“Outside, the north wind,
coming and passing,
swelling and dying,
lifts the frozen sand drives it
a-rattle against the lidless windows
and we may
dear
sit stroking the cat stroking the cat
and smiling sleepily, prrrr.”
~William Carlos Williams
(This is for our daughter who is off to college, whose cat Jose continues to look for her around the house as we are completely inadequate substitutes when it comes to kitty cuddling.)
“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking.”
~Frederich Buechner
And tomorrow
move forward
to leave a mark on a new day
after night’s erasing rest.
No matter what took place the day before,
no matter the misgivings,
no matter what should have been left unsaid,
no matter how hard the heart,
there is another day to make it right.
Forgiveness finds a foothold in the dark,
when eyelids close,
thoughts quietly open,
voices hush in prayers
of praise, petition and gratitude.
And so now
sleep on it
knowing his grace
abounds in blameless dreams.
Morning will come
awash in new light,
another chance
freely given.
The cold has the philosophical value of reminding men that the universe does not love us…cold is our ancient companion. To return back indoors after exposure to the bitter, inimical, implacable cold is to experience gratitude for the shelters of civilization, for the islands of warmth that life creates.
~John Updike from “The Cold”
We’ve had a string of sub-freezing temperature nights and days with crystal clear skies once the frozen fog abates. There has been no northeaster to send the windchill plummeting. Everything shimmers with diamonds of frosty glitter all day long. It is the kind of cold this pacific northwest native can actually enjoy. It is not the cold of the midwest plains, or the Alaskan frontier. This is civilized, “kill the bugs and the allergens” cold that helps balance out the ecosystem as well as our internal thermostats. It is just not seemly to live at 70 degrees year round, toasted by the stove in the winter, soothed by conditioned air in the summer.
We are not always so lucky as this. The cold that sometimes descends from the Arctic can blast through the strongest Carhartt clothing, sneak through drafty doors and windows, and freeze pipes not left dripping. It leaves no one untouched and unbitten with universal freezer burn.
A bitter cold snap ensures even independent fair-weather individualists must become companionable when the going gets rugged, mandating shelter with others for survival. It can even mean forced companionship with those we ordinarily avoid, with whom we have little in common, with whom we disagree and even quarrel, with whom sharing a hug or snuggling for warmth would be unimaginable.
Our nation is in such a cold snap today, terribly and bitterly divided. If we all together don’t come in out of the deep freeze, we each will perish alone. It is time to be thankful we have each other, such as we are. At least we can generate heat, even if we can’t lighten up.
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It ‘s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
~Emily Dickinson
In the moments before dawn
when glow gently tints
the inside of horizon’s eyelids,
the black of midnight
waxes to mere shadow,
the fear forgotten for but a few hours.
Gloaming dusk
fades into gleaming dawn,
its backlit silhouettes stark
as the darkening earth
slowly opens her eyes
to greet a new and glorious morn.
I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges. “Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula — are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world…. That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm
photo by Josh Scholten
I return to the ground its original music.
It will rise out of the horizon
of the grass, and over the heads
of weeds, and it will rise over
the horizon of men’s heads.
As I age in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased with the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.
~Wendell Berry from “Planting Trees”
A tree is a prayer that begins
like a small seed
falling from our lips,
tentative with need.
–a word of thanks
a moment of praise
a tear from grief
a plea for grace–
Unsure if it will land
on receptive soil
with sufficient light
or sprinkling
to quench its dryness.
An answered prayer, like a tree,
takes hold
roots burrowed deep
held fast
filling to fullness
to grow higher in
blooming profusion
that reaches the sky,
awaiting the wind’s touch.
Our prayer, like a tree,
planted on fertile soil,
will someday yield
its gifts and blessings
of fruit and shade,
to rise beyond the horizon
and reach past our last
Amen.
A reminder this weekend of the value of all life, no matter how small, how seemingly insignificant, and how brief…
The call came in the middle of a busy night
as we worked on a floppy baby with high fever,
a croupy toddler whose breathing squeezed and squeaked,
a pale adolescent transfusing due to leukemia bleeding.
It was an anencephalic baby just born, unexpected, unwanted
in a hospital across town, and she needed a place to die.
Our team of three puzzled how to manage a baby without a brain–
simply put her in a room, swaddled, kept warm but alone?
Hydrate her with a dropper of water to moisten her mouth?
Offer her a taste of milk?
She arrived by ambulance, the somber attendants
leaving quickly, unnerved by her mewing cries.
I took the wrapped bundle and peeled away the layers
to find a plump full term baby, her hands gripping, arms waving
once freed; just another newborn until I pulled off her stocking cap
and looked into an…
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“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
We were meant to be more than mere blemish, more than a sullied spot or gaping hole on the surface, imperfect and inconvenient.
We were created as air and water and flesh and bones, from the covering of skin to our deeper darkened cavities that fill and empty.
We were created out of Word and Silence.
We were created to weep and praise, praise and weep.
We were meant to be mystery, perfect in our imperfection. Blemish made beautiful.
The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken… One is married to marriage as well as to one’s spouse. But one is married also to something vital of one’s own that does not exist before the marriage: one’s given word. It now seems to me that the modern misunderstanding of marriage involves a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of the seriousness of giving one’s word, and of the dangers of breaking it once it is given. Adultery and divorce now must be looked upon as instances of that disease of word-breaking, which our age justifies as “realistic” or “practical” or “necessary,” but which is tattering the invariably single fabric of speech and trust.
~Wendell Berry from “The Body and the Earth” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Covenant between two married people, between parent and child, between coworkers, between countries, between God and His people — is too often broken, irrevocably shattered when convenient and deemed necessary.
I see the sequelae of broken vows, broken words, broken covenants every day in my work. Divorcing parents destroy the integrity of a family built on trust and commitment. Relationships wax and wane with the ebb and flow of one’s mood and need for something/someone new.
It is a chronic disease of acute trust deficiency, this lack of keeping faith with one another, this brittle bitter breaking of word and promise.
Our only hope is in the one who kept His promise fully and wholly, renewing His covenant with us until His last breath.
And so, it is finished, having been paid in full, and our faith will never again be broken.
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment … a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present…
~Wendell Berry
My days are filled with anxious people, one after another after another. They sit at the edge of their seat, eyes brimming, fingers gripping the arms of the chair. Each moment, each breath, each rapid heart beat overwhelmed by fear-filled questions: will there be another breath? must there be another breath? Must this life go on like this in panic of what the next moment will bring?
The only thing more frightening than the unknown is the known that the next moment will be just like the last. There is a deficit of thankfulness, no recognition of a moment just passed that can never be retrieved and relived. There is only fear of the next and the next so that the now and now is lost forever.
Their worry and angst is contagious as the flu.
I mask up and wash my hands of it throughout the day.
I wish a vaccination could protect us all from unnamed fears.
I want to say to them and myself:
Stop. Stop this. Stop this moment in time.
Stop expecting some one, some thing or some drug must fix this feeling.
Stop being blind and deaf to the gift of each breath.
Just stop.
And simply be.
I want to say:
this moment is ours,
this moment of weeping and sharing
and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it.
Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that can flow over grateful lips.
Stop me before I write,
because of my own anxiety,
yet another prescription
you don’t really need.
Just be–
and be blessed–
in the now and now.
Barnstorming 