Something About The Joy

My craft is small, my vessel weak, not fit for ocean gale. Yet here I rush, into the deep, where wind and waves assail. The swells are high, the troughs are deep, their darkness swallows me. Yet blindly, fiercely on I sail, thrust forward, helplessly. What whim or fancy guides my fate? What sure & steady will? One lifts me up; one thrusts me forth, and I am floating still. What purpose drives the raging sea against my bark so small? What sighing wind speaks earnestly of hope despite it all,  A s if a portal just ahead, lies safe & full of light, Awaiting, through the raging storm, my exit from the night? f or my dear friends, Sif Kadak and Alayne Adams 💗

Sometime in the winter of 1966,  at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff I'm leaning into the icy wind, pushing forward, straining to put one foot in front of the other, sniffing and covering my stuffy nose with a gloved hand to keep it from freezing and falling off. My dorm is at the edge of campus, about as far away from my secretarial job in the Philosophy Department as it can get. It's only a ten-minute walk, but in this weather it seems longer. It seems impossibly long. I try to focus on the warmth I'll find inside at the end of the trek, but, caught up in the present external reality of the freezing snow whirling in my face, I am internally embroiled in the One Great, Universal, philosophical debate of the ages: If God is so good, why does He allow suffering in the world? I don't want to be doing this. I'm fresh out of the school infirmary where I spent a week being poked with needles twice a day, pumped full of heavy a