November 5: Looking for Blessings, Galway Kinnell, "Saint Francis and the Sow"

I do this when I feel overwhelmed.  Count my blessings.  Watch my son sleep.  Listen to my daughter sing along with the radio.  Put my arm around my wife in the middle of the night.  Remind myself that happiness is all around me.  Like a tulip bulb buried in the ground, waiting for spring.

Blessings are about possibility and hope.  It's about looking past day-to-day ugliness and finding love.

Saint Marty is feeling a little less overwhelmed this evening.  And a lot more loved.  

Saint Francis and the Sow

by:  Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Loveliness and hope