perspectives

Earlier in the week, I sat and drank morning coffee with my husband, who was looking out the window.

"Look at that," he mused, "How long the smoke from the neighbors' chimney lasts."

I turned to look as well, noting the wispy clouds moving and dissolving within feet of their entering the brisk outside air.

What is your life? I said to myself. A vapor... here, then gone.

All the frustrations of school/nonschool homemaking/nonhomemaking - as real and as big as they seem... aren't.

At choir, we've begun singing a song with text by the English poet Christina Rossetti called "All Flesh is Grass." More perspective. :) Here's the poem (with the line that smacked me upside the head this week):

So brief a life, and then an endless life
Or endless death;
So brief a life, then endless peace or
strife:
Whoso considereth
How man but like a flower
Or shoot of grass
Blooms an hour,
Well may sigh "Alas!"

So brief a life, and then an endless grief
Or endless joy;
So brief a life, then ruin or relief:
What solace, what annoy
Of Time needs dwelling on?
It is, it was,
It is done,
While we sigh "Alas!"

Yet saints are singing in a happy hope
Forecasting pleasure,
Bright eyes of faith enlarging all their
scope;
Saints love beyond Time's measure:
Where love is, there is bliss
That will not pass;
Where love is,
Dies away "Alas!"