and the barberry: another thoughtless human assumption
sidetracking the best story this furrow spider knew to spin.
And, trying to get the sticky filament off my face, I must look,
to the neighbors, like someone being attacked by his own nervous
system, a man conducting an orchestra of bees. Or maybe it’s only the dance
of human history I’m reenacting: caught in his own careless wreckage,
a man trying to extricate himself, afraid to open his eyes. ~Jeff Worley from Lucky Talk
For a change, it is a relief the citizens of this country are waking up to clear election results. A majority of voters have mandated a new direction, in an attempt to turn this massive ship of a nation around.
Too often in recent history, the election results are uncertain the next day. We remain suspended in a sticky web of our own making for some time, dangling as the votes are recounted, rehashed, distrusted, and litigated…
Twenty-six years ago, I woke up not feeling very well after a long night of waiting for election results to come in. I thought it was from the tension of not knowing when the outcome would be finalized but no… It ended up being appendicitis — it was my 2000 post-election surgical solution to take my mind off the contest of Bush vs Gore.
It worked. I simply ceased to care about anything but my own healing. What was happening in the headlines became background noise.
This morning, I don’t need any such distraction. I will endeavor to keep myself out of the ER and the OR and just go about my day, watching our democracy in action.
For well over a decade, we the people have been caught in a sticky-wickety web, spread all over our faces. We’ve struggled to keep our eyes open to the reality of our own messy entrapment,
So today I am taking a few deep breaths and I hope you will too. And tomorrow and the next day.
And avoid radical surgery if we can.
Maybe this dance is something we can manage to do together — coordinated, cooperative, choreographed, and united — rather than flailing about in a careless wreckage of human history.
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Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies, warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when it seems like all this will go on forever,
when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day, then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun, and in the evening one night make pickled beets and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney, and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor and make grape jam,
when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves, through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,
when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear or somehow be taken away from all this,
at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly
I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now, in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,
I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be taken from me, and therefore I’ve got to say, right now, what I feel and know and see, I’ve got to say, right now, how beautiful and sweet this world can be. ~David Budbill“Sometimes”
This is a beautiful, wonderful, terrific day to vote.
Normally election days are filled with stressful anticipation about what storms and floods will arrive next due to the ever-changing political climate.
Yet today, as I fill out my ballot, along with millions of others in my country, no matter how erratic our leadership, how corrupt its political machinations, we together have the ability to change course through the sacred privilege and responsibility of voting.
Over two centuries of great sacrifice has bought us this right and freedom. I am proud to exercise it, no matter the result. Too many people in the world do not know this privilege, so I do not take it lightly.
Sometime, and God only knows when, we’ll find ourselves united more than divided, working together to harvest the best we can grow.
Then what a wonderful world this will be…
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In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name.
Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor. ~Annie Finch, from “Samhain” in Eve
Let’s go our old way by the stream, and kick the leaves as we always did, to make the rhythm of breaking waves.
This day draws no breath – shows no colour anywhere except for the leaves – in their death brilliant as never before.
Ah, but you were always leaf-light. And you so seldom talk as we go. But there at my side through the bright leaves you walk.
And yet – touch my hand that I may be quite without fear, for it seems as if a mist descends, and the leaves where you walk do not stir. ~Francis Bellerby from “All Souls’ Day”
And blessèd are the ones we overlook; The faithful servers on the coffee rota, The ones who hold no candle, bell or book But keep the books and tally up the quota,
The gentle souls who come to ‘do the flowers’, The quiet ones who organise the fete, Church sitters who give up their weekday hours, Doorkeepers who may open heaven’s gate.
God knows the depths that often go unspoken Amongst the shy, the quiet, and the kind, Or the slow healing of a heart long broken Placing each flower so for a year’s mind.
Invisible on earth, without a voice, In heaven their angels glory and rejoice. ~Malcolm Guite “The Last Beattitude”
There is no denying I am composed of all of the thousands of my ancestors, carrying their DNA in every cell of my body. Their traits and characteristics pulse continuously in my blood even when at times I wish they didn’t.
On All Souls’ Day, we remember those from whom we come — all those spirited ghosts within our cells who shake and rattle a bit louder this time of year in the foggy darkness.
I wave at them warily from my perch in the 21st century.
I come from somber folk. That explains a lot.
I feel great kinship to the peasant farmers I descend from though I wish I could turn off the genes that lead me to eat too much, and worry too much and my tendency toward the melancholy rather than the jocular. Somehow I have suppressed the tendency to drink too much and curse too much. I do come from a long line of believers in ghosts, so these days of Samhain and All Hallows’ tend to open those creaky doors of shivers and chills, so I avoid anything even remotely scary. It only encourages those more tenuous strands of my DNA.
I am indeed made up of all-ancestor bits and pieces, and can’t deny it.
There is some comfort in realizing there is nothing really brand new about me, so I try not to make a fool of myself on behalf of the hosts of others sitting tidily wrapped up in my nuclei. There is additional comfort knowing a small part of me will continue in my descendants, who will ponder their family tree wondering which great-great-great-great grandparent passed down which annoying characteristic.
I wave hopefully from the 21st century to those generations to come, to remind them not to forget those of us who came before. If there are spirits that come to visit on Samhain, I promise to be a friendly ghost.
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Though Satan breaks our dark glass into shards Each shard still shines with Christ’s reflected light, It glances from the eyes, kindles the words Of all his unknown saints. The dark is bright With quiet lives and steady lights undimmed, The witness of the ones we shunned and shamed. Plain in our sight and far beyond our seeing He weaves them with us in the web of being They stand beside us even as we grieve, The lone and left behind whom no one claimed, Unnumbered multitudes, he lifts above The shadow of the gibbet and the grave, To triumph where all saints are known and named; The gathered glories of His wounded love. ~Malcolm Guite “All Saints’ Day”
The ordinary saints, the ones we know, Our too-familiar family and friends, When shall we see them? Who can truly show Whilst still rough-hewn, the God who shapes our ends? Who will unveil the presence, glimpse the gold That is and always was our common ground, Stretch out a finger, feel, along the fold To find the flaw, to touch and search that wound From which the light we never noticed fell Into our lives? Remember how we turned To look at them, and they looked back? That full- -eyed love unselved us, and we turned around, Unready for the wrench and reach of grace. But one day we will see them face to face. ~Malcom Guite “Ordinary Saints”
As grains of sand, as stars, as drops of dew, Numbered and treasured by the Almighty Hand, The Saints triumphant throng that holy land Where all things and Jerusalem are new.
We know not half they sing or half they do, But this we know, they rest and understand; While like a conflagration freshly fanned, Their love glows upward, outward, through and through.
Lo! like a stream of incense launched on flame Fresh Saints stream up from death to life above, To shine among those others and rejoice.
What matters tribulation whence they came? All love, and only love, can find a voice Where God makes glad His Saints, for God is Love. ~Christina Rossetti “As Grains of Sand“
At almost four in the afternoon, the wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods.
The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches on fire in the heavy sky that flickers
with the disappearing sun. I wonder what I owe the fading day, why I keep
my place at this dark desk by the window measuring the force of the wind, gauging
how long a certain cloud will hold that pink edge that even now has slipped into gray?
Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp in every window and nests of stars
We are created to reflect the Light sent from above, whether we are the smallest dewdrop, a grain of sand on an infinite beach, or the first rung on a ladder set for heaven.
We are here today due to sacrifices of ordinary saints who came before: the parents who stayed up all night with our high fever measles, the grandparents who nurtured us when our parents were too weary, the church members who prayed over us when we went astray.
We are who we are today because of people who invested in our surviving, who bore arms in foreign lands far from home, who strived to keep water and air clean, who grew good food not knowing who would benefit.
We are gifted from the reach of common grace that emanates from common people; grace such as this wrenches us away from caring only for ourselves and thrusts us into the lives of others.
We are all created in the image of a very personal God who knows our very folds and inner and outer flaws, but loves us nonetheless, reminding us to sacrifice self for the sake of the other, to reflect His Light no matter where He sends us.
We are unselved by the saints today: loved for who we are yet created to love those we’ll never know.
Lyrics: All around us and within us And yet it’s only at times we notice As real as rain, and soft as stardust We know deep down, what nobody told us. Chorus: Can’t you feel it ever closer We breathe it in and we then we exhale We touch both sides and now eternal Standing closer to the veil
Now is just a, moving image Not a ribbon, a start and end There is a bird, a hidden singer That calls and listens, and calls again
Centered down and moving outward Sometimes almost, to sweet to bare There are endless ways to reach home Just keep walking and I’ll meet you there
Standing closer to the veil There’s a blurring of the borders And I swear that I heard voices But every act of, simple kindness Calls the kingdom down and all around us
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Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree. ~Louise Glück “All Hallows”
All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall.
The stranger at my fireside cannot see The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear; He but perceives what is; while unto me All that has been is visible and clear…
…So from the world of spirits there descends A bridge of light, connecting it with this, O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “Haunted Houses”
Most of the apples have already fallen. The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls. But what if my land is the land of the living? The bird from the dust takes flight Then turns multiple—
A handful of birds rising in the dead sky Opened to receive them. But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them. Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust. ~Lindsay Turner from Halloween
The old trees on this farm have souls, bearing fruit for all to enjoy, the deer, the raccoons, the birds, our family.
Rarely, when one topples in a windstorm, its 100-plus years of fruitfulness abruptly ended, I sense its soul’s return to the dust beneath, sinking back to the roots which held firm through many storms, its hollow trunk now a telescope to the beyond.
Goodbye, sweet broken soul. To dust we someday return until called back to fruitfulness…
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou from “When Great Trees Fall”
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And then in the falling comes a rising, as of the bass coming up for autumn’s last insects struggling amid the mosaic of leaves on the lake’s surface. We express it as the season of lacking, but what is this nakedness — the unharvested corn frost-shriveled but still a little golden under the diffuse light of a foggy sky, the pin oak’s newly stark web of barbs, the woodbine’s vines shriven of their scarlet and left askew in the air like the tangle of threads on the wall’s side of the castle tapestry—what is it but greater intimacy, the world slackening its grip on the veils, letting them slump to the floor in a heap of sodden colors, and saying, this is me, this is my skeletal muscle, my latticework of bones, my barren winter skin, this is it and if you love me, know that this is what you love. ~Laura Fargas “October Struck” from Animal of the Sixth Day
Something about the emerging nakedness of autumn reassures; we are loved even when stripped down to our bones.
While making quite a show of shedding our coverings, our bits and pieces fluttering down to rejoin the soil, what is left is meager lattice.
But when the light is just right, we simmer gold, illuminated and illuminating, even if barely there.
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Once again, the field rehearses how to die. Some of the grass turns golden first. Some simply fades into brown. Just this morning, I, too, lay in corpse pose, practicing how to let myself be totally held by the earth without striving, how to meet the day without rushing off to do the next necessary or beautiful thing. Soon, the grass will bend or break, molder or disintegrate. Every year, the same lesson in how to join the darkness, how to be unmade, how quietly we might lean into the uncertainty, how generous the ground. ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “Shavasana”
The grasses are collapsing, withering to the ground, all spent after a season of flourishing. The next wind and rain storm will finish the job. Stems and leaves become rich compost in the seasons that follow, a generous bed for future seeds.
We expect this fading away.
I know it doesn’t mean the end – there is still vitality lying dormant, hidden away, waiting for the right moment to re-emerge, resurrect and live again.
I know this too about myself. The dying-time-of-year doesn’t get easier. It seems more real-time, vivid, and personal. Colors fade, leaves wrinkle and dry, fruit falls unconsumed and softened.
Our beauty, so evident only a short time ago, thrives inward, silently germinating, ready to rise again when called forth.
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It takes a peculiar vision to be able to detect Precisely where
The field grasses brushed by blowing Stars and the odor of spring In the breath of sweet clover buds And the star-mingled calls of the toads In the threading grasses and the paws Of the clover brushing through the field Of stars and the star-shaped crickets In the ears of the sweet grasses And the tail of the night flicking Through the calls of the clover and the spring Stars slinking past the eyes of midnight And the hour of the field mouse passing Through the claws of the stars and the brushing Haunches of the weeds and starry grasses Threading through the eyes of the mouse And the buds of the stars calling With the sweet breath of the field
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay. Soon, on cold nights, you’ll be saying “Excuse me” if you want to get out of your chair. But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat is “Excuse me.” Nor Einstein’s famous theorem. Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.” In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. In this world where much is missing, a cat fills only a cat-sized hole. Yet your whole body turns toward it again and again because it is there. ~Jane Hirshfield “A Small-Sized Mystery” from Come, Thief
(from the Barnstorming archives)
Chores at our farm are rarely routine since our batch of four male kittens were born 6 months ago. They were delivered unceremoniously in the corner of one of the horse stalls by their young mother whose spontaneous adoption we accepted a mere four weeks before, not realizing we were accepting five kitties, not just one.
They were born under a Haflinger horse’s nose, and amazingly survived the ordeal and managed to stay safe until the next day when we came in to clean and discovered them nicely warmed near a nice fresh pile of poop. What a birthing spot this mama had chosen. Thankfully Haflingers are tolerant about sharing their space as long as you don’t ask for a share of their food too…
We moved them and mama to a safer spot in the barn, away from big Haflinger feet, and they thrived, getting more adventuresome by the week, until they are now in full adolescent glory, mock fighting with each other, scrambling up and down the hay bales, using the shavings as their personal litter box, doing rodent patrol, and most of all, strolling along the shelves that line the stalls, breathing in the Haflinger smell, and rubbing their fur up against Haflinger noses through the wire. They are best of friends with these ponies in the light of day, as after all they were born right in a Haflinger bed.
But at night it’s another story. Each evening as I come out to do chores after returning home from work, it is pitch dark and the Haflingers, out in their winter paddocks, must walk with me one by one back to their box stalls for the night. Only this is now far more of an adventure thanks to four cats who glory in stealth attacks in the dark, like mountain lions in the shadows, waiting for their prey to pass by.
These four rascals are two tabbies, one black and one gray, all four perfectly suited to be camouflaged in the northwest dim misty fall evenings along a barely lit pathway between paddocks and barn. They flatten themselves tight on the ground, just inches from where our feet will pass, and suddenly, they spring into the air as we approach, just looking for a reaction from either the horse or myself. It never fails to unnerve me, as I’m always anticipating and fearing the horse’s response to a surprise cat attack.
Interestingly, the Haflingers, used to kitten antics all night long in the barn, are completely bored by the whole show, but when the tension from me as I tighten on the lead rope comes through to them, their head goes up and they sense there must be something to fear. Then the dancing on the lead rope begins, only because I’m the one with the fear transmitted like an electric current to the Haflinger. We do this four times along the path to the barn as four kittens lay in wait, one after another, just to torment me. By the end of bringing in eight horses, I’m done in by my own case of nerves.
You’d think I’d learn to stop fearing, and start laughing at these pranksters. They are hilarious in their hiding places, their attempts to “guard” the barn door from intruders, their occasional miscalculations that land them right in front of a hoof about to hit the ground. Why I haven’t had at least one squished kitten by now is beyond my comprehension.
Yet they survive to torment me and delight me yet another night. I cuddle them after the horses are all put away, flopping them on their backs in my arms, and tickling their tummies and scolding them for their contribution to my increasingly gray hair.
I’m a slow learner. These are like so many of my little daily fears, which seem to hide, blended in to the surroundings of my daily life, ready to spring at me without warning, looking like much bigger scarier things than they really are. I’m a highly skilled catastrophizer in the best of circumstances, and if I have a kitten-sized worry, it becomes a mountain lion-sized melodrama in no time. Only because I allow it to become so.
Stepping back, taking a deep breath, if I learn to laugh at the small stuff, then it won’t become a “cat”astrophe, now will it? If I can grab those fears, turn them over on their back and tickle their tummies until they purr, then I’m the one enjoying a good time.
I’ll try that the next time I feel that old familiar sensation of “what if?” making my muscles tense and my step quicken. I just might tolerate that walk in the dark a little better, whether it is the scary plane flight, the worry over a loved one’s health, the state of the economy, why there are ongoing wars causing civilian deaths, or the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring.
I’ll know that behind that mountain lion is a soft loving purring fur ball, granting me relief from the routine, for which I’m extremely grateful. Life is always an adventure, even if it is just a stroll down a barn lane in the dark wondering what might come at me next on the path.
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
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Though he was ill and in pain, in disobedience to the instruction he would have received if he had asked, the old man got up from his bed, dressed, and went to the barn. The bare branches of winter had emerged through the last leaf-colors of fall, the loveliest of all, browns and yellows delicate and nameless in the gray light and the sifting rain. He put feed in the troughs for eighteen ewe lambs, sent the dog for them, and she brought them. They came eager to their feed, and he who felt their hunger was by their feeding eased. From no place in the time of present places, within no boundary nameable in human thought, they had gathered once again, the shepherd, his sheep, and his dog with all the known and the unknown round about to the heavens’ limit. Was this his stubbornness or bravado? No. Only an ordinary act of profoundest intimacy in a day that might have been better. Still the world persisted in its beauty, he in his gratitude, and for this he had most earnestly prayed. ~Wendell Berry “XI”
He (the professor) asked what I made of the other students (at Oxford) so I told him. They were okay, but they were all very similar… they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.
He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru.
For over forty years, I have spent about an hour a day shoveling manure out of our horse stalls and I’m a better person for it.
Wheeled to a mountainous pile in our barnyard, this daily collection of manure happily composts year round, becoming rich fertilizer in a matter of months through a crucible-like heating process of organic chemistry, bacteria and earthworms. Nothing mankind has achieved quite matches the drama of useless and basically disgusting stuff transforming into the essential elements needed for productive growth and survival.
Our government certainly hasn’t discovered the secret. This is a metaphor I can <ahem> happily muck about in.
I’m in awe, every day, at being part of this process — in many ways a far more tangible improvement to the world than anything else I manage to accomplish every day. The horses, major contributors that they are, act underwhelmed by my enthusiasm. I guess some miracles are relative, depending on one’s perspective, but if the horses understood that the grass they contentedly eat in the pasture, or the hay they munch on during the winter months, was grown thanks to their carefully recycled waste products, they might be more impressed.
Their nonchalance about the daily mucking routine is understandable. If they are outside, they probably don’t notice their beds are clean when they return to the stalls at night. If they are inside during the heavy rain days, they feel duty-bound to be in my face as I move about their stall, toting my pitchfork and pushing a wheelbarrow. I’m a source of constant amusement as they nose my jacket pockets for treats that I never carry, as they beg for scratches on their unreachable itchy spots, and as they attempt to overturn an almost full load, just to see balls of manure roll to all corners of the stall like breaking a rack of billiard balls in a game of pool.
Good thing I’m a patient person always seeking an object lesson in whatever I see or do ~ mucking out stalls every day helps me tolerate the proverbial muck I encounter in the news. And spending an hour a day getting dirty in the real stuff somehow makes the virtual manure less noxious.
Indeed, everyone should be mucking out, especially during election season, as I think the world would generally be a better place.
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…the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. ~John Stott from The Cross of Christ
Try as we might to make things in our own image, no matter what discontent we feel, we fail to comprehend we are not God and never can be.
Try as we might to pick ourselves up when we fall, no matter the anguish we feel, we struggle to understand He fell to earth specifically to catch us: He bled our blood, shed our tears, brought us home.
Lyrics from Psalm 84:
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! 2 My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
3 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. 4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise!
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