Kingfisher

This is another day, much like one which happened two years ago.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

So said the great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. This latter half of this poem kept running through my head this morning. It is easy for one man to wound another with a knife; it is easy to listen to what you want to hear rather than what is. All parties in an affray are to blame, but the one in the hospital with a drip vainly feeding into his arm - that one is the one whose mother will mourn.

It's a kind of deja vu for me to be going through the same route. Divestment of powers, the removal of the things of earth which I cannot change, which I lost heart in the changing of, which I cannot be trusted to handle. I am become Bombadil, to whom the Ring could not be entrusted.

A failure, again. And yet, a failure who is owned by no man.