The hidden labours

the hidden labours

Anxiety
Anger
Accountability
Prayer
Patience
Love
Learning
Letting go
Grace
Grit
Grief
Forbearance
Forgiveness

Holding tenaciously to sanity
Telling hard truths to self
Resisting easy evils
Pursuing and puzzling the way through to justice

Rewiring the circuits of care and compassion in the cold cold dark when the fuse has blown

Restringing the heart’s guitar when the nickel is worn and untuneable and so silence holds out against songs for a long bitter hour

Stripping back and sanding the gathering table in the basement –  it takes weeks before a meal can be hosted again

Slow small point by point stitching of scraps of warmth and hope into a new blanket – perhaps ready by winter?

These are the invisible tasks
unseen exhaustions
subterranean toils
worthy labours
for which there are no awards
or grades or applause
or polls or honourable mentions

The soul is a sweat shop
dingy dusty
pittance pay
no job security
survival
or yet living
liminal

moment to moment
hand to mouth
earth to breath
rib to flesh

Oh grubby hands of God
knuckle gnarled
stubby thumbed
invisibly
making ever-loved
forms of life
apprentice me
to your
covert craft