Tomorrow, I leave for a 5-day painting retreat at Camp Calumet, in Freedom, New Hampshire. All evening, I’ve been packing up paints, brushes, boards, boots, mittens, warm coats, books and poetry, bits of cotton, random pieces of string I might need, masking tape, pencil sharpeners. The car is becoming a mobile studio and library. This trip has become an annual Lent pilgrimage, the drive north to the mountains through snow now a part of the expectation in this season.  This night before the retreat is one of the evenings of the year when I permit myself the luxury of perusing books of poetry, without feeling like I need to be doing anything else. It’s as if the retreat has already begun. Who will come along? Which poet this year? I find Gary Snyder’s This Present Moment; the cover depicts a snowy landscape, and just because of this, it goes in the bag–Tom Killion is the artist who designed the cover, a long-time friend and collaborator of Snyder’s. I’m quietly thrilled I will have several days to savor these poems. Sometimes a poet’s voice becomes the voice that interprets one’s life–I’ve been reading Snyder for 40 years, and he’s as present in my mind’s ear as the present moment itself.  He’s been a meditation teacher for me, just in the way of his writing.

But by tomorrow afternoon, painting will become the order of the day, this week. We will be working on an icon of St. Francis. It seems appropriate given this morning’s Gospel, to be preparing and praying about Francis this Lent, his conversations with birds and beasts, trees, water, sun, moon and stars.  I love the image of Jesus hovering over Jerusalem like a mother hen, or mother bird, calling his brood to him, gathering them under his wings (or in this case of mixed imagery, Jesus as a “her” gathering the chicks under her wings).  Francis shared that yearning. Tonight, there is a pause in the evening’s packing, a time for gathering all the parts of oneself, as a hen might gather her chicks, up into an inner shelter, a breathing in of anticipated peace, the quiet room, the laundry finishing up, everyone else already asleep.  Lent is just such a pause in a long life really, at least tonight has that feel–the pause of Holy Saturday, though it is weeks away, the pause of a mother bird, as she settles on her nest, the pause between breaths, the pause between death and life.