Milking

I pulled, I yanked

squeezed hard and soft

both hands together

sometimes oned

toward the impatient pail

awaiting in silence

for some trickle as proof

that I drew milk

milk from a teat

Now those long years have past

I, growing old and grey

have learned quite late

the secret of the task:

I never, occasionally

patted her ass

*I am a joyful sinner.  I am not the first nor am I the last but I am a joyful sinner.

*We raise children to let them go.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the noblest ideas that men have had - ideas about love and freedom and justice - have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for foolish ends.  Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.

  -The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only...the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal.  But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and our imagination - if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next -  what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hand of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.  This is what the stories about Jesus' coming back to life means, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men can kill him.

  -If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.