Catholic Hermit Reminisces on Gift Made Four Years Ago

Hard to fathom that I had such lovely, organized, leisurely and creatively conducive hermitage back then.  Within a month from painting this for a priest friend, on a flat stone, my living conditions took a swift change in circumstance.  To think of all the projects I could willy-nilly select to do, and to have supplies at hand play with--wonderful!  

I created the little rhyme based upon my angel's leading me in a dream-vision to the stairway to heaven.  Not long after, the mystical ecstasies began at Mass.  That was over eight years ago.  So four years ago this Christmas, this was the gift I gave to the dear priest.  I think he may have thought it looked to much like a tombstone--and given the stairway to heaven mention...!  

I got a stone similar, back then, to do another.  There was a marvelously fun stone place near my little, lovely, comfortable, all-settled in, garden-planted hermitage.  Then.  But as I've mentioned, there was family pressure to move, deputy sheriff suggestion to move, and a diabolical and mentally unstable neighbor situation with my protective order to soon run out.  So move I did, and there have not been the fun, creative splurges since.  I just came across my paints recently.  Perhaps they are dried by now.

Yet today the creativity had to be put in the prayers offered while up on a ladder, scraping the old, painted newsprint from 1904 wood plank ceilings upstairs, and then hammer-loosening and pulling out oodles of tacks.  Another day will be for creatively and prayerfully installing sanded, primed tongue-in-groove ceiling wood--fresh, new--and then caulking between each groove, and painting two final top coats.  

I can ponder Mass as the stairway to heaven, and that the earth is so temporal.  I can contemplate the beauty of God such as was in the gardens that could never be replicated.  And perhaps that is the best point, the kiss of God in the situation: our journeys to God flow and progress, and the kisses God bestows and of which we kiss His Face--are never replicated, one after another.