Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. James 4:14
photo by Josh Scholten
…Noticing
a spider’s web under the olive trees
splendidly hung with early drops, already
vanishing up the vortex of the air
…a heaven-sent refreshment? or a curtain
cutting out the light?
And I must ask it now (small moisture that I am)under the sun of God’s great grace on me: Which am I–dew, or fog? ~Luci Shaw from “…for you are a mist“
To be mist that clarifies
rather than opacifies,
that reflects
rather than absorbs,
that replenishes
rather than depletes~
to evaporate within His warmth,
glistening with descended grace.
What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall… It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. ~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it. ~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood
Mothering is like standing under a waterfall, barely able to breathe, barraged by the firehose of birthing and raising children, so much so fast. Nothing rough remains after child rearing — all becomes soft and cushiony, designed to gather in, hold tight, and then reluctantly and necessarily, let go.
I’m well aware, even after my children have grown and flown, my rough edges still surface, like Godzilla from the primordial swamp, unbidden and unwarranted. I want the sharpness gone, sanded down by the waterfalls of life, and smoothed to a fine finish.
My children continue to polish me, now from afar. Time pounds away at me. I can feel it hitting, every drop a blessing.
Her fate seizes her and brings her down. She is heavy with it. It wrings her. The great weight is heaved out of her. It eases. She moves into what she has become sure in her fate now as a fish free in the current. She turns to the calf who has broken out of the womb’s water and its veil. He breathes. She licks his wet hair. He gathers his legs under him and rises. He stands, and his legs wobble. After the months of his pursuit of her now they meet face to face. From the beginnings of the world his arrival and her welcome have been prepared. They have always known each other. ~Wendell Berry “Her First Calf”
Seized, brought down, wrung from, heaved out, pursued, then eased.
Nothing gentle in what it takes to become a mother;
once birthed, mothering is sweetness never tasted before,
a face to face meeting
destined from the beginnings of time.
I have known you, I knew each of you,
you have known me all along,
born in covenant promise
set free at our birth.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for. ~Vladimir Nabokov from Speak Memory
I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.~Jane Kenyon from "Reading Aloud to My Father"
We too often mistake this world, this existence, as the only light there is, a mere beam of illumination in the surrounding night of eternity, the only relief from overwhelming darkness. If we stand looking up from the bottom, we might erroneously assume we are the source of the light, we are all there is.
Yet looking at this world from a different perspective, gazing down into the abyss from above, it is clear the light does not come from below –it is from beyond us.
The newborn and the dying know this. They signal their transition into and out of this world with their hands. An infant holds tightly to whatever their fist finds, grasping and clinging so as not be lost to this darkness they have entered. The dying instead loosen their grip on this world, reaching up and picking the air on their climb back to heaven.
We hold babies tightly so they won’t lose their way in the dark. We loosen our grip on the dying to honor their reach out to the light that leads to something greater.
In the intervening years, we struggle in our blindness to climb out of the abyss to a vista of great beauty and grace. Only then we can see, with great calm and serenity, where we are headed.
So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me. ~William Maxwell
If I stop and really look at something I usually pass by with only a cursory glance, I am astonished at what I didn’t see before.
Inside and up close is an unfamiliar richness and strangeness, as if of a foreign world, that I might miss altogether if I didn’t find the time to be surprised by life.
It is beyond me how much is beyond me.
It is all beyond me.
Things: simply lasting, then failing to last: water, a blue heron’s eye, and the light passing between them: into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen. ~Jane Kenyon, “Things”
Things we think last don’t.
Light passes between things and us,
a pathway illuminated to something lasting.
We will follow,
falling, failing to last
until lifted at last.
Gladly we become light
ourselves.
How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life. How much better to throw the garbage onto the compost, or to pin the clean sheet on the line, With a gray-brown wooden clothes pin. ~Jane Kenyon “The Clothespin”
I get easily overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done on the farm in addition to all the usual household tasks, especially on a weekend–grass to mow, flower beds to weed, garden to plant, fences to fix, manure to haul, animals to brush out — the list is endless and there are never enough hours in the day. I moan and whine about it.
Or I can set to work, tackling one thing at a time. A simple task is accomplished, and then another, like hanging clothes on the line: this one is done, and now this one, pinned and hanging to freshen, renewed, in the spring breezes.
At the end of the day (or the end of the weekend), I pull them down, bury my face in them and breathe deeply, knowing how much better I am than before I began.
The spider, dropping down from twig, Unfolds a plan of her devising, A thin premeditated rig To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space, In cool descent and loyal hearted, She spins a ladder to the place From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken thread to you For my returning. ~E.B. White A Spider’s Web (A Natural History)
Attached in ways I can not always see
but surely feel,
I go astray,
wander afar,
lose my way,
yet the thread remains
to return me
to where I belong.
A silken umbilical cord
continues to pump
what I need to be alive,
anchoring me,
releasing me without letting go.
My soul hangs
by this gossamer thread,
this silken connection
to eternity.
photo by Josh Scholten
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. ~Walt Whitman from “A Noiseless Patient Spider”
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
poplar row behind the apple orchard
Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam Of golden sunlight shines On the rippling waves, that brightly flow Beneath the flowering vines. Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn Comes floating by on the fragrant air, Through the forest cool and dim; Then spread each wing, And work, and sing, Through the long, bright sunny hours; O’er the pleasant earth We journey forth, For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I
a favorite rhododendron
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. ~John Galsworthy
a happy day put out to pasture
At morn when light mine eyes unsealed
I gazed upon the open field;
The rain had fallen in the night —
The landscape in the new day’s light
A countenance of grace revealed
Upon the meadow, wood and height.
The sun’s light was a smile of gold,
Ere shut by sudden fold on fold
Of surging, showering clouds from view;
No sooner hid than it broke through
A tearful smile upon the wold
Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.
The sky was as a canvas spun
To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;
A blended melody of tints —
The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints
Of garden-closes, when the sun
Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.
~William Stanley Braithwaite
a happy day put out to blue skies in the breezerosemary
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and green world all together, Star-eyed strawberry breasted Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within, And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell.” – Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat
Kale going to seed
“A delicate fabric of bird song Floats in the air, The smell of wet wild earth Is everywhere. Oh I must pass nothing by Without loving it much, The raindrop try with my lips, The grass with my touch; For how can I be sure I shall see again The world on the first of May Shining after the rain?” – Sara Teasdale, May Day
grape hyacinth and tulips
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.” – Ellis Peters
“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of spring Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thing Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms show I look forward to the sight of other flowers though Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the dark Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole park The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the land A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.” – Larry Tilander, Springtime of My Soul
“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.” – Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring
skimmia
“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.” – Carl Sandburg
yew pollen
“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “ – Gustav Mahler
the first of dozens of peonies
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov
Virginia Creeper starting to do its creeper thing
Canadian mountains to the north
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.” – D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.” – Robert Frost
spring sunrise over Mt Baker
“Hark, I hear a robin calling! List, the wind is from the south! And the orchard-bloom is falling Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
Come and let us seek together Springtime lore of daffodils, Giving to the golden weather Greeting on the sun-warm hills.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song
“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.” – Audra Foveo
Sam stops to smell the tulips
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” – Mark Twain
someone is looking his age….it was a rough winter
“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.” – Dorothy Parker 😉
Barnstorming 