What I long for. I long for peace. I long for love. I long for equanimity. I long for the end of hunger and fear and hatred. I long so very much for safety. I long for delight in other people in other cultures in other places. I long for tranquility. I long for freedom from suffering and I long for people to be whole and to treat others with respect and kindness and to be humble in the presence of goodness. I long for us as a people who inhabit a planet together to genuinely be an us. I long for the end of wastefulness, of power, of humiliation, of anger. Oh, so much I long for the end of anger. Of division. Of hierarchies that oppress. I long for the end of lies. I long for the end of mistruth. I long for friend to be easy. I long for new to be pleasure. I long for different to be interesting and calming and fun and open and honest. I long for borders to be rivers and oceans and mountains as things to be seen from one side or another. I long for justice. I long for mercy. I long for all of these things. Mostly, I long for hope that these things are possible. Oh so much, I long for hope. I long for hope. How I long for hope. Soft hope. Fierce hope. True hope. But right now, right now, now? Hope… hop… ho… h… … are you there?

What is the thread of my life? Foremost, it has been the ever present sense of God. From childhood to teens to twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, there has always been the sense of other. Present, yet not present. Close yet distant. Loving yet cold. Something other beyond me but with great affection and care for me and my well-being in the sense that I am alive, which is a gift in and of itself. There. Here. Me, but not me. Creator. Sustainer. Modifier. Parent. Not that I am a pet, but it is the closest relationship I can express in human terms. That of a loyal presence. I can look back upon life and see that God was there, with me all the time. In good and bad, in happy and sad, in fullness and loneliness. In my thoughts. In my body. In the room. On the bike. At the beach. In the sun. With my family. On walks. At work. On the train. Car. Plane. Cooking. At breakfast. God was and is all-in-all and ever present with me.

God is the thread. And the thread is what makes me who I am. It is the purpose in my love for others it is the purpose in why I awake each day. It is wholeness. It is barrenness. It is whimsy.

But the thread is not pride. The thread is not envy. The thread is not lust. The thread is not anything that is hateful or isolating or condescending. The thread is not anything that is not life affirming or life giving or life aware. It should not succumb to worldly angers or worldly mistrusts, but sometimes I wish that it would because otherwise I am left to know it is me who does the succumbing. That is Truth. The thread is not political in the sense that it creates division. It is not religious in the sense that it creates division. It is not gender, it is not race, it is not nationality, it is not party, it is not orientation, or color, or size or language, or position, or power-over in the sense that it creates division.

The thread is wholeness. Completeness. The thread has always been here. Has always been now. The thread is. It is not a question of the thread’s existence. Or manner of being. In fact, the thread is not just my thread, but all thread. All things brought together are threaded. All things assembled, or grown or found are pulled together by thread. By weak force. By strong force. By being. Just the simple sense of being.

Of being. All around is the Creator’s mind. The architecture. The engineering. Of the universe and of every part of the universe.

Of being. Of me. Of you. Of all. The thread reminds me that it has all been put here. Created from nothing by Love itself. Incarnate. Tangible. Present. Goodness in the biggest sense in which I am almost nothing except the thread weaves me in and calls me child. Child of Love. Child of Forgiveness. Child of Mercy. Created. Created. Created to love in creation by Love. Now. This day.