The Word Made Flesh

There is something about winter that makes me tired. Barren branches, frozen dirt, a yard full of misplaced balls, benches and flower pots now exposed with no tall grass or leaves to frame them. I should go pick all of that stuff up and hide it beneath the porch but my body says "No." Even my mind lazily childes "To what end?" Winter has brought me a fine chest cold.

And this is after all the holiday season, time to relax and work puzzles. But I don't feel like it. I lie in bed with two good books, Barbara Brown Taylor's "An Altar in the World" and PD James' "The Private Patient." But as much as I believe I should use this time to enjoy some leisure reading, I keep dozing off.

For the third day in a row, my family has remarked that I do not know how to rest--not even if I wanted to. Given that I spend most of my waking hours in an office, I feel compelled to make practical use of my four-day weekend at home. I start with the immediate: groceries, laundry, cleaning the kitchen and changing the sheets on the beds.

I make phone calls to family members spread across the country, calls I've put off far too long, shoved on the backburner in favor of deadline and deadlines and more deadlines. Indeed for the past couple of days I've had this recurring dream--I have three hours to write a story and I haven't read any of the background material or completed any of the interviews and I can't find my car in the parking lot. (Never mind this dream deadline is a quadruple homicide and I actually spend most of my days writing financial stuff).

Day three: I've not done most of the things that I've put off. I've been to the post office and correctly addressed, stamped and shipped a little plastic box of jumping beans to my 5-year-old nephew in Savannah. They've been in my desk drawer for a month, though periodically I've taken them out and put them under the light to make them jump and to make sure they're still alive. I've sent off books I promised my little sister in July at which point the biography of Bonnie and Clyde was the newest thing on the market. (It may no longer be the final word on their ill-fated lives).

So now I am sitting on the back porch, trying to distract myself with Barbara Brown Taylor's book so that I do not notice the green algae hue of the ropes in the still hammock, or the wheel barrow left in the ivy, standing with a bag of wet cement from I project I don't remember now.

Here on page 46, Taylor is writing about her prayer habits and how she likens them to doing laundry:

"The socks go all in a row at the end like exclamation points. All day long, as watch the breeze toss these clothes in the wind, I imagine my prayers spinning away over the tops of the trees. This is good work, this prayer. This is good prayer, this work."

Taylor is big on the Word made flesh. In fact, I guess you could call it a theme of hers--and it's lovely.

Only sometimes the flesh isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it isn't spritely arms and busy hands plucking clean sheets from a wicker basket, the smell of fresh-turned earth from the garden pungent in prayerful nostrils.

Sometimes the Word made flesh means that those nostrils can't smell a thing. They need a cup of hot tea, some Vick's vapor rub and some unwanted time under the covers.