linnéa

(Written in the Rockies)

Hear, on the upturned palm of the earth I am pressed into the sky. Earth lifts itself to You in great walls of stone scared by the epic passion of soil for sky.

I too am earth: clay, mineral and salt quickened by Divine Breath; and this soil that I am longs for the sky… strains to breach the burden of distance between what mortal and what is eternal.

And so… I lift myself as well.

I rise in prayer, pressing myself to heaven with the kind of fervor that rips up from me impurities with bone-jarring shock. Coarse monoliths, high and unavoidable, hoist themselves from my once unrumpled plains of serene religion … of easy, sun-drenched normalcy. These are the seismic events whose collision creates landmarks and monuments, cataclysms that scar and orient me. Plow my fallow ground from beneath so that familiar horizons burst wide with conflict and desire so hot, that shocking substances shoot from unidentified places - caverns of building pressure, fissures of scalding tension. Subterranean anguish rockets into daylight and I blink in surprise as envy, spite and sullied motives all hurl themselves up from my once placid surface. I need to be near to you Oh Father in heaven, and in lifting myself up to you I can in no way disguise the nature of my soil.

Earth that I am, tear and boil … let the torque of tectonic plates speak truths too difficult for speech. Prayer spits and arcs from me… inarticulate, deeply felt.

Yet as the air settles, Your sunrise spills on the face of these torn cliffs and escarpments; fingers of light catch the glimmer of gold. Coal and gold interweave in tangled seams of strata.