March 19-22 (Days 25-28)
This is the seventh set of eleven posts I’m doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional in offerings of beauty. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. I will offer all of them with very little or no context.
March 19 (Day 25)
From THE COLOR PURPLE, a novel:
Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
—ALICE WALKER
March 20 (Day 26)
March 21 (Day 27)
WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
MARY OLIVER
March 22 (Day 28)
Woman in Kitchen Tying Her Hair, William Gedney (Leatherwood, Kentucky 1972)