Midsummer Prayer
under the luminous sky of everlasting light
Midsummer Prayer
In midsummer, under the luminous sky of everlasting light, the laced structures of thought fall away like the filigrees of the white diaphanous dandelion turned pure white and ghostly, hovering at the edge of its own insubstantial discovery in flight. I’ll do the same, watch the shimmering dispersal of tented seeds lodge in the tangled landscape without the least discrimination. So let my own hopes escape the burning wreck of ambition, parachute through the hushed air, let them spread elsewhere, into the tangled part of life that refuses to be set straight. Herod searched for days looking for the children. The mind’s hunger for fame will hunt down all innocence. Let them find safety in the growing wild. I’ll not touch them there. from River Flow: New & Selected Poems: Revised Edition originally published in Fire in the Earth
This is how you pray when the liturgy burns down and the wildflowers move in.
David Whyte has done it again—woven a psalm for the ones who slip the noose of achievement and let the dandelion do what the dandelion knows: scatter in surrender, not in strategy.
Herod still hunts—these days in influencer metrics and nonprofit grant deadlines—but let the soul’s small seeds fall outside the gridlines.
Ambition is just anxiety in a tuxedo.
Sanity is in the tangled part of life that refuses to be set straight.
Amen and wild be it.
Herod was a surprising turn. I enjoyed that.