September 2012 – Page 3

September 11, 2012 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

A poem from three years ago…

By now the fields have survived
A first, and even second cutting
Mowed and tedded
Raked and baled, scalped clean then
Rained upon in spurts and spells.

The grass blades rise again, reluctant-
Certain of the cuts to come;
No longer brazen, reaching to the sky
With the blinding bright enthusiasm of May and June endless days,
But shorter, gentle growth of late summer golden sunsets.

The third cutting sparse and short as thinning hair
Tender baby soft forage, light in the hands and on the wagon
Precious cargo carried back to the barn;
Fragrant treasure for vesper manger meals
A special Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve gift.

Once again the fields are bare, aching for cover
Which comes as leaves rain and swirl in release,
Winds buffet, offering respite of deepening winter
Snowdrifts, blanketing in silent relief and rest
Until patiently stirred by melting soaking warmth

To rouse again, reaching…

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First Gray Hair

September 10, 2012September 10, 2012 barnstormingblog2 Comments

193320_4179225791222_981150280_o — photo by Josh Scholten

“The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.”
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I remember a day before I turned 30 when a barber pulled a gray hair from my head and handed it to me. “Here you go, ” she said, “this is only the beginning.”

Indeed. My mother was totally gray by 32 and my hope was to hold onto my light brown hair until at least 50.

It didn’t seem possible I could be losing my “freshness” so young as 29, but double the years with an exponential increase in the number of gray hairs, and I must face facts. Quite a few years ago on my 45th birthday, as I was walking down the sidewalk at work, a middle-aged woman stopped me mid-stride and asked me what brand hair coloring I used. I was taken completely off-guard. All I could respond was that I used no hair coloring other than what God Himself applied. She laughed and said she would have to keep looking then, as she was hoping I could direct her to a hair color that would make her hair look like “champagne” just like mine. I floated for three days on that thought alone.

Champagne. So I wasn’t “one season too many” after all. I was “well-aged.”

I sympathize with the not-so-fresh foliage on the farm in late summer. In anticipation of autumn, some of the yellow leaves simply give up and let go, flying in the wind to their final resting place, even in early September. Others decide to hang on until the bitter end ~yellowing, goldening, reddening and browning in a shimmering kaleidoscope of exhausted pigment.

I am one of those hanging on, quaking at times in the breezes, bedraggled in the drizzle, tattered on the edges, with some age spots here and there. I’m determined to make the best of the gray and am proud of every strand I’ve earned over the years and hope to earn a bunch more before I’m done.

After all…it isn’t really gray. It is champagne, well aged, with bubbles sparkling in the sun.

Photos of the “gray hairs” showing up around the farm as of today

Autumn Inferred

September 9, 2012September 10, 2012 barnstormingblog6 Comments

: photo by Kim Rockdale of St. Anne’s Church steeple, Parksville, Vancouver Island

Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud,
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.
~Emily Dickinson in “Summer Begins to Have the Look”

Summer is waning and wistful; it has the look of packing up, and moving on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds with a hint of spit from the sky as I gaze upward to see (and smell) the change. Rain is long overdue yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time. Though we are in need of a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, berries to pick before they mold on the vine, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick. I’m just not ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.

The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes. There is no negotiation possible. I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer has left off. Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues.

The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

: photo by Nate Gibson; a September dawn on the farm

Every Common Bush

September 8, 2012 barnstormingblog2 Comments

our haywagon swallowed by this year’s growth of blackberry bushes

Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries~
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning in “Aurora Leigh”

All I wanted was a few blackberries.

I admit my objective was just to pick enough for cobbler for Sunday noon dinner after church, oblivious to God burning in the bushes towering over me, around me, snagging me at every opportunity. If I had given it more thought, I would have realized the reaching vines hooking my arms and legs were hardly subtle. The thorns ripped at my skin, leaving me bloody and smarting. The fruit itself stained my hands purple, making them look freshly bruised. I crushed fat vines underfoot, trampling and stomping with my muck boots in order to dive deeper into the bushes. Webs were everywhere, with spiders crawling up my arms and dropping down into my hair. I managed to kick up one hornet’s nest so I called it quits.

All I wanted was a few blackberries, so blinded to all the clues crammed in every nook and cranny of every bush.

All I wanted was a few blackberries, trampling on holy ground with well-protected feet, unwilling to be barefoot and tenderly vulnerable.

All I wanted was a few blackberries, the lure of black gold plucked at the cost of rips and scratches and tears.

What I got was burned by a bush…

and a few blackberries for tomorrow’s crammed-with-heaven cobbler.

Bitter Sweetness

September 7, 2012 barnstormingblog1 Comment

39798_1519136170644_3016799_n — photo by Josh Scholten

Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know…
Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening.
~Wendell Berry in “Ripening”

My husband and I walk our country road together on a warm late summer evening, breathing in the smell of ripening cornstalks and freshly mowed grass lined up in windrows, much like the walks we took together nearly thirty years ago when we were newly married. Just down the road, we pass the smaller farm we first owned having left the city behind for a new life amid quieter surroundings. The seedling trees we planted there are now a thick grove and effective windbreak from the bitter howling northeasters we endured. The fences need work after 25 years, the blackberries have swallowed up the small barn where our first horses, goats, chickens and cows lived, the house needs painting, nevertheless there is such sweetness recalling the first home we owned together.

On this road, our children were conceived and raised, strolling these same steps with us many times, but now flown thousands of miles away for their life’s work. My husband and I are back to walking together again, just the two of us, wondering how each child is doing at this very moment, pondering how the passage of time could be so swift that our hair is turning white and we are going to seed when only yesterday we were so young.

We ripen before we’re ready.

It is bitter sweetness relinquishing what we know, to face what we can never know.

It is the mystery that keeps us coming back, walking the same steps those younger legs once did, admiring the same setting sun, smelling the same late summer smells. But we are not the same as we were, having finally come to the fruitfulness intended all along.

Ripening and readying.

474532_3902376630166_125323081_o — photo by Josh Scholten

Ready to Hear

September 6, 2012 barnstormingblog1 Comment

323127_3903922868821_1724599666_o — photo by Josh Scholten

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum in the silence…
There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens…
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
There is a moment that I anticipate every time I wash long-impacted ear wax out of a patient’s ear canals when they have had difficulty hearing. It can take one minute or maybe thirty to accomplish, but it is worth the effort. When the wax dislodges and flows out into the catch basin, I see the same anticipatory look on each patient’s face. Their eyes widen, their mouth forms an “O” in sudden recognition of their new readiness to hear. There may not be a sound in the room, but there is something different about the new silence that was not true before. This silence is ready to be broken, its vibrant hum no longer suppressed.

Usually we don’t even realize what we can’t hear over time; we don’t know what we are missing or how we are losing connection. The day comes when we wake completely deaf, too full to hear or acknowledge anything outside ourselves.

So it is necessary to be washed clean, the blockage removed, the barriers broken down, the connection restored to everything and everyone around us. We are emptied out in order to be filled through listening. Our eyes widen in order to see again, our mouths open to pray in gratitude without ceasing. The silence is no more.

Even the stones will cry out.

And we will be ready to hear.

Making and Unmaking

September 5, 2012 barnstormingblog1 Comment

53760_1591929830440_907951_o — photo by Josh Scholten

“Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”
~Paul Harding

What persists indeed? There are times when all appears to be perishing, especially in the dying time of year when the world is drying up, blowing away like the dust storms in the parched midwest which soil the air like so much smoke. The obituary pages predominate in the paper, accompanying an overload of bad news, mass shootings and suicide bombings. All appears to be perishing with no relief or hope.

But it is waning light and shortening days coloring my view like haze in the sky painting a sunset blood red. Darkness is temporary and inevitably helpless; it can never overcome the light of all things made.

Life persists in the midst of perishing because of the cataclysm of a loving and bleeding God dying as sacrifice. Nothing, nothing can ever be the same.

“God goes where God has never gone before.”
~ Kathleen Mulhern in Dry Bones

329392_558246069724_1785740492_o — photo by Nate Gibson

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
~John 1: 3-5

Summer Afternoon at BriarCroft

September 3, 2012May 4, 2013 barnstormingblog16 Comments

tonysept — Tony running in the lower field

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

: fish pond

walnutshade — Front yard light and shadow under the walnut tree

: the swing set my dad made when I was little, now perched on our farm

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock

It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod

tree house in the walnut tree

oldbuddies — Old buddies Dylan Thomas and Bobbie

gravensteinwindfalls — Gravenstein windfalls

blackberry — a few of a million blackberries on the farm

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird

‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More

poplar row

in the filbert grove

Baldwin apple tree

Bartlett pear tree

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare

BriarCroft in Winter

abandoned Mountain View School, now on private prairie ranch land near Rapelje, Montana

“Tell me and I forget,
teach me and I may remember,
involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin

An advantage to driving the back roads across the country is seeing authentic rural America minus chain restaurants and gas stations. Remarkably, there are shells of old abandoned buildings still standing, sometimes just barely, bearing witness to the ways things used to be done.

The one room school house has been left behind in this day and age of easier transportation allowing children from as far away as fifty miles to be bussed daily into large school districts. Educating large numbers of children together in same-age groups may be more cost-effective and more efficient, but does it enhance learning? I’m not sure there is clear evidence of a benefit when you look at the sad drop-out rate prior to graduation and dismal standardized test scores.

The one room school house of yesteryear became the center of small communities, serving as the gathering spot for holiday programs and meals, voting in elections, as well as public meetings where important decisions would be made. There was community pride and honor within those doors. It was the great equalizer among families from diverse economic, ethnic and faith backgrounds; the one room school brought them all together under the same roof.

This kind of classroom environment would be a challenge for any teacher, particularly the scarcely trained single women of 17 or 18 who were placed in these settings. But with older children helping the younger, the responsibility for education didn’t fall solely on the shoulders of the teacher. Students became teachers themselves out of necessity–they were involved and thereby learned.

Both my parents were in one room school houses in rural settings until high school. Both went on to college and became teachers themselves. I remember as a child visiting the remnants of my mother’s schoolhouse sitting at a crossroads in the rural Palouse hills of eastern Washington. Now only a foundation exists, but what a foundation it laid for children of the wheat farms like my mother and her descendents. Two generations later, our three children are teaching or plan to teach as a life long career.

The two schools pictured here are still standing, most likely abandoned over seventy or more years ago. It was grand to see them last week on our travels. I could almost hear the bell clanging announcing the start of the school day, the chatter and laughter of children as they entered the large room, and feel the warmth of the pot-bellied stove on a brisk autumn day.

Surely the exercise of education in these little schools was challenging, full of gaps and flaws. The teachers were not always skilled enough, the children unruly and the multi-age classroom chaotic. But the existence of these humble little buildings meant there was a community commitment to the future and hope for a brighter tomorrow. Even though the schools have now been left behind, standing empty and abandoned, the promise they represent is still worth celebrating.

Sometimes you just don’t know what you had until it is gone.

Douglas County, Washington abandoned schoolhouse in a wheat field, photo by Marilyn Wood

“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery.”
— Horace Mann

“you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”
Joni Mitchell from They Paved Paradise

A physician’s chronicle of faith, family and farm life in rural northwest Washington state.

I come from Pacific Northwest farmers going back four generations: the daughter of teachers, married to a son of farmers. We have raised three children who are making a difference in the world in their professional lives and as people of faith.

While keeping my eyes and heart open to the extraordinary things around me, I have worked over forty years as a family physician as well as a steward of the small farm we call home.

What I harvest in words or pictures finds its way here.
I welcome your messages and comments sent to emilypgibson@gmail.com

Listening to Others…

…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. … And the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4: 8 -9

What is my only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
~Heidelberg Catechism

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

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
~ T.S. Eliot

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To live is so startling, it leaves little room for other occupations.
~Emily Dickinson

I believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
~ C. S. Lewis

Remember this. When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold. When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in itself but they are in darkness. This is also the case when people withdraw from God.
~ Augustine

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

The seed is in the ground. Now may we rest in hope while darkness does its work.
~ Wendell Berry

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine the true poetry of life.~ Sir William Osler

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
~George Eliot’s final sentence in Middlemarch

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
~ E.B. White

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.~~ “The Wild Geese” Wendell Berry

Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.
~ Jane Kenyon from “Let Evening Come”

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Look for what you notice but no one else sees. ~Rick Rubin

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. ~ Thomas Merton

This life therefore is not righteousness,
but growth in righteousness,
not health but healing,
not being but becoming,
not rest but exercise.
We are not yet
what we shall be,
but we are growing toward it.
The process is not finished
but it is going on.
This is not the end
but it is the road.
~Martin Luther

Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
~ Mary Oliver

It is not your love that sustains the marriage —
but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

She has done what she could…
~Mark 14:8

What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?~ J. R. R. Tolkien from The Hobbit

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Month: September 2012