This wild and precious life

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver

As I watch the morning sun pour through the curtains of my room in this beautiful Vermont farmhouse this morning, this phrase from Mary Oliver keeps haunting me.

I suspect my senses are colored by today's readings in John O'Donohue's Anam Cara, which resonate with wonderful sentences like "the body is suffused with wild and vital divinity" and "We are no longer in exile from the wonderful harvest of divinity that is always secretly gathering within us."

I have loved living in the Pacific Northwest these last twenty years, but there is a golden quality to the light here that seems to suffuse the landscape with a depth and vitality that I've been missing. But then, there's also a magical quality to this house that lends its own energy to the experience.

It's a traditional New England home, rambling and gracious, with hardwood floors and painted moldings, wallpapered walls and curtained windows, glass doorknobs, beadboard wainscoting, throw rugs and multi-paned windows and stone lions at the gates. The rolling lawns are dappled with sunshine and red barns, and ancient maple trees frame the views from almost every window.

Add to that a delightful sprinkling of buddha statues and angels and you have a delicious environment that thrills and stimulates the senses and would make an ideal retreat center: it just hums with creativity. So I have to say that my soul is being wonderfully fed by the light here; I hope I can pass that sense of delight and wonder and possibility on to you!