Biology: Course Review
If you forget what axons do,
or how a virus invades a cell,
remember this—
that light becomes food.
That the seasons rhyme,
a different word each time
turning soil into living song.
That all things work together.
Even death. Even decay.
That this is the way
of the world we got: what is given
grows by grace and care
and knows what it needs.
That life is strong, and precarious,
full of devices and desires.
That what we hold in common
may not be owned. Control
is costly. Close attention
is the reverence due
whatever lives and moves,
mutant and quick and clever.
That our neighbors—
the plankton, the white pine,
the busy nematodes–
serve us best
in reciprocal gratitude:
what they receive, they give.
The way the heart accepts
what the vein delivers and sends it on,
again. Again.
(see at http://www.christiancentury.org/search/node/McEntyre%20Biology)
The world for which you have been so carefully prepared
is being taken away from you
by the grace of God.
– Bruggeman –
Birth keeps happening.
Small empty hands curl
around our hopes and hold
us captive. A child’s needs
are gifts. We learn again what
can be taught only from the cradle—
pure pleasure in the body’s
many miracles, full-bellied
laughter over falling things.
Small spaces in the heart open
wider as we linger, putting off
what seemed to matter more.
Death keeps happening, too:
Fires burn a path through
tended gardens and offices
where good stewards sat at work,
unaware that every page would feed
an hour’s ravenous flames.
A young man’s body is wracked
with disease. Another’s, crushed
between metal and slick road.
Fierce as the love that lets us
live to see such loss is the hunger
for life it leaves behind.
Before the backward glance
a new landscape stretches, newly
familiar. That was then—
now is a place of decisions
we do not need to make in fear
or haste. What we know
is sufficient for the day. We
speak the words at hand, water
the plants and watch
for small birds in the sycamore tree.
Grace keeps happening. Old friends
invite us, and new ones. We listen
for summonings, subtler now
than when every morning’s alarm
set us on a known path.
The call of the moment takes us by surprise.
Every assent resets our course:
Begin now. And now. Begin again.