Work

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Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.

Emily Dickinson

It’s official. Three years since we were to stop a plague in two weeks.

We went home. To work. Then out. With masks. We connected without touching. We worked without working. We were humans in full inhumanity.

The damage has been transcendent of our understanding. The young are bent. The working are, well, not working has they had worked. Worship is in isolation for most. Love, if not had before the break, is complicated for more. So more isolation after house arrest ended.

More people smoke weed than cigarettes. Every regular anything: shows, meals, visits, all accept irregularity, even impossibility as just what happens. We still test for the plague and act as if it’s presence is death to our days.

We have come to know our furniture. Our cooking. Our wardrobe. Our bodies. The B-Roll Flip Side of work is at home with most of us in everything we do.

Life has turned into work without a boss.

Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.

We, I, look to the obituaries every day and marvel that my life pales against those who lived fewer years. We now touch through touching screens. We know, more, the death that was always there, but have the Heaven below set away from our lives. By fear. Of what?

God’s residence is next to mine. The banal is, in fact, the sacred we do not see. Because we fear. So life becomes work to avoid hell. When Heaven is below.

Having had children, I know we are them. Told to change or die, we all changed. Not for two weeks, but for two years. The last year has come to know that death is always there, and it’s rule has never changed: We Die.

Somehow it was deemed far worse three years ago. We now know what we once knew, but we are changed. But God has not. So I am with Him more.

Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.