Only Kindness Makes Sense Anymore

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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Kindness” in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
― Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields…
Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~Mary Oliver from “Why I Wake Early”

Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in doing kind things – in merely doing kind things? … he spent a great proportion of his time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people.

There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping. But what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.…

I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are.
How much the world needs it.
How easily it is done.
How instantaneously it acts.
How infallibly it is remembered.
~Henry Drummond from The Greatest Thing in the World

(to remind myself)

i  

Make a place to sit down.  
Sit down. Be quiet.  
You must depend upon  
affection, reading, knowledge,  
skill—more of each  
than you have—inspiration,  
work, growing older, patience,  
for patience joins time  
to eternity.

ii  

Breathe with unconditional breath  
the unconditioned air.  
Stay away from anything  
that obscures the place it is in.  
There are no unsacred places;  
there are only sacred places  
and desecrated places.  

iii  

Accept what comes from silence.  
Make the best you can of it.  
Of the little words that come  
out of the silence, like prayers  
prayed back to the one who prays,  
make a poem that does not disturb  
the silence from which it came.
~Wendell Berry from “How to Be a Poet”

I wake up discouraged by the desecration of kindness in this world.

I share here what I pluck out of each morning’s sacred silence,
sharing my thanks to God for what is astonishingly beautiful
so as not to forget each moment.

And here you are, receiving my aching heart with gentleness,
listening to what emerges from my “telling out” each morning,
so often reacting with kindness and encouragement.

That is even more astonishing to me.

Thank you for being here to see what I discover.
Thank you for sharing with others in your life.
Thank you for letting me know it makes a difference.

Welcome back, each and every day.
So happy you are here, kind souls –
the only thing that makes sense anymore.

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Come and See: Ripe for Harvest

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Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true.  I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.

They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
John 4: 31-42

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
~Wendell Berry “The Man Born to Farming” from Farming: A Handbook

My dad had a standard sign-off whenever I called my parents long-distance once a week from college.

He always said, “you know what you’re there for…”

At first I puzzled over that phrase. I knew I was in school to study and get a degree, but what was going to happen after that was still an unknown. Yet the weekly reminder was a good one. He was telling me that I was a seed sown in rich soil, and what I learned would help me grow and thrive as long as I remembered to put my roots down and drink deeply from that well of knowledge.

So it was with the Samaritan woman at the well – Jesus waited for her in the heat of the day for a reason. She was a seed sown, meant to bring others to share in the harvest of the good news she had heard.

So we too are here for a purpose. We truly need one another, to become interwoven and linked, both visibly and invisibly.

I am woven around you and you around me; together we grow and thrive when tended and — just as intended.

But more than anything, we need our Gardener.
We are sown, nurtured, grown under His care.
He knows what we are here for, and now, so do we.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together. Past posts can be found by searching “Come and See” on this blog.

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An Imaginary Mushroom Waiting

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Whenever the question comes up,
the poets all say the same thing:
the only poem we’re interested in is the next poem,
the one not written, the poem of tomorrow.

It’s a perfect answer,
which conjures up a bit of hope
and manages to place on the higher tray
of the scale of pride a gram of modesty.

But the problem is
as soon as you start to write it,
the next poem no longer is the next poem,
rather just another poem you are writing,
and the next poem has become
an imaginary mushroom waiting
in the future in a dark forest of pine needles.

And that is probably why I have lost interest
in this poem, in where it is going
or how it will manage to find a way to end.

It could droop into a reverie,
maybe shift to the doctor’s waiting room
where I am entering it into a notebook,
or circle back to that mushroom for all I care.

All I care about is the next poem,
not this current one,
which might even turn out to be my last—

the last orange on my miniature tree,
a shroud pulled over my baby grand,
the ultimate chirp of my canary,
or, how about this?
the final striped umbrella on the vacant beach of my soul?
~Billy Collins “The Next Poem”

It has been awhile since I posted my various local mushroom photos, so sharing Billy Collins’ poem about searching for the next poem to write gives me a good excuse.

After seventeen years of writing nearly daily, I sometimes run dry. Like Billy, I tend to be thinking about what comes next, rather than focusing on what is right in front of me.

I tend to forget about living in the “now” in my effort to reconcile yesterday with what I hope will happen tomorrow.

I forget that tomorrow isn’t a given and yesterday is old news already.

So I search for what otherwise might remain hidden and mysterious, hoping to find something worthy to share today.

I hope these not-so-imaginary mushrooms fill the bill, because I can’t help myself — I’m already thinking about what to write tomorrow.

instead of silly mushroom songs (and there are plenty!), here are two recent recordings I enjoyed listening to…

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Left Up to God

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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.

I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”

I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an ax—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”

bluejay photo by Josh Scholten

Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.   
~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold” found in A Hundred White Daffodils

For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.  

The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.   

The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.

Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.

As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.

It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.  

I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return.
It won’t be long.

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No Trifling Matter

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For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.
 
For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.
 
For the snub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.
 
For the scut and scat of cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
 
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch.
 
But mostly for the swinging locks
Of yellow catkins.
 
Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.
~Seamus Heaney “Planting the Alder” with an explanation of some of the poet’s poetic words here

Alder catkin,
weightless as down,
only blow it away
and all changes utterly,
and life, it appears,
is not such a trifling matter,
when nothing about it
seems merely a trifle.
…an alder catkin
lies in my palm,
and quivers, as if living..
~Yevgeny Yevtushenko from “Alder Catkin” translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin

The alder tree branches are still winter-naked as their catkins start to emerge, other-worldly in appearance.

The swinging catkins search out every breeze to spread pollen as far as possible, engaging in serious alder-production business. It’s effective, as annually our pastures fill with baby alder trees, eager to form their own dense community in the wet ground of our lowlands.

In its desire to dominate the woodlands and allergies here in the northwest, the alder catkin is nothing to trifle with. Though we don’t want a field full of them, I can’t help but admire them this time of year for their bold color and knobby texture, reminiscent of the upholstery of my family’s well-loved 1950’s davenport sofa which converted to a bed for sick kids or visiting cousins.

Another world, another life-time full of dreams…

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Restoration

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Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

A single green sprouting thing
would restore me . . .
~Jane Kenyon from “February: Thinking of Flowers”

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
~ John Macleod Campbell Crum – two stanzas from “Now the Green Blade Riseth”

…times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter–
it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring.

Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.

Our inward winters take many forms–failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them–protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance–we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in winter, the most dismaying season of all.
~Parker Palmer from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Why did “Let It Go” from the Disney movie “Frozen” resonate as a universal pop anthem some ten years ago?

Maybe we needed the call to emerge from our dormancy, to reach out in our God-given ability to overcome challenges, despite everything the outward and inward winters blow at us.

I trust, from all I’ve learned in His Word  —  I have only gone underground temporarily and will soon emerge restored in renewal.

The cold never bothered me anyway?
Yes, of course it did, but it is not the end of my story.

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Glimpsing Eden

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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home
– dear and familiar stone hearth and garden –
and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
~Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone To Talk

We all long for Eden,
and we are constantly glimpsing it:
our whole nature
at its best and least corrupted,
its gentlest and most human,
is still soaked with the sense of exile.
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air
would coil about them for a second.
Grey damp would be around them, and the sun,
a copper penny, would fade away.
The wings next to their own wings
would shade into vacancy,
until each bird was a lonely sound
in cold annihilation,
a presence after uncertain.
And there they would hang in chartless nothing,
seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom,
until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed
and the serpents writhed.
Then, in a moment of time,
they would be in the jewelled world once more:
a sea under them like turquoise
and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created,
with the dew of Eden not yet dry.
~T.H. White from The Once and Future King

The Lord your God is with you,
    the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
    but will rejoice over you with singing.
I will rescue the lame;
    I will gather the exiles.
I will give them praise and honor
    in every land where they have suffered shame.
At that time I will gather you;
    at that time I will bring you home.
Zephaniah 3: 17, 19-20

I, like everyone on this earth,
am only a sojourner,
seemingly settled, yet certainly not lasting.  
As a garden flourishes in the dew and then dies back,
so will I. 

This is exile in the wilderness
until we are taken back home.
He has sent His Son to fetch us.

Home. Really home.
A place of no fading or withering.

Each of us etched on His heart,
created in His image,
held fast in His Hand,
and led back home.


Lyrics:

The barren land around me lies
My flame is burning low
Cold and pale the winter skies
And I am far from home.
With my light that burns so dim,
Am I visible to Him?
Does He hear the fragile song of creatures here below?

He wakes the lark and bids her fly
To greet the coming spring,
Wakes our hearts and bids us rise
Then gives our spirits wing.
He speaks, and winter melts away,
Hears us when we come to pray,
Turns our nighttime into day –
Our Light, our Life, our King.

Glorious joy of summer sun,
The gentle healing rain,
Banishing our tears and sighs,
With beauty for our pain.
Earth and sky, lay glory by-
Christ the Lord is drawing nigh!
All creation, bow to Him
From whom all blessings flow!

Blows the wind, and soon will come
The autumn of the year
With its golden light of love
Still shining ever clear.
From the rising of the sun
To the place where day is done,
Peace on earth has now begun
To cast away our fear.
-Johanna Anderson, 2018

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A Thousand Thoughts

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Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee
doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting
better at chasing my mind back to the moment

so I can see the spiderwebs making hammocks
the color of the moon. My son tries to photograph
a rainbow outside the car window. It’s impossible,

of course, this wonder, the trying to hold it.
But I do what I can. I’ve stopped waiting to enjoy
the cinnamon tea. I take deeper breaths and listen

to the flutter of strings floating down from café
speakers. I don’t want to be a pilgrim of memory
anymore. I want to pop the champagne and salute

this now, and this one with soft brie, dried apricots,
and the sunset celebration another anniversary
of light while I eat fists of grapes the same shade

and sweetness of night. Congratulations, Time. Look
at you and your gorgeous minutes full of everything.
Three cheers for the temp agency that hired this

particular day, these particular clouds, this set
of honking geese migrating through it. I want to be
better at being alive, so I’ve been picturing my heart

as a fox—which means wild and nocturnal, not
terrorizing the neighbor’s chickens. My love says
most equations in quantum field theory give infinity

as an answer, which is not meaningful because all
infinities are the same. In that case, let’s stop reaching
so hard for it. I’ll take this infinity’s morning where

my son and I confused falling leaves for monarchs.
Every time we thought we saw a butterfly, it was
just a leaf with the gentlest falling. We laughed at

every mistake, and he said, That was a beautiful
confusion. Sometimes when the moment doesn’t offer
a praying mantis on the porch or a charismatic sky,

I imagine my heart is my son’s face, and I am back
in love with the day, its astonishments like hot-air
balloons, and the daily present of power lines strung

with starlings like dozens of music notes. Let me
be more bound to my living in each moment, be held
by this hum, that cloud, this breath, that shroud.
~Traci Brimhall “This Beautiful Confusion” from Love Prodigal

Some Monday mornings, my mind is going in a thousand different directions. So I follow, knowing there will never be another Monday morning quite like this one. I hope there will be a few hundred more Monday mornings to come.

I want to be better at being alive,
noticing, remembering, connecting,
and grateful to be breathing.

Perhaps you are here because — you do too…

our sons – 1990
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Come and See: Could This Be?

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Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people,  “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”  They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
John 4:27-30

The woman is isolated and shunned by her community, which is why she comes to the well at noon and not in the cool of the morning or evening with the other women. She sees nothing but problems and barriers at first: the divisions of race and religion, the practical problem of the deep well, of having no buckets — and then the living presence of Jesus changes everything.

We see him through the icon, with one hand on his heart, the other on the water, himself the living connection between the two. Gazing at the icon, we see that the living water is already at the brim of the well. Has his presence drawn it up from the depths, or is it in fact flowing from him into the well, and not the other way round? Certainly, everything is reversed for the woman, and she who had to walk away from her village to find an outer source of refreshment will soon herself be a centre of renewal and be spreading good news in community.
~Malcolm Guite “Poet’s Corner” from Church Times

Icon painted by John Coleman for the Retreat Association

Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
~ R. S. Thomas “Gift” from Experimenting with an Amen 

..my heart leaps in wonder.
Cold, fresh, deep, I feel the word water
spelled in my left palm…
opening the doors of the world…
~Denise Levertov from “The Well”

I approach the well with shame, in the heat of the day,
not wanting to speak or be spoken to…

Yet this man, waiting there,
asks for water
asks for my help
asks, despite of who I am
and what I have done.

Then he offers to me
what I could not give him:
knowing my life and my shame
he opens the door to the rest of my life,
having no more thirst.

Could this be?

My heart leaping in wonder,
now I must tell everyone I know…

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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A Dishwater Sky of Sadness

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A dishwater sky mutes
sun’s rays to gray, the hills
leading to the pass forested
in haze, drained of green.

Though a steady bluster, the wind
musters nothing but silence.
The plodding sound of melt
drip, drip, drips
from the askew rusted rain gutter
outside my purview.
Perhaps, I have all my life been
too much in love with sadness.
~Lana Hectman Ayers from “Window in Late January” from Autobiography of Rain

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold,
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”

I am astonished by my thirst
for clinging to sadness
when a gray day asks so little of me.

Good thing I’m shaken from my melancholy
by such simple moments
as a twilight shimmering gold,
a burst of unexpected evening birdsong,
a steadfast fir standing unyielding on our hilltop,
where it glimpses the edge of tomorrow
as today’s dusky horizon fades away.

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