This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
A perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your splashing.
This is the blessing for the sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.
This is the blessing for a ripe peach
This is luck made round. Frost can nip the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus, the burrowing worm that coils in rot can blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store sell in January, those red things with the savor of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name. How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm, warm as the flank of a cow in the sun. You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
This is the blessing for a political victory
Although I shall not forget that things work in increments and epicycles and sometime leaps that half the time fall back down, let's not relinquish dancing while the music fits into our hips and bounces our heels. We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
The blessing for the return of a favorite cat, the blessing for love returned, for friends' return, for money received unexpected, the blessing for the rising of the bread, the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.
But the discipline of blessings is to taste each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor; its aroma and its use.
Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new.