Unencumbered(or how to get your crown)
To wake up to the call of “Daylight in the Swamp”
To hurry knowing there is much to do, but where to start? To round the corner of the porch deck toward the smell of breakfast and have your gait paused by the nonchalance of the white egret: swoop from dead tree,, spear fish with beak, perch near wild azalea.
And just as the day before, when kayaking the river, this same egret had been the haunched guide on every river bend to reassure, “Yes though you may not realize it you’re doing fine.”(flap wings... fly ahead) “Yes this is the way though you may not see it” (hurtle on to wait at next point of uncertainty/anxiety) Yes this really is what you are seeking, stay the course.”
This minister with the white robe doesn’t shout, tremble or strike much of a cadence. Again with nonchalance listing and repeating back to you, your story:
Yes the swamp is a scary place but look how you met the snake coiled in the branch above the flood water, eye to eye. Twice.
Yes the swamp is the low point where the sadness of human sin suspends in the water before lodging in muck forever. You can not begin to see through what you float above.
Yet to be baptized/capsized in this water is to embrace all the contradictions that is life itself. Why not come up from this water drenched and cold and gasping to proclaim, “But I was once a princess!”
Rising to take your crown from the ringed gnarls of the centuries old cypress, never too old to feel the verve of yet another Springtime. Unencumbered.