"God comes to your window,/ all bright light and black wings,/ and (sometimes) you're just too tired to open it." – Dorianne Laux

   Fatigue is the challenge every lover faces. You have worked two shifts and want to drink in the Love at the window, but "you're just too tired to open it."

  Another transcendent poet, Mary Oliver, offers the kind of solace that may help you whenever exhaustion and fear arrive during your journey with your partner, Radical Loving Care.

   Oliver writes of Jesus with the fisherman amid the storm – how he "stood up in the boat/ and the sea lay down,/ silky and sorry."

   What a relief to those in the boat. Jesus calmed the sea for them.

   Another occasion for hunger arose as the multitudes awaited food. "Nobody knows what the soul is," Oliver writes. "It comes and goes/ like the wind over the water/ sometimes, for days,/ you don't think of it."

   It is amid your body's exhaustion that your own soul may seem far away. Where is Love's comfort hiding?

   It is then that you may forget how Jesus faced the storm, how "he rose and talked to it/ tender and luminous and demanding/ as he always was…."

   Of course, you cannot calm storms. You can only calm yourself. You can let the holy spirit touch your hands and heart. 

   Elusive as she may often seem, Love is always at your window and mine.

   Recover your soul's humility. Tap the window ajar so you can let Love heal.  

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Photograph "Man in Ocean" by erie