These are the days...

Man am I beat - but blessed! It snowed and poured sunshine three or four times today. We had a good crowd at worship and then raised nearly $7K for the CROP Walk. We sang and prayed, said farewell to a young family heading to North Carolina and met new friends, too. It was the first anniversary of my musical colleague and partner in ministry and his spouse and it was the first anniversary of my father's passing. The music for "Missa Gaia" really came together at our rehearsal after worship and we had a blast walking together throughout Pittsfield with friends from area churches and Berkshire Bank raising funds and consciousness about hunger needs. I crashed completely when the day was done and then awoke to prays for a dear friend in Brooklyn entering the hospital today for stomach surgery. I am finally over the stomach flu and now Di is suffering under its influence.

Today calls to mind not only 10,000 Maniacs by Charles Baudelaire.

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”