The Art of Losing

If you came to this blog hoping for a meditation on the feast days of Anna and Simeon, I'll redirect you to this post on my theology blog.

Today is the 1 year anniversary of the date when I was severed from my last full-time job as a college administrator.  I have continued to teach college English classes online, so I am only underemployed, not unemployed.  I tried to claim unemployment, and the state of Florida still owes me over $2,000.00.  I am not holding out any hope that I will ever see that money.

But it could be worse.  We had just closed on our house so we have cash reserves we wouldn't have had otherwise. We got out of that house before the next hurricane.  The next hurricane hasn't happened yet, but it will.  I began my morning reading with this story in The Washington Post about people who weren't so lucky as they continue to try to recover from Hurricane Ian.

Today, I'm looking at very different weather.  I went out for a pre-dawn walk, so that I could get a walk in before the temperatures start dropping.  It was 39 degrees at 6:30, and I had hoped I might see snow.  I did not.

But I did see this door; yes, that's a holiday wreath with berries and pine cones on the door:

It made me think of a first line for a poem:  God lives in the burned out house.  Perhaps God crochets mittens to leave on the branches (too much like Emily Dickinson?), or maybe God just finds lost things to collect:

I am thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "One Art" with these stanzas that I love:  

"I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster."

I haven't mastered the art of losing yet.  I still dream of a day when all the lost mittens find their mates.