Ash Wednesday Threads

An Ash Wednesday thread ran through my day yesterday--you are not surprised by this sentence, if you read this blog regularly.  Some pieces of my day:

--I found bits of T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" popping up here and there.  Here are the lines that kept coming back to me:

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance."

--Later in the day, I wrote lines of my own:

"I have seen the bones of a billion citizens
baking in a dry seabed."

--Then I wrote some pairs of rhyming words:  ash/flesh, bones/stones, rust/dust, ash/smash

--But I thought of Ash Wednesday poems I've already written and got discouraged.  Plus, there's the T.S. Eliot poem that makes me feel the "Why should I even bother?" blues.

--Later in the day, I went to church for our Ash Wednesday soup supper.  What a comfort to eat a ladle of soup, a bowl at a time, trying each pot of deliciousness.

--Each pot was delicious in its own way--a lesson for creativity.  We can't all be T.S. Eliot.

--One of the elderly snowbirds talked about her grandmother's cup and how she had misplaced it.  At first, we thought she had misplaced it in the church's mug cabinet.  We have the kind of mug cabinet where everyone stashes mugs that they don't want anymore but can't bear to throw away.

--About the same time, a critical mass of us realized that she's was talking about a more profound loss.

--Was she?  Or was she disoriented and not knowing where she was?

--But she seemed safe and with friends/family members who didn't seem concerned.  So we gave her another mug and settled down to eat the beignets that our pastor makes just before Lent each year.

At some point, maybe I'll weave all these threads together.  Or maybe they'll remain here, a collage in words of Ash Wednesday 2015.