Day-blind stars waiting with their light

I was walking around taking pictures of how the sun came into my house the other day, and I snapped this one of our kitchen windowsill, which is growing quite crowded. My son-in-law gave me that orange pitcher to hold flowers, because when he brought me blooms I could never find a vase. My mother gifted me that mortar and pestle made of Jamaican lignum vitae, and the gracious-like-her coasters that sit under it. My niece Dani gave me the plant for my last birthday, assuring me that it was resilient and needed hardly any care. And to hold the sorrel he made last Christmas, my husband picked up those capped bottles that harness the light just so. 

I woke up yesterday with a red rash on my cheeks, and at first couldn't figure out what I'd done to bring it on. Then I remembered I'd swiped a clear liquid over my disappearing eyebrows the day before, morning and evening as instructed, to coax them to grow. It was the only thing that could have accounted for the red flush seemingly out of nowhere. I texted my daughter to tell her about it. Send me a picture, she said, so I turned to the window and smized. The red flush is there, but I'm intrigued that it looks like I applied blush to my cheeks, and this morning, I am still wearing it, despite abandoning the clear liquid promise of thicker eyebrow and vigorously scrubbing my skin.  Also, yikes, my gray sure has grown in. Even so, that window, too, gives good light.

In the face of everything going on, including the very troubling news of boy engineers hacking into the government's Treasury Department, giving them control of social security payments, tax refunds, medicaid payments, federal salaries, program grants, and more, I thought I would share this gorgeous offering from Wendell Berry. I'm fairly sure I've posted it before, and that many of you already know this poem, but every line is so perfect for these times, so I'm sharing it again. I want to be able to find it easily when I need to be reminded there is peace all around us, if we remember to look.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me 

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought 

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.