Infinite Finiteness
or
For the Sake of Argument I’ll say God
I know something about God.
So do you. And now
we know something neither of us knew
until, and because, we met.
One time, or many times, when we might have
listened to each other
tell the stories that wanted to be told
in that particular moment.
A transmission happened,
though we would not have called it that.
We might have been doing the dishes,
our hands in the water,
reading pages out loud to each other from our
Books of What God Is.
And what that old, old Redwood knows of God – the music
that has been recorded of her long, slow dance
in her Book of What God Is…
If I lean into her body, sink in until we can
listen to each other,
surrender
my story in exchange for
what small portion of hers
she may be able to impart
to one so new –
I may receive one page, perhaps, from her Book
that I can then add to all that I know
about God
so far.
And maybe one day, I open my book to that page –
just out of the blue, or so it would seem,
and that page begets a new page
called a poem –
conceived in a conjugal union of
Past and Present –
about a redwood tree
and cycles of life,
one of many that fill the Book of What God Is.
Yes, if we could lean in and
listen to each other
like we can with a Tree,
or the Wind, or the Ocean
receive each page with love,
knowing that we’re learning still more of what God is.
We’re all reporters for the Book of What God is
writing and reading
ad infinitum
“All the news without fear or favor.”
So, let’s say that poem I write gets read,
to a haphazard gathering of strangers and friends,
and one, whom I may not even know,
finds a thread in the poem
which leads to some overgrown, tangled place
in her heart. Somewhat dazed, she stares
out a window
she looks through every day,
but only now
sees
that old Valley Oak, so stalwart and reaching
out like the shelter of mothering arms. She goes outside, for she hears the tree
calling her, knows
that in this moment they can
listen to each other.
As she opens her Book to put in this page
a hundred pages spill out,
and flow past her eyes
like a river. She weeps,
tasting the tears in her Book of What God is –
the pages she’d tucked away and forgotten.
She weeps,
and all of them sing themselves back to her.
She weeps
for things she didn’t know needed weeping.
She writes a new page with
her grief, in moans, and her praise
in crazed laughter –
the kind that only comes after the prisoner
is set unexpectedly free.
Those sounds heaving up from her heart
write a crystalline code
into each teardrop falling
from her face to the earth.
And the billions of organisms
who live in the soil
made moist by her tears
receive this transmission – each of them
has a new page for their Book of What God Is.
And they tell their stories to countless others;
the tree receives her story and theirs,
multiple versions of this one multifaceted moment of God.
The pages swell.
Sparrows, ravens, hearing her cries
write their pages.
The evening sun, glancing over one shoulder,
casts a moment
that the Earth herself writes into the Book –
a moment filled with infinite moments
of beauty an
d surrender,
pages within pages,
stories within stories
making One glorious infinite Story.
God
is reading and writing,
reading and writing,
reading and writing:
I am that.
I am that.
I am that.
I am.
by Purple Hazel Green
for Marleen, and everyone else
September 6, 2015
Purple Hazel Green 