Pain. Paradise. Repeat.

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about what shape the next stanza in my series would take. It is to be about the Agony in the Garden, but beyond that I didn't have any very clear concept of it. (The basic framework and precise poetical form of the stanza series was given to me in a "download" during prayer, but it is left to me to flesh out those bones.) In a hypnopompic reverie, I thought of the Garden as a symbol of Paradise (my vivid mental image of the Garden is one of Eden-like beauty), but Jesus' experience there was marked by intense suffering rather than idyllic happiness. I tried out a tentative couplet on that theme but rejected it because it rhymed pain with again, an unacceptable kludge.

When I went out in the morning, I almost immediately encountered this T-shirt, on the back of the motorcyclist in front of me on the road:

I noted that 22/7 is an approximation of pi, with pain the circumference and paradise the diameter, but I think that's just noise, or at least I have not yet found in it any coherent symbolic meaning.

The stanza remains unwritten. I had hoped to get as far as the Crucifixion today, Good Friday, and do the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, but I don't think that's going to work out. Well, inspiration is not exactly known for conforming to liturgical calendars.