"Itself Within That All, Forever Healed"
(or, talking to God in the bath, and a bit of Rilke)
*
You are every bit as loved by God as is the oak tree, said a voice. No more, no, but certainly no less.
*
The moon had just been full, eclipsed, and I was bone tired from a long day and night preparing a lecture, and an early morning up with it too, and then the giving of the lecture. Tired every time I looked out at the grief of the world I read in the news. Tired from a kind of relentless urgency in me around a novel I’m writing, the urgency I imagine of a woman in labor, only over weeks and months instead of days, like in me all the time is this long guttural push. And tired also in my heart in secret, ancient, fundamental ways too tender to write about directly.