A Road to Lead Me Home

barnstormingblog2 Comments

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.
You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet,
there is no knowing where you might be swept off too.
~J.R.R. Tolkien – Bilbo to Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way, around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side, who would not hanker
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go?
~Sheenagh Pugh “What if This Road?”

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish;
but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
~C.S. Lewis from The Great Divorce

We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye —

A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —

And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —

The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —

Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
~Emily Dickinson

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
~Jane Hirschfield from “The Weighing”

I admit I stumble if not careful,
bearing some bruises and scrapes from
hazards hidden in darkness.

My eyes slowly adjust to such bare illumination,
when the Lamp is dim and the road unfamiliar.

I’m feeling my way through uncertainty in this time of life.

I suspect there are fellow darkness travelers
who also have lost their way and their Light,
giving away what they can
and sometimes more than they have.

And so, blinded as we each are,
we run forehead-first into the Tree
which has always been there and always will be,
the symbol of our salvation.

Because of who we are and Who loves us,
we, now free and forgiven,
safely follow a darkened road made nearly straight,
all the way Home.

Lyrics: Tell me where is the road I can call my own,
That I left, that I lost, so long ago.
All these years I have wondered, oh when will I know,
There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.

After wind, After rain, when the dark is done,
As I wake from a dream, in the gold of day,
Through the air there’s a calling from far away,
There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.

Rise up, follow me, come away is the call
With (the) love in your heart as the only song
There is no such beauty as where you belong
Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.

Go Help Your Dad

barnstormingblog1 Comment

We will grieve not, rather find                     
Strength in what remains behind;                     
In the primal sympathy                     
Which having been must ever be;    

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
~William Wordsworth from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

It was hard work, dying, harder
than anything he’d ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-
Breaking chore he’d forced himself

to endure—it was nothing
compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job
be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was
hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we’d heard
my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this
was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,
in a field we could not reach.
~Joyce Sutphen, “My Father, Dying” from Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems.

                 

Henry Polis 1968
Pouring the sidewalk by hand
Grouting the tile perimeter

Thirty-one years ago today
we watched by your bedside as you labored,
readying yourself to die;
we could not help
other than to be there while you
slipped farther away from us.

This dying, the hardest work you had ever done:

harder than handling the plow behind a team of draft horses,
harder than confronting a broken, alcoholic and abusive father,
harder than slashing brambles and branches to clear the woods,
harder than digging out stumps, shoring up foundations, fixing roofs,
harder than shipping out to war,
harder than leaving behind a new wife after a week of marriage,
harder than leading a battalion to battle on Saipan, Tinian and Tarawa,
harder than returning home so changed there were no words,
harder than returning to school, working long hours to support family,
harder than running a farm with nothing but muscle and will power,
harder than coping with an ill wife, infertility, job conflict, discontent,
harder than building your own garage, your own house, a pool,
harder than ending your marriage, a second wife dying,
and returning home forgiven.

Dying was the hardest of all
as no amount of muscle or smarts could stop it from crushing you,
you, who could do nearly anything you put your mind and muscle to,
taking away the strength you relied on for nearly 73 years.

So as you lay helpless,
moaning,
struggling to breathe,
we knew most of your hard work was complete;
what was yet undone was not for us
to finish up for you.

Come And See: As Clear as Mud

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?”  Some claimed that he was.

Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”

But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”

“How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.

He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”

Where is this man?” they asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.
John 9:1-12

The Lord came: what did He do?
He set forth a great mystery.
He spat on the ground, He made clay of His spittle;
for the Word was made flesh. 
And He anointed the eyes of the blind man. 
The anointing had taken place, and yet he saw not.
He sent him to the pool which is called Siloam.
But it was John’s concern
to call our attention to the name of this pool;
and he adds, Which is interpreted, Sent. 
You understand now who it is that was sent;
for had He not been sent,
none of us would have been set free from iniquity.
Accordingly he washed his eyes in that pool
which is interpreted, Sent —
he was baptized in Christ.
~Augustine from Tractate 44 on John

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.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”

A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.

All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—”for Thy sake”—
Will not grow bright and clean.
~George Herbert from “The Elixir”

We came from dust in the beginning,
choosing to wallow in mud of our own making.

And Christ lives among us and our muddy messes.

Yet He is even more:
when Christ heals the blind man,
He mixes the dusty earth and His own spit —
using holy mud to anoint unseeing eyes
which heal glass-clear with washing.

Christ – sent to cleanse and restore us
with God’s deep and abiding grace.

We once were blind, but now we see…

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

At Summer’s Edge

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

At the edge of the city,
at the edge of the world,
at the edge between
the earth and endless sky,
the moonshining place,
the place where we hung
our long summer legs
over the edge and fought
the urge to drop a shoe
or sneak a real first kiss,
the place where we played
hide-and-go-seek
and Tag, you’re it!
until we couldn’t breathe
or the sun went down,
the place where we came
on the quietest nights
to feel the moon kiss
the edge between
our skin and endless sky.
~Sarah Kobrinsky, from Nighttime on the Otherside of Everything

photo of supermoon by Harry Rodenberger

there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….
~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning.

The truth of it is: we’re always on the edge of something.
Often we’re not aware of it
but that’s where some of the best things happen.

Summer itself can lead us right to edge of ourselves,
a bright and bold tease to imagine something
even more beautiful beyond our reach.
It is an invitation to follow the lingering light of the horizon
to wherever it may take us.

I can’t help but cling just a while longer
before I tumble off the edge of the world.

Lyrics:
In love, we find our way
With trust, hope remains

I’ll be here
Stay right here
Don’t you fear

In love, we find our way through the night
In love, we find our way

In love, we find a way
Your love leads the way

Just An Ordinary Life

barnstormingblog1 Comment

No doubt she’s disappointed.

Such a disgrace I turned out to be.

Not a policy-maker
Or tech-savvy entrepreneur.
Nothing of note.

I gave birth three times
and sent three
tall, kind people 
into the world

I offered words of consolation
I planted sunflowers
I listened

Elected official?
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist?
Cutting-edge thought-leader?
MD, PhD, CEO?
Oscar, Emmy, Tony? 
Nobel? 
Anything?

I closed my mother’s eyes
when she died
and again, my father’s

I made no fortune
no headlines
nothing went viral

I sang and danced
for no one

I remembered
I noticed
I breathed

Just an ordinary life
filled with extraordinary love.

How disappointing.
~Mary Poindexter McLaughlin “Alma Mater”

Parents can hold unreasonable expectations of success for their children; they tend to reflect their own deficiencies or failures.
After all, we want our kids to make the world a better place
than it was for us.

Yet no academic degree, no bank account, no notoriety or award
can match living an ordinary life filled with extraordinary love.

And yes, I am disappointed in myself – not because of the unmet expectations of my parents – I checked off all the boxes they hoped I would achieve in my younger years, but I couldn’t match the extraordinary love they showed me.

The older me tended to withhold myself emotionally from them as they grew frailer, fearing their weaknesses would someday become my own.

I could have been more compassionate in their final years, rather than taking on the more professional role of the doctor-daughter – physically present but too distracted and stretched with competing responsibilities.

That is something I cannot undo now except to pray for forgiveness for how my own inner struggles made those years harder than they needed to be.

My husband and I birthed three tall kind people who we love and have sent into the world. I pray for them what I wish I had understood when I was sent into the world by my parents: living their ordinary life of extraordinary love is more important than anything else they set out to do.

I rejoice as I see them foster such love for their spouses and their children and their communities: remembering, noticing and breathing life into each new day.

Seeing that as the years go by, I keep planting my sunflowers, slowly letting go of my own disappointment in myself.

Daylight Stakes Its Claim

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
~Robert Creeley “The Flower”

…forests giving way
to open meadow where deep snow
lingers and finally relents, uncovering
acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche
white — daylight restaking its earthly claim.
Every season swallows someone — 
~Kevin Craft from “For the Climbers”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
~William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

In early July, up in the alpine meadows of the Cascade mountains grow delicate avalanche lilies pushing through icy crust as the snow melt completes. Though brief in their blooming, they are harbingers of long summer daylight, a reminder the painful darkness of winter is behind us, as well as bound to come again too soon.

I am swallowed by each season.

The lilies, bursting through waning snow, become a bit of heaven on earth. Despite the bleak chill of winter, they fight to rise triumphant each year, an eternal promise of a some-day never-ending summer.

Prickly, Yet Tender-Hearted

barnstormingblog2 Comments

The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable, 

She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.
~Pablo Neruda from “Ode to an Artichoke”

She bore only the heart,
Worked at the stem with her
Fingers, pulling it to her,
And into her, like a cord.
She would sustain him,
Would cover his heart.
The hairy needles
And the bigger leaves,
These she licked into shape,
Tipping each with its point.
He is the mud-flower,
The thorny hugger.
~James McMichael “The Artichoke”

I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father’s garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.
~Diane Lockwood from “The First Artichoke”

I first encountered a globe artichoke in my first week at college in California. I’d never seen one before, much less dismantled and actually eaten one.  The California natives around me in the dining hall were astonished my worldview had never before included artichoke leaves and heart. After all, the University was only an hour away from the artichoke capital of the world, Watsonville, where the motto for the annual artichoke festival was “Thistle Be Fun!”

My frame of reference growing up on a farm was that thistle-looking plants were noxious weeds and needed to be chopped down before going to seed and reproducing even more noxious weeds. This spiny looking bud that was about to bloom a purple thistle flower looked highly suspicious to me and not to be trusted.

But then someone showed me how to peel off a leaf, dip the base in mayonnaise or lemon garlic butter and scrape off the soft part with my teeth. 

Noxious? Not even close. 
Absolutely delicious! 
Prickly protects the tasty.

The circumferential peeling of leaves one by one leads deeper to softer petals and fewer prickles, with the flavor becoming less subtle and more distinct. Once the leaves are all off, there lies uncovered at the base a heart to be scooped out.  The round meaty heart is the point of all this effort. 

It is the gold in the buried treasure chest, the pot at the end of the rainbow. It takes work to reach it, but it never disappoints.

How to mentally get past the plainness and prickles? 
How to recognize what appears so undesirable as something to preserve and nurture?  

There are so many times in my day I walk right past such people or opportunities as not worth the trouble.  Sometimes I myself am the one with the prickles, protective as they seem to me yet announcing caution to others, not to be trusted.

How could anyone know the tender heart that dwells within unless we gently, graciously, gratefully peel the prickles away?

Preserving the Sweetness

barnstormingblogLeave a comment
photo by Joel DeWaard

How beautiful the things are that you did not notice before!
A few sweetclover plants
Along the road to Bellingham,
Culvert ends poking out of driveways,
Wooden corncribs, slowly falling,
What no one loves, no one rushes towards or shouts about,
What lives like the new moon,
And the wind
Blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.
~Robert Bly from “Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life”

culvert

“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
~Maxine Kumin “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins”

The Robert Bly poem reminds me to see in a new way
as I travel the road to Bellingham, Washington
(not Bly’s Bellingham, Minnesota).

My eyes scan for the unnoticed and unremarkable,
along these rural byways I traveled decades to work,
now only to meetings or shopping –
when feeling the need to wander and wonder.

Forty years ago in my twice-daily
hour-long Seattle traffic commute to reach my clinic,
I could only pay attention to the cars around me,
blinkered to all else happening.

Since moving north to Whatcom County,
I try to notice what small things
I might keep handy in my memory for another day,
like a jar of canned peaches in our root cellar,
just so I won’t forget,
ready to pull them off the shelf someday
so I might share
their sweetness with someone else.

morning113157
photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. 
…to get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way
that takes nothing for granted. 
Everything is phenomenal;
everything is incredible;
never treat life casually.
To be spiritual is to be amazed.
~Abraham Joshua Hershel

photo by Harry Rodenberger
photo by Harry Rodenberger
groundcover

Let Us Gather a Vase of Flowers

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Master, how serene
Are all the hours
We waste
If, as we waste them,
We place them in a vase
Like flowers.

There are no sorrows
In our lives
Nor joys either.
Let us learn then,
Innocent sages,
Not to live life,

But to pass through it,
Tranquil, serene,
Taking children
As our teachers,
Eyes full
Of Nature . . .

Beside a river,
Beside a road,
Wherever we are,
Living life
With the same
Light ease.

Let us gather flowers.
Let us bathe our hands
In the calm rivers,
And from them
Learn their calm.

[12 June, 1914]
~Fernando Pessoa from “Ode 1” translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean 
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; 
To which, besides their own demean, 
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. 
Grief melts away 
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing. 

Who would have thought my shriveled heart 
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 
  Quite underground; as flowers depart 
To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 
Where they together 
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 

 These are thy wonders, Lord of power, 
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell 
And up to heaven in an hour; 
Making a chiming of a passing-bell. 
We say amiss 
This or that is: 
Thy word is all, if we could spell. 

         Oh that I once past changing were, 
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! 
Many a spring I shoot up fair, 
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; 
Nor doth my flower 
Want a spring shower, 
My sins and I joining together. 

But while I grow in a straight line, 
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, 
Thy anger comes, and I decline: 
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone 
Where all things burn, 
When thou dost turn, 
And the least frown of thine is shown? 

And now in age I bud again, 
After so many deaths I live and write; 
I once more smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing. Oh, my only light, 
It cannot be 
That I am he 
On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

These are thy wonders, Lord of love, 
To make us see we are but flowers that glide; 
Which when we once can find and prove, 
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; 
Who would be more, 
Swelling through store, 
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
~George Herbert “The Flower”

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee from “From Blossoms”

Our small church has a couple of gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards and fields each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.

It is a special treat to walk into church and see what they brought to the altar to share with us all on Sunday morning. I keep a photo album of these very unique Sunday “pulpit posies” our keepers of gardens share.

Why are these arrangements special?
After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.

These are special as many of these flowers are seeded, watered, fertilized and nurtured by one of our own, grown with love and caring, just as God cares for each of His children.

These are special as some are considered simple weeds, and are gleaned from ditches and hedges. They are part of God’s creation and have a wild beauty that can be as breathtaking as a hothouse orchid.

These are special because they often go home with a congregant or visitor who will enjoy their loveliness for many more days, as if they represent the manifestation of God’s Word itself.

Some of us are dahlias, zinnias and roses.
Some of us are rare gardenias and orchids.
Most of us are dandelions, sagebrush, Queen Anne’s lace,
fireweed, burdock, and daisies thriving
in the crevasses, ditches and hedgerows of life.

No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of our loving gardening God. He created us to take care of His creation.

Each week, we bud afresh for Him.

Come and See: Who Do You Think You Are?

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”

“I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”

At this they exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets.

Who do you think you are?”

Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”

 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
John 8: 48-59

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice.

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. …

Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
~C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity

I am all at once what Christ is,
since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection“

He says emphatically: Before Abraham, I am.

He is the Lord,
not liar nor lunatic.

He rains upon our thirsting earth
with shining drops of living water.

We are saved from the drought
of unbelief and skepticism.

Who do we think He is?
He is the immortal I AM.

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