Love Note: Calling

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Hello Dear First U,

I hope this email finds you well.  I miss seeing you.

Today’s poem is by English poet John Fuller.  I’m drawn to it because of his message of calling.

Because of the continued pandemic or the strife due to civil unrest, perhaps some of us are feeling blank and gray, as if we have nothing to say.  Nonetheless, duty calls us to tend to relationships that have grown apart.  This could apply to any relationship, and yet my mind goes to our relationship with our brothers and sisters of color.  Duty (whose other name is justice) calls us to hear their voices in this dark hour, singing for change at a distance throughout the world, and yet outside my own door, and yours as well.

History is being made as we speak.  I’m grateful for the voice that continues to call us to us to awakeness, stirring us to reconfigure ourselves and our world towards beauty (again, whose other name is justice).   I’m grateful, too, for the work that we, as First U family members, are doing in this fight.  May we continue in our work, because this fight is a long one that will not end abruptly.  And so, may we not become distracted by things of lesser importance.

Sending love,
Lori
In this image, do you notice the large white structures of the mountains in the background, as if they are looking on from their position of power and safety at the darker individual trees in the foreground?  Ours is the call…will we remain in the background or will we come forth and join them at the river of change,  a river that reflects their inherent worth and dignity.
Calling

There, don’t you hear it too?
Something is calling, although
The day is blank and gray.

The eye fastened on nothing,
The ear undistracted
And we with nothing to say.

But still that sense of calling,
Of something seeking attention
Beyond our consciousness.

That voice in voiceless things
When they cease to be themselves,
Losing their choice and purpose.

Joining the indiscriminate
Otherness which surrounds us
At our own times of withdrawal.

It is then that the world calls us
As if to reinterpret
Or to reconfigure.

Whose is this voice? A god’s?
Surely not. It seems
To be the voice of duty

That speaks of origins
And of relationships
Between things grown apart.

And I remember the muezzin
Singing every morning
Raptly, as if for himself.

Singing in the dark hour
At a distance, over all,
And yet outside our door.

His practised lilt spoke more
Of the puzzles of night than of
The determinations of morning.

As though the light had still
To be charmed into being
And each day a reward.

The voice is much like his,
A commanding meditation
Rising from the blankness.

Of a sleeping senselessness,
Thoughtful, improbable,
But stirring us to beauty.

And like his, the voice
Links us for a while
In its reiterations

Then ends abruptly, as if
Distracted by something else
Of no great importance.

~ John Fuller ~