When Had My Fear Of Broken Plates

All That Paddling Around In The Alphabet Soup Of One's Childhood, Scooping Up Letters, Hoping To Arrange Them Into Enlightening Sentences That Would Explain Why Things Had Turned Out The Way They Had. It Evoked A Certain Mutiny In Me.

I Often Went To Catholic Mass Or Eucharist At The Episcopal Church, Nourished By The Symbol And Power Of This Profound Feeding Ritual. It Never Occurred To Me How Odd It Was That Women, Who Have Presided Over The Domain Of Food And Feeding For Thousands Of Years, Were Historically And Routinely Barred From Presiding Over It In A Spiritual Context. And When The Priest Held Out The Host And Said, "this Is My Body, Given For You," Not Once Did I Recognize That It Is Women In The Act Of Breastfeeding Who Most Truly Embody Those Words And Who Are Also Most Excluded From Ritually Saying Them.

Now And Then Sprays Of Rain Flew Over And Misted Our Faces. Every Time I Refused To Wipe Away The Wetness. It Made The World Seem So Alive To Me. I Couldn't Help But Envy The Way A Good Storm Got Everyone's Attention.

I Didn't Know What To Think, But What I Felt Was Magnetic And So Big It Ached Like The Moon Had Entered My Chest And Filled It Up. The Only Think I Could Compare It To Was The Feeling I Got One Time When I Walked From The Peach Stand And Saw The Sun Spreading Across The Late Afternoon, Setting The Top Of The Orchard On Fire While Darkness Collected Underneath. Silence Had Hovered Over My Head, Beauty Multiplying In The Air, The Trees So Transparent I Felt Like I Could See Through To Something Pure Inside Them. My Chest Ached Then, Too, This Very Same Way.

People In General Would Rather Die Than Forgive. It's That Hard. If God Said In Plain Language. "i'm Giving You A Choice, Forgive Or Die," A Lot Of People Would Go Ahead And Order Their Coffin.