I find it difficult to think about Costa Rica when my daily tasks overflow and the biggest of tasks is to find a job. Many applications and one interview later, I have nothing. Nada. Not yet. The day with its accomplishments and wastes of time sets behind me. Although I waste some time, I proudly commit most of the time to being in the present. But during the dark nights like this one I lay in bed, not sleeping as my body would like, rather I sit awake with uncertainties pumping the heart faster and faster. So no, I haven’t thought about Costa Rica lately. And indeed I feel guilty about it.
What an amazing adventure and even more than adventure, what a journey in community. The journey is a gift waiting to be shared, but I have yet to unlock that door holding the memories captive. By the time I do, I think most of my interested family and friends will have moved on to other news. The words on this blog long-forgotten by those I know and left to the occasional stumbler from the land of the internets. I know by browsing my statistics most visits are based on word searches, more specifically relating to a poem I posted well over a year ago. Still hungering for Sufi mystic Hafiz, they come.
In the moment, my life is enriched by the greening of Seattle. OK, it’s always green here. But Springtime cues the greenest season of them all. So today, even as I felt sad and stressed, I stopped to give thanks for the rain and the new life springing from everywhere. I am job-less, word-less, but not life-less.
Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic and one of my heroes, used the latin “Viriditas” (greeness) as imagery for the Divine. Here is a piece of one of her beautiful chants, with one of my recent photos of the awakening of Spring in Seattle (translated from Latin…not by me):
O viridissima virga, ave
Hail, O greenest branch,
who in the blowing gust
of the saints’ quest have come forth
when the time came
that you were in bloom along our boughs,
hail, hail to you!
for the sun’s heat sweated in you
like the fragrance of balsam.For a fair flower was flowering in you,
which gave its scent
to all the herbs
that were dryAnd these then all appeared,
full in greenness.