My hen, Rocky, was a prize fighter in the hen pen dust bowl. I organized a pen for my four hens last year- under, around, and next to – a large hemlock tree where I lived on Old Wendell Road in Northfield, Massachusetts.

I never learned much at home growing up, or did projects like that. I did learn, however, that daffodils are quite beautiful in the spring. I remember one day sitting in warm grass as a tiny child, next to a rock wall border that surrounded a bed, where my mother’s dogwood tree grew.

The dogwood tree had graceful limbs which reached pleasantly to the sky- like a work of art 🤔 Or, those Chinese style, two dimensional-looking paintings that Van Gogh styled his dogwood tree painting after.

What I saw that day was was more beautiful than Von Gogh’s dogwood blossoms. If one can believe such a thing is possible.

I was a tiny child, probably a baby who could barely walk. The light around me glowed with peachy-rose colored, speckled light. Green grass glimmered like an emerald -only felt warm and soft like a luxurious carpet.

The sun, radiating brilliant light and warmth- felt life-giving. Nourishing, like an awesomely powerful yet gentle benefactor. I was shielded too, from it’s piercing and powerful rays by lovely blossoms of my mother’s dogwood tree.

That was not to be a long-lived experienced for their seemed to be a war in the outside world around me. I have been terrified a large part of my adult life by it.

It’s hard to see and explain, how war can be invisible yet raging beneath the surface of our own beings, and our pretensions- as well as beyond what we see as the facade of reality we experience in our daily life.

Its full of pain, the war I am experiencing. It rages, it flails, it wants to do anything to escape its fate. Like a giant, powerful monster wanting to escape. But can’t. The monster is not me (I don’t think). Literally.

It’s as though the universe is ripping apart because warring realms can no longer coexist. (The realm of light I experienced as a child and the realm of this mad modern world).

I feel like I am being ripped apart, too. Like someone is tearing me out of my old existence, my old self. And, bringing me to the realm to come. The one that is winning the war- the one from whence comes Van Gogh’s dogwood blossoms! It’s a realm of light. It’s very beautiful!

Yesterday, I mentioned love being dirty meaning – it emerges in ways that are not by any means glamorous, grand, or important. Or, clean and neat. But, love gets dirty I mean to say. It does the work of reaching into this often horrifying, painful and ugly existence to free us from its corruption.

I think things are about to get dirty!