God is a day

"The day is taken by each thing and grows complete." (This was the prompt Jes and I wrote to on Sunday-- the last line of some poem, the author I do not know.)

"The day is taken by each thing and grows complete." It is an impossible sentence, like those Buddhist ones I read over and over again in high school, believing there would be an answer, believing they were like a sunset-- they would burst open with beautiful colors at some patient time, if you only stared long enough.

Life was harder then, it's true-- always staring at the world, never letting my mind rest, complete. But it was also a more promising time, for there is some indescribable comfort, and an edge of purpose, excitement, in believing there are answers. Sometime later, I figured out everyone made up their own answers, and while some were certainly more reasonable than others, there was no one agreed upon thing that could unite us all, except perhaps the looking.

So now the line is mine- to take and dissect and scrap back together again in a piecemeal mess. What does it mean to be taken and made complete? Usually the day is an empty thing, like a glass filled, and in our pouring minutes into it, it grows full. But this quote says we take it as well-- a startling box of time (stolen or given, we cannot say). And how is it the day cannot miss what we take, can grow more complete by our taking?

The only answer that comes is that the day is love, for as cliche as it sounds, that is the only other thing that, when taken, grows more complete. I suppose there are a few other mysteries that fall into this category, exhibiting properties not like most-- whose arithmetic falters and seems a foolish system. Perhaps they day is like this-- motion and light and love-- the way things move faster on a slope, each expense of speed leaving them with more, the way light grows when it shines on water, the rays not absorbed, but reflected in a splintering multitude of the infinite.

All this leads me to only one conclusion-- that we must be like a slope, a mirror, something sharp and shiny pressed against the day. That on these occasions we take from the day and let it grow because we are in some kind of symbiotic relationship with it.

But there are times when this is not the case, when the hours seem pocketed too quickly, defeated and languid against the edges of cruel clocks. There are days we take and take from, and they move slowly-- half empty and dimming, wasted, like a sled trying to go uphill, like a star shone into a black hole. There are days where we take and take, and the trees and the animals, too, and none of us grows complete, only hungrier-- all forces depleted in our desperate wanting.

I do not know how to make these days, how to make myself like a mirror and a mountain-- how to carry myself so that I always carry the light. How to live the day so that we both grow full-- the hours in my bones, my bones in the hours, drinking each other down, the way eyes drink sunsets, the way snow takes the cold. I do not know how to live each day toward mutual completeness.

That is the miracle of Nature, or-- as you say-- God.