From the forest branches fading
birdsong offered
Self-sacrifice to a huge silence.
Dark formlessness settled over all
diversity
Of land and water.As shadows, as particles,
my body
Fused with endless night.I came to rest
At the altar of the stars.Alone, amazed,
I stared
Upwards with hands clasped and said,
"Sun, you have removed
Your rays: show now your loveliest,
kindlier form
That I may see the Person who dwells in
me as in you."
Gardens are spaces of inhabiting in which we are entrusted with the very continuity of life itself. Our job is not to oversee or control, but to plant, prune, water, feed and encourage growth. We either make of the garden a verdant refreshing oasis or a desert, stripped of nutrients and barren of new life.
Peacemaking is a call that has been discerned when our garden's ripeness shows that we have learned that we inhabit one great garden, our earth, when we have learned that we are but one interwoven fabric of created life charged with mutual and tender cultivation by the One who gave and gives us life.