No way to avoid it, no way to side step or roll around it. Life has its moments of mud, moments of muck, some of which rotate and alternate, receding to reveal brilliance; some of which last and linger, obscuring all the good stuff for longer than is kind.

How might we live into the gratitude woven into the brilliant irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut, who riffs on the origin story that we humans were once mundane mud made conscious. Yet ~ and here’s the kicker ~ among all the vast amounts of mud, we are the mud that got to sit up and look around. How do we acknowledge our great fortune? How might we spend all our days ~ or at least more of them than not ~ singing how lucky we are! Even with shadows and muck, heartbreak and pain, how can we not love everything we see? Or at least try?

What if, when we cannot find our way to love everything we see, when we are spending too much time in trenches of shadows ~ what if ~ we practice how to move, perhaps even pull each other through salt and mud because that is the only and best option? How might we become the people, each of us, but more so, all of us as a united community, who become what the poet Marge Piercy describes as “straining in the mud and the muck to move things forward, [to] do what has to be done, again and again.”

How might we reach out, to the ones we already know and love, and to the ones we come to encounter on our journeys, being a reminder to each other that before spring becomes beautiful, it is nothing but mud and muck – and so might it be true for the hard times in our lives.

It is good we gather. It is good we gather together. It is good we gather together for this time of raising up that which is worthy of our attention.