Everyone has her basket.

And in that basket are all the things a body gets in a lifetime:

The long legs the natural grace

The way with words or people or numbers or animals

The force field that makes money or love or ideas or children come to them first

The gene soup that makes eyes blue stomachs sturdy loins fruitful brains prodigious

Even the luck, the ponies the Kojak parking the pair of pants on sale or the person of their dreams available at the exact moment where need and want meet, even that is in the basket.

There will be days when you look down at your basket and marvel at the wonderful wonderful things inside

And there will be days when you cannot bring yourself to look at all or rather where the only place you can look is at the basket next to you and with longing.

But every day someone is looking at your basket with longing

Every day someone would trade baskets with yours sight unseen

I have been in all of those places and mostly I am grateful for the grace that forgave my foolishness

This is my basket to carry and uncover layer by layer day by day year by year

And sometimes story by story.

May your basket overflow with beautiful things of incomparable joy and wonder

And when it does not may you be visited by the same grace that sat down beside me to show me the beauty and the joy and the wonder I could not see

xxx c

Image by The Wandering Angel via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.