Sext is the prayer at high noon in the liturgical cycle, or six hours after the first prayer of the day. And this poem too is a prayer at high noon, a poem at midlife. The summer of our lives has already brought the death of so much that is momentary, cyclic, and tender. We may seem to have lost the miracle years of birth and of youth, when the mystery of the unborn still freely penetrated into our lives, when the freshness of each new thing called through the veil of our worldliness, offering us one last chance to remember who we really are before getting lost in the play; before that fluid voice, the “call” that lives in all things, takes on the apparent mantle of solid and separate and alien thingness. The Goddess, awake and trembling, out of pure love for our drunken and forgetful existence, is willing to be captured in sheer form.
So spring totters momentarily on the brink in its vulnerable lilac ecstasy, as its new shoots and delicate green give way to the sturdy and fully embodied business of summer. And our lives take on the same solidity, now fully identified with the drama and the meanings we have come to assign to ourselves. Our only reminder of what is lost is our own nostalgia for something we can’t quite place; that keeps us looking backward or forward to that “lost moment,” never again beheld. And yet …
The secret is that we have never lost this timeless moment of creation and mystery; we have never left it behind. We are always living it, right into the dream of summer and fall. It is the very Dreamer. We are the freshness of morning playing out our role as high noon, later as dusk. We are the moment of birth, peering out of the eyes of a fading old man. We are springtime, dreaming its way through summer; dreaming its way into the fruiting of our own fields; into the unfoldment of all cause and consequence; into the blessing we may leave behind as our individual fruiting falls and seeds another time; into the voices of the scythes that tell us: this summer is done. We are death and rebirth.
In all of this there sleeps the glorious story of who we really are; of what is at play here in the fields of the Lord. We are always at play, a play that engages and demands all the heartfelt intention and seriousness of our life. And now, as we awaken, we are free to play with all the affirmation of our being.