Alchemy

The peacock struts around eating things that are brightly colored: plants, insects and snakes.  

Much of what it eats is poisonous.   

May we learn to move closer to pain, invite in the Lady of Sorrows to sit it at our table, as if she were our neighbor, as if she were a weary vagabond in need of food and shelter, and we were a Spanish Mission.  

Then we might be something like the peacock, whose tail-feathers are alchemized by poison into something bright and beautiful.