgent challenges facing those coming after us.
My lifetime represents scarcely a flicker in the timescale of life on Earth. Yet, during this flicker, the planet’s human population has soared by about 375% and gross consumption by our species of whatever is dollar-measured has grown even faster while much of the rest of the ecology of all life is stressed to the tune of accelerated extinctions. The mantra of “sustained economic growth” central to the shortening, anxious vision of my generation must be radically revised. The cost, if there’s to be a priority for social and ecological justice, will be large.
In 2019, as I turn 84, slower and wobblier yet independent, every new day together with Lesley is a lived gratefully.
What matters? Relationships, relationships, relationships – in creation, in the ecology of all life, in friendship, in community, in marriage and family.
In the image of
(For Lesley on our 53rd wedding anniversary, 19.8.2014)
How much of the whole you do I really know; you, companion,
lover, critic, friend through all these decades of days and nights?
Maybe about as little as I know the fullness of my self, aware of
much beyond my grasp of you, yours of you, yours of me, mine of me.
There’s comfort, trust, in our routine meshing of lives, awe in
knowing yet not knowing there’s more than an ocean of mystery
in the spaces within each and in the between of us. Daily reseedings
of marriage must germinate, grow, in mutually gifted freedom to be
ant-small concelebrants of the greatest of all thanksgivings in this
indwelt creation where you and I and us are known as we are yet to
know, incomplete yet valued in the currency of the ultimate economy
where every one, every thing, is held in the palm of infinite grace.
Bread-making
Mix dry, unpromising yeast with honey, warm water.
Many one-cell critters come to bubbling, sexy life.
Add to salted flour, mix, knead-knead-knead, rest while
the lively critters each release molecules: enzymes.
How many? Uncountable but busy, each making too
little difference to measure, yet the proving is that
dough rises, becomes bread, not biscuit. Meanwhile,
one by one, each enzyme molecule is spent, job done.
That’s life. It’s plenty.
Urban Life
Around this spot on the young planet it seems
a few simple molecules acquired the possibility
of life less complicated than slime.
That was a while back (unless you’re a cosmologist):
say, thirty or so million centuries ago.
The new life’s world was water.
Well, life moves on as they say. Some of it learned
to live with land and air. There were dryings and
dunkings of this bit of Gondwana while life became
more complicated, more diverse, until after more than
99.9% of the time from its beginning until now the
first of the two-legged, big-head species came this way.
And now we live with concrete and the odd tiny patch
of mulch over weed mat over soil nearly sterile
and something called The Economy about something
called Money which seems to have nothing at all to
do with the fullness and future of life’s whole story.
Maybe just about all will be extinguished
by the blindly urbane rat-racing sprawl before a
rebirth (through water) in something like snot.
There is a meanwhile. Our tiny lives and our
children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s
within all life will occupy a mere flicker in the big time
scale, offering yet the possibility of real life abundant.
The Spirit, as always, is willing.
Choice
If I think
In the box
Of me
I am stagnant,
Anxious,
Empty.
If I think
In the free,
Holy,
Vulnerable,
Uncontrolled
Betweens of
Marriage, family,
Friendship,
Neighbourhood,
Land’s myriad life
(Including mine),
Seen and hidden,
I move, fill out
Just a bit.
Breathe easy,
Grateful to be
Incomplete
Here and now.
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