Month: August 2016

Where the Land Leaves Off

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kingstondock

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.
The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins
Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn’t named, that doesn’t know
How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift its head
Into the blue and so unfold there?
~Laurie Sheck “And Water Lies Plainly”

kitsapsunset

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
~William Wordsworth from Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 1802

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We feel restless about the tail end of summer when it is too hot for anything to grow or thrive without water.  There is a longing to settle in, like going down for a nap–to drift off in comfort instead of sweating, to sink deep and untroubled tucked under blankets that instead are folded away, unused.

Our long uninterrupted sleep waits so we must take our rest at intervals.  There is some daylight left.

We take our calm as it comes, as a serene moment of reflection, looking out from the edge where the land leaves off and wonder at the still waters to come, to ponder what is waiting on the other side.

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Floodlit

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It is not physical beauty,
nor temporal glory,
nor the brightness of light so dear to earthly eyes,
nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs,
nor the gentle odor of flowers or ointments or perfumes,
nor manna, nor honey,
nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh.
It is not these things I love when I love my God.

Yet there is a light I love,
and a food,
and a kind of embrace when I love my God.
A light, voice, odor, food,
embrace of my innerness,
where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain,
where there is sound that time cannot seize,
where there is perfume which no breeze disperses,
where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can satisfy,
where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part.
That is what I love, when I love my God.
~Augustine of Hippo

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zinniacenter

God designed His creation as a reflection of His Being. We and everything around us are the image bearers — even in our heart of darkness we are floodlit by a goodness overflowing our soul’s capacity.

We are in His spotlight; we are floodlit.

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moonrisebaker

The Twinges of this World

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sunflower8162

sunflower

butterflygarden5

Under a canopy of leaves,
the irises, bountiful,
the calico butterfly flashing

and this one golden head
of a dazzling sunflower grasping
its cowled neck,

outweighing its stalk

in order to turn,
full bonneted,
to the absolute light.

What wonders these are:
things struggling
filament by filament,

birds twittering in a laughter
that could be weeping,
barely feeling the twinges of this world,

where the weak get stronger
or snailish with cracks

a day at a time.
~Judith Harris “Recovery”

webleash

sunflower816

“Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.”
Rainier Marie Rilke

We feel the twinges of struggling to live broken in difficult times; indeed all our days are difficult times. We won’t get out of this predicament alive.

Whether we care or not about what happens next does not alter the fact Christ dwells with us; our heavy heads bow, turning to the absolute light. The coming of spring will not be stopped by a slumbering disinterested earth.

Like Mary, we must say:  “Let it be”, not “no, not me, not now.”

We are transformed, simply by accepting He has come on our behalf:
an oh so difficult faith that connects us like a filament to heaven,
like a shoot breaking through the crust of frozen earth to reach the sun in order to bloom,
like the butterfly emerging from its cracked chrysalis to try its wings,
like the snail shell abandoned because we will no longer fit inside its broken walls.

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Piecing Together the Scraps

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“I make them warm to keep my family from freezing;
I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”
–From the journal of a prairie woman, 1870
To keep a husband and five children warm,
she quilts them covers thick as drifts against
the door. Through every fleshy square white threads
needle their almost invisible tracks; her hours
count each small suture that holds together
the raw-cut, uncolored edges of her life.
She pieces each one beautiful, and summer bright
to thaw her frozen soul. Under her fingers
the scraps grow to green birds and purple
improbable leaves; deeper than calico, her mid-winter
mind bursts into flowers. She watches them unfold
between the double stars, the wedding rings.
~Luci Shaw “Quiltmaker”
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It could be the world was made this way:
piecemeal, the parts fitting together
as if made for one another~
disparate and separate
coming together in harmony.
The point of its creation
to be forever functional,
a blanket of warmth and security
but its result is so much more:
beauty arising from scraps,
the broken stitched to broken
to become holy and whole.
(all quilts here are on display this week at the Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden)
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A Thing With Feathers

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
~Emily Dickinson
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Our local fair feels much like I remember when I was a child in the 60’s, accompanying my father to the Lynden fairgrounds during those summers of political and social turmoil.  His job was to supervise the teachers of FFA kids (Future Farmers of America) so he did the rounds of the regional and county fairs and my brother and I tagged along to explore the exhibits and go on rides.

The heart beat of a country fair pulses deep for me: I fell in love with my future husband at a fair, and we spent twenty years from 1992-2012 at the local Lynden fair exhibiting our Haflinger horses together as family and friends. Once our children grew and flew away four years ago, my husband and I were relegated to mere fair-goers, exploring exhibits without the need to show up to muck out stalls at 6 AM.

As we walked through this year’s home made quilt exhibit (see my photos and post tomorrow), I marveled, as always, at the multifaceted and intricate designs, with a distinctly planned out mix and match of colors in each quiltmaker’s entry.
Only a short stroll away is the chicken exhibit building, one of the same buildings I wandered through as a child over fifty years ago.  As we entered, it struck me that here too I was admiring designs and color schemes, layered with nuance and texture, just like the quilts — the feathers are God’s threads put to exquisite use to blanket a mere chicken.
So much design, so much detail, so much hope covers something as mere as me.
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barn owl and woodpecker feathers found on our farm this week

Making Hay and Raising Tomatoes

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haymaking5

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it.

The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Other than a few exceptional circumstances in my life, I have always played it safe: a down-home, don’t rock the boat, work hard and live-a-quiet-life kind of person. My grandparents lived that way, my parents lived that way so I feel like it is bound in the twists and turns of my DNA.

Even so, I do know a thing or two about sulking on the edge of rage, lost in a morass of seething bitterness about the state of the world.  Yet if I were honest about it, my discontent is all about me, always about me. I fail to measure up.

But then that is the rub: I can never deserve unmerited grace.  It is pure Gift, borne out of radical sacrifice.

And because of that Gift, I can live a life of radical gratitude, even if a little quietly.

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A Curious Gladness

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rose52916

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
and still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed…”

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
~Stanley Kunitz  “The Round”

wwubee

sunflower816

compostjanuary

It is too easy to be ground to a pulp by the little things, those worries that never seem to wane, sucking the gladness out of the day.  They become four dimensional and soon we’re enveloped within, losing all perspective on what got us out of bed to begin the day.

God is in these intricate details, whether the splash of light on a petal or the smell of rotting refuse and it is our job to notice.  It is tempting to look past His ubiquitous presence in all things, to seek out only the elegant grandeur of creation.   Yet even what lacks elegance from our limited perspective, is still worthy of His divine attention.

The time has come to be refreshed and renewed
even when surrounded by decay.
His care is revealed in the tiniest way.
He is worthy of my attention.

A new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

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wwublackeyed

A Blessing for Hairy Toes

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homer811

“May the hair on your toes never fall out!”
— J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit (Thorin Oakenshield addressing Bilbo Baggins)

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photo of Samwise Gamgee by Nate  Gibson

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photo by Nate Gibson

Tolkien’s Hairy Toes Blessing has been one of my more popular blog posts when I have posted it before, most likely because our corgis are just like hobbits with irresistible hairy toes. Yet the message itself goes beyond cute: it is indeed a good thing to give and receive blessings.

It’s a safe bet my toes and your toes have never been subjected to such a blessing.   But I like the idea of blessings starting from the bottom up,  encompassing our most humble and homely parts first.

The world would be a better place if we rediscovered the art of bestowing blessings–those specific prayers of favor and protection that reinforce community and connection to each other and to something larger than ourselves.   They have become passé in a modern society where God’s relationship with and blessing of His people is not much more than an after-thought.   Benedictions must extend beyond the end of worship services to all tender partings;  wedding receptions can go beyond roasting and toasting to encompass sincere prayers for a future life together.

Today especially necessitates a special blessing not invoking hairy toes: our daughter moves several hours away to start her first permanent teaching job, so I send the following blessing with her as she drives away to start her new life (shared by my dear friend Alice in New York):

…Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path….
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.
May anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
~John O’Donohue from “Blessing for Presence”  from To Bless the Space Between Us

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The True Harvest

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sunset8916

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau

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Painting the indescribable with words necessitates subtlety, sound and rhythm on a page.  The best word color portraits I know are by Gerard Manley Hopkins who created  through startling combinations:  “crimson-cresseted”, “couple-colour”, “rose-moles”, “fresh-firecoal”, “adazzle, dim”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, “blue-bleak embers”, “gash gold-vermillion”.

I understand, as Thoreau does,  how difficult it is to harvest a day using ordinary words.   Like grasping ephemeral star trails like our current Perseid meteor showers or the transient rainbow that moves away as I approach, what I hold on the page is intangible yet very real.

I will keep reaching for that rainbow moving target, searching for the best word pictures to preserve my days and nights forever, perhaps for my someday greatgrandchildren, or whoever, even today, might have the need to imagine what it is like to capture and clutch it fast in their mind’s eye.

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Bleeding Sweetness

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plum8161

plum8163

Sometimes it’s not about
seeking, but of receiving,
the way a plum takes in light,
an inner ripening that cracks
its perfect purple skin,
and sweetness, an amber rivulet,
crusts along the gash.
~Lois Parker Edstrom from “The Lesson of Plums”

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Our silver plum tree is a lot like some people I know:  most of the time barely noticeable, hanging on the periphery of the crowd,  fairly reserved and unobtrusive.  But their roots go deep and the nourishment is substantial,  so they bear fruit, no doing things half-way.   The feast is plentiful and abundant, the meal glorious, despite a bitter skin.

They bleed out sweet.

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