A Deep River Year - 2017

Today is such an ordinary day here. The early morning light was soft, golden. The air was still. Crows watched peacefully from the wires in above Main Street in the center of town as I walked the dogs and admired this sweet September day. Down in Florida the day was anything but ordinary, as the remnant of a fierce hurricane rumbled northward, leaving damaged homes and displaced people in its wake. Millions were in the dark, waiting perhaps for days or weeks for the electricity to return.

This day also marks the anniversary of another day that began in ordinary fashion. September 11 is still etched in our minds for the tragic destruction that took place when airplanes commandeered by terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Our world changed that day. The way we see everything is shaded by the reminder that it all can be snatched away from us in a second. It is not just the existence of a terrorist threat that does this, of course. Our everyday fragility as human beings haunts us, a cloud hanging at the edges of our sunny lives. We walk through a mine field of accidents, illness, pain, sorrow. We clutch the people we love against the day when they, or we, will be there no more.

This ordinary morning I noticed that every telephone pole has a number on it. I suppose there is someone whose job is keeping track of all those poles and numbers, in case one falls or needs to be replaced. The old Scriptures claim that every hair on our head is numbered, too. I think that may be something of a holy exaggeration, and I hope nobody has the job of keeping track of all those hairs. But I do like to think that every one of us is as least as important as a telephone pole. Of course most all of us carry a Social Security number through our lifetime. But I trust that each person hunkered down in a Florda shelter, each man or woman who lost their life on Sept. 11, each precious one of us has somebody who calls us by name, who remembers us with a tug of joy, and who celebrates our ordinary days that are precious beyond measure.

Number

They are numbered
and kept
in some great heart:
every leaf and blade of grass,
every feather, every song,
every sunrise and raindrop,
every peculiar and ordinary day,
every kindness an act of courage,
every heart waking to wonder
or drifting to dreams,
all of them, 
every one of us,
every blessed one of us,
loved.

--Timothy Haut