A World Full of Peril

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The world is indeed full of peril
and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair.
And though in all lands,
love is now mingled with grief,
it still grows, perhaps, the greater.
— J. R. R. Tolkien from The Fellowship of the Ring

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief
Isaiah 53:3

Shut out suffering, and you see only one side of this strange and fearful thing, the life of man. Christ saw both sides. He could be glad, he could rejoice with them that rejoice; and yet the settled tone of his disposition was a peculiar and subdued sadness.

That gave the calm depth to the character of Christ;
he had got the true view of life by acquainting himself with grief.
~Frederick Robertson from a 1846 sermon entitled Typified by the Man of Sorrows, the Human Race

An elderly mother/grandmother apparently kidnapped from her home is yet to be heard from.

And another school shooting takes hold of my heart and breaks it.

Our sorrows fill a chasm so deep and dark that it is a fearsome thing to even peer from the edge. We join the helplessness of countless people in human history who have lived through times which appeared unendurable.

We don’t understand why inexplicable tragedy befalls good and gracious people, taking them when they are not yet finished with their work on earth.

From the unconscionable shootings of innocents,
to quakes that topple buildings burying people,
to waves that wipe out whole communities sweeping away thousands,
to pathogens too swift and devastating for modern medicine —

we are reminded every day: we live on perilous ground and our time here has always been finite.

We don’t have control over the amount of time, but we do have control over how extensively our compassion for others is heard and spread.

There is assurance in knowing we do not weep alone;
our Lord is acquainted with grief. 

Our grieving is so familiar to a suffering God who too wept at the death of a beloved friend, when He faced a city about to condemn Him to death and He was tasked with enduring the unendurable.

There is comfort in knowing He too peered into the chasm of darkness; He willingly entered its depths to come to our rescue.

His has an incomparable capacity for Light,
bringing to the world a Love that lasts an eternity.

Lyrics:

Angels, where you soar
Up to God’s own light
Take my own lost bird
On your hearts tonight;
And as grief once more
Mounts to heaven and sings
Let my love be heard
Whispering in your wings
~Alfred Noyes

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And With Ah! Bright Wings

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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”

Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. 
~John Donne from “Annunciation”

I know this sound, first birds of morning.
As a child, I waited for hours for the drape
of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first
hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant
light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song,
able at last to close my eyes.
I know this sound, some kind of redemption,
waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment
even as the work of the previous day marks my bones
in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn
pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls
like a promise you hoped someone would keep.
~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light

Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.

Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.

It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.

When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:

“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…

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A Marshy Cacophony

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Cold, wet leaves
Floating on moss-coloured water   
And the croaking of frogs—
Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.
~Amy Lowell “The Pond”

Poets who know no better
rhapsodize about the peace of nature,
but a well-populated marsh is a cacophony.
~Bern Keating

O, I love to hear the frogs
When they first begin to sing;
How they vocalize the bogs,
And vociferate the Spring.
How they carol as they croak,
How they mingle jest and joke
With their solemn chant and dirge
On the river’s slimy verge.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their monotone uncouth
Is the music of the cogs
Of the mill wheel of my youth.
And I listen half asleep,
And the eyes of mem’ry peep
Through the bars that hold me fast,
From the pleasures of the past.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their melody is health
To the heart that worry flogs
With the lash of want or wealth.
And the cares of life take wing,
And its pleasures lose their sting,
And love’s channel way unclogs
In the croaking of the frogs.
~Harry Edward Mills “The Early Frogs”

I wanted to speak at length about
The happiness of my body and the
Delight of my mind …

But something in myself for maybe
From somewhere other said: not too
Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the
Frogs are singing.
~Mary Oliver, from “April”

About two weeks ago, music from the wetlands became faintly detectable in the distance. We were only a little over a month into winter, yet due to unduly mild temperatures, the chorus had begun.

The sleigh-bell jingle song of the Pacific Chorus Frogs now fills the air each evening, rising from the ponds and standing water that surround our farm. I stand still for a moment to soak up that song that heralds spring–a certainty that the muddy marshes are thawed enough to invite the frogs out of their sleep and start their courting rituals.

Now winter won’t return anytime soon with any seriousness.

This marsh music is disorienting this early, along with daffodils budding in late January and lawns needing mowing in February. With voices so numerous, strong and insistent, it feels as though a New York City of frogs has moved in next door; we are seated in the balcony of Carnegie Hall. 

They seem to be directed by an unseen conductor, as their voices rise and fall together and then cut off suddenly with a slice of the baton, plunging the landscape into uncomfortable silence at the slightest provocation, as if they hold an extended fermata for minutes on end.

The frogs’ repertoire is limited but their wind power, stamina and ability to project their voices impressive. They are most tenacious at making their presence known to any other peeper within a mile radius. Their mystical, twilight symphony of love and territory has begun, soft and surging, welcome and reassuring.

There’s a spring a-comin’, the peepers proclaim. 
Nothing can be sweeter.

I know all the behaviorist theories about frog chorus being about territoriality –the “I’m here and you’re not” view of the animal kingdom’s staking their claims. Knowing that theory somehow distorts the cheer I feel when I hear these songs. I want the frogs (and birds) to be singing out of the sheer joy of living. Instead, they are singing to defend their piece of mud or branch.

Then I remember, that’s not so different from people. Our voices tend to be loudest when we are being insistently territorial: we own this and you do not, and we are irresistibly better than you.

I’m not sure anyone enjoys human cacophony in the same way I enjoy listening to the chorus of frogs at night or birdsong in the morning. We humans are most harmonic when we choose to listen. Instead of sounding off, we should soak up. Instead of shouting “this is mine,” we should sit expectant and grateful.

Perhaps that is why the most beloved human choruses are derived from prayers and praise – singing out in joy and gratitude rather than in warning.

I’ll try to remember this when I get into my own righteous and “territorial” mode. I don’t bring joy to the listener nor to myself. When it comes right down to it, all that noise I make is nothing more than a croaking cacophony in a smelly mucky swamp.

Here’s what it sounds like all around us: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Ab4EBKYx9

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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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