The Unexpected Ecclesiastic

Mother Earth

Wild Woman started out fleeing 

from churches with walls,

adrift in the world,

without rudder or ballast,

horizon or shore,

was buffeted about,

charted a course she hoped 

would improve the journey,

encountered storm, damage, 

death, betrayal, 

abandonment and shipwreck,

had absolutely everything stripped away,

emerging onshore clad only in her skin,

began again, 

and repeated this pattern 

several times over.

Somewhere through the course 

of these misadventures,

she fell deeply in love with life,

with the natural world,

and one or two million 

of its non-human creatures,

and gradually discovered

she had become an

unexpected ecclesiastic

in the Church of Mother Earth.

Posted for Shay's challenge on Fireblossom Friday over at Real Toads: to select words from her list to create a title, then write a poem to it. Of course one of the hardest words popped out at me, so I had no choice but to figure it out! This was a way-cool prompt. Cant wait to rush over and see what other poets have done with it.

Cracked Up

Kids, I have to inform you,
blow by blow,
that the earth is
completely cracked,
in case you didn't already know.

This is short but is about all I can come up with, having come across a humorous article on cracked.com by freelance writer Danny Gallagher entitled 5 Delicious Animals You Can Eat During Lent.

He writes humorously about the Catholic Church's ruling, in earlier years, that parishioners were not to eat meat on Fridays (this changed some years back). Also that in order to not overload church members with undue hardship of too much  "personal sacrifice" during Lent, (the prupose of Lent, one would think), Bishops in various locales made the following exceptions:

In the late 1600's, a monastery in France allowed the eating of puffins, as "their habitat was as much acquatic as terrestrial".

A New Orleans archbishop in this age of emails has declared the alligator an allowed exemption, considering it in this context to be a fish. Good grief.

Michigan Catholics have apparently been eating muskrats on Friday for years, since 
 a missionary in the 1800's allowed parishioners to devour them "because they didn't have much else to eat". Sounds like a good reason to me.

OMG, in the Great Canadian North, apparently our totem animal - the beaver - is allowed to be eaten during Lent, even though salmon and trout are plentiful.

This one takes the cake: In Ireland, parishioners are allowed to eat CORNED BEEF, their traditional St Patrick's Day meal, because the saint's day is in the middle of Lent.

I rest my case. It isn't the earth that is cracked. it's the people who live on it. 
Cackle.

posted for Fireblossom Friday's challenge over at Real Toads: the crack in everything. I didn't have to go far to find an example :) Thanks, Shay. Cracked is definitely familiar territory for me!