Faith equals Wait plus Trust

1 Sunrise, late winter skunk smell turkey flock playful otter, too. The white heron a great blue, white phase, in the abandoned beaver pond. Purple clematis its long-awned achenes in globose heads spidery, fiery, extravagant fruit! To identify or classify birds by the complexity or beauty of their songs. And so what is over that ridge or hill a sink-hole, a sand dune, a steep bluff. 2 What must I do. Organize the heretofore unorganized. The rabble of unemployed child abusers. Molesters of their intimates. Are there dysfunctional bird families? Simply put, they do not survive. We have hope that everyone alive is essential, consequential. We classify and specify. The commonplace and everyday is sanctified. What happens everyday? Morning is quiet, everyone at work. Home writing, watching birds. Afternoon, kids come back from school. Evening, watch tv. Scotch and Star Trek. Captain Picard's problems eclipse ours who stayed behind. 3 Pray to Allah and maybe he will spare you when he sets the world on fire. Where or with who will I be on that day? And how many people and adventures will I find in the wind storm and rubble? I may live, but will it matter whether or not I help anyone else to live? This is no Last Judgement. Those who have learned or who still know how to live will survive. Nobody will go to hell, they will just die. There is no limbo either. Anyone who didn't find a way to be immortal is just dead. So, what am I trying to do. Organize the unemployed, the welfare mothers and alcoholics into a flying chevron of purposeful explorers? 4 The doctor's conscious, organized, naive attempt to do good, his legacy, versus the randomness of the road and the war zone. There his legacy is his rectitude and natural rough compassion for the damaged people he encounters. The difference between planning a legacy as if you knew enough to control events and letting the legacy arise from events themselves, controlling, insofar as you are able, only your own actions and reactions. The doctor's leadership role such as it was grew out of not his material possessions like the car but his mission, his personal quest to find the young doctors he had naively trained and sent into the war zone where all died. 5 July-a cold city not as great or as gritty as I thought, summer theater left the shoe shine bereft of customers eyes cold as a bureaucrat's except for our soles and their leather. Sweat-soaked girls, the beautiful ones left town. Emotionless as a bus. Sparrows, no chickadees. All that's important happens indoors. Exercise to philosophies. You get what you see. The panhandlers ask just once, won't risk friendship, justice. No sale today in the finite city where, for the shoe shine, pedestrians are infinite, times two shoes. 6 Faith = wait + trust. But don't anticipate. Popper prohibits prediction. Niebuhr expects destruction. I believe in God doesn't mean there's a sketch of a man in my head. It must mean all will be well in the end. Satisfied with snow or summer. And now with dying old or younger. Gold or paper clips. Gulps or sips. In the final resting place in the city of the dead are there all night card games and sometimes open swims? Each inch, square, or cube of Earth brim with grasses and sedges, dragonflies and spiders, sparrows and eagles. The tiger lily and the water lily and the lily of the valley, the calla lily. When a girl on a bicycle smiles, that is a smile.