Heading to Sewanee, poetry awaits

We are headed to the Episcopal seminary at Sewanee, Tennessee, for a few days to take a class (more on that tomorrow), and we will be back Saturday. The photo at right is from inside the chapel at Sewanee, I took it a few years back when I was there for a seminar.

We are much looking forward to a wonderful drive through places we've never seen, and NOT being in an airport. Tonight we will stay in Knoxville, and we are going to visit our friend Karen, her husband Jim, and we are especially excited to meet their Baby J, who came into this world only a few short months ago.

Those of you familiar with this blog know that Karen contributes most of the poetry here, for which I am endlessly grateful and eternally inspired. So that reminds me, we've had an awful much of church politics here lately and nowhere enough of poetry. So here, dear ones, is a recent offering from Karen...

Fire 

By Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.
So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.