Grin Reaper (JOK)

From the Journals of the Kirk: Today the sun presses at the morning and through the trees like cheese pressed through a grater …

I think for a moment what would be, if the light didn’t bend .. or I guess, if the sun wasn’t so big that it should hone down a shadow like a cone. Could it be that for one brief moment that the tree hit by the sun on the rising plane should send a dark void that would sail out with total black like a silhouette launched forever and the grass stretched high should cast a total black that would leave each blade behind in total dark.

Today I think of the sun on the world as a sickle. A blade pressed like a plow to the earth and parting the skin with a swell.

Here I am. My camera set. It will catch the first hint of dawn as it makes the sycamore to be like a shaft of rhubarb. I know.. For I have seen it, in the sierra Club Calendars, that most of our pictures are taken now, or at the closing fade for the glorious lessening of light. So is the sun with me now, reaping a volley of shutter clicks? Here the line is not set against so much that is great. The line reaches up from here into Kansas and I guess into Nebraska and the Dakotas . Is some photographer with me catching pink on the four heads of stone? And soon to hit the greater stone works of the west. Will the shutters start clicking with me or behind as the sun pours through the arches and pools. Everyday, a harvest of clicks.

and so much more.

Here is the sun reaping coffee and alarm bells. The bells ring around the world in a creeping line. A thin din some hours before the sun a rising like a mad avalanche of bell ringers. And Dear! A wave of bad breath as we rise!

Or even before. Here is the pulling on the teats of cows. Milk squeezed into the world before the sun and swelling around the world each day. Or the reaping of the rooster crow.

Maybe we could make a map -- a diagram for each thing as it is in relationship to the sun. We should have a round clock map with swelling with the appropriate hours and for each activity.

We should see the swell of waking….

Here the light is catching fire, entering our eyes, rubbed open from the dark of dim dreams. The sun punching into our corporate awareness. The sun growing by the thousands each second -- pouring down the holes of our optic nerves and filling our bodies with the unthinkable light.

I see it now as a flood poring down the wormholes and then … as if the skin of the world were thin, pouring into us and lighting vast inner caverns. Each man is a cavern taking in and making bit the sun.

I think too of the prayers.

Pastor Bob said that Charles Wesley said something like this: I have so much to do today, that I can not think about starting until I have spent two or three hours in prayer!"

Now how's that for a way to greet the sun! I rise with a whisper of thanks but the prayers come hard. I rise already distracted, but how many better souls are out there. How many better souls to put time before the reaping of the day. Ha …. Now a map for prayer intensity. Have we cooled a bit in the last centuries? Or do the sisters of Mercy greet each day with a bonfire of prayer in India . Or is it now that these Continental States that once lifted prayer like a volcano now smolder with the coming of sun. Has the fire shifted? Will they greet the day with Alleluia in Bolivia or Seoul ? Is the light of God brighter than the light of Sun poured out into some waking eyes?

I see it with my mind. The rotating earth, prayers lifted up in a chorus or swell.

And then there are Sundays. Give or take some hours for differences in start time, but about 10Am in most places … prayers lifted up along the longitude and rising like a din. Given the sweep of Mexico and South America Below, we should be doing pretty well against our line.