What a pity flowers can utter no sound! —A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle… on, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!
~Henry Ward Beecher
One last floral symphony before the blooms are gone with the wind and burned by the frost.
He’s of the colour of the nutmeg.
And of the heat of the ginger….
he is pure air and fire;
and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him,
but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him;
he is indeed a horse…
~William Shakespeare from Henry V
Not just because of the long wavy mane,
and bushy ringleted tail,
the feathers on the fetlocks,
the blackrimmed deep brown eyes,
topped with long curved lashes,
the glistening nutmeg ginger color,
the perfect parallel little ears,
the forelock that almost reaches to the upper lip….
The real reason to love a Haflinger horse is its nose.
Pink noses,
gray noses,
nondescript not-sure-what-color noses,
noses that have white stripes, diamonds, triangles, hearts
or absolutely no white at all.
With hot breath exuding fragrance
better than pricey perfume,
lips softer than the most elegant velvet.
Noses reach out in greeting,
blow,
sniff,
nuzzle,
caress,
push,
search,
smudge faces and
shower snot.
Irresistible.
Irrepressible.
Irreplaceable.
The nose knows.
First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf.
~Martin Luther
Any election cycle in a free country is indeed a free-for-all, with the loudest and brashest citizens shouting their personal opinions far and wide. This election season has been particularly noxious, with the presidential candidates and their followers talking over and above each other until no one bothers to listen.
Since this time around I have no candidate, my voice is meager in comparison. Some would say I have no say since I refuse to partake of rotten apples.
Yet on election day, each citizen, even the smallest and meekest, has the opportunity to express themselves, quietly and alone in a pas-de-deux between them and their personal ballot. Their vote, whether checking a box next to a candidate name, or writing in an alternative, is just as significant.
With each news cycle, each debate, each Tweet, we just want to see this election over and done with. We have shaken the electoral apple tree so hard that all the ripe and bitter and rotten fruit has fallen to the ground. We then must cope with whatever harvest we reap with our votes.
Rarely do we find near-perfect fruit; this year it is already rotted on the branch, tainted from the start.
Some citizens vote along party lines only; the quality of the candidate is immaterial as long as they have the right party affiliation. Other citizens turn over every leaf in detailed scrutiny of each candidate’s history and qualifications and vote character over platform. This year there are citizens like myself who see nothing in the current candidates for president but worm holes leading to a fermented core of character rot.
Rotten to the core doesn’t even make edible applesauce. It is good for nothing but the compost pile in the hope that the fertilizer of today it will somehow yield better fruit tomorrow.
In my opinion, this time around there is no candidate worthy to lead a country founded on the principles of equality for all individuals as well as preventing the tyranny of government in the personal lives of citizens. The candidates have fostered a confused and too-angry citizenry, divided and divisive, shaking our shared tree for all its worth to see what’s in it for us, thus threatening the life of the tree itself.
The moral foundation of our country is mocked by these deeply flawed individuals who believe they deserve to be in the Oval Office despite their dark personal histories, statements and actions. This election has become all about them and what they want, not about the integrity our country desperately needs in its leaders.
So I pray for a day when we can set differences aside and raise up leaders who can as well. We must work together to care for the tree that bears the fruit needed for our children’s future. Let’s bury this year’s rot around the roots, water it generously and prune the old dead useless stuff away. The branches will be stronger, the blossoms hearty and ready for pollination (if there are any bees left), and the resulting fruit more palatable.
Perhaps next time around the worms won’t win.
That’ll be the day.
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
sunrise
sunset
blue skies
river full of life
the mystery of the sea
What’s enough? Countless times I’ve watched the sun rise like God’s tender mercy to gently lift the dark blanket from the earth, and countless more times I’ve watched the sun set in such a splendiferous farewell that it must reflect the fringe on God’s robe. I’ve seen the sky define blue and endless. I’ve watched rivers run to the sea, full as life runs to God. I’ve felt the sea roll in on the eternal note of mystery and assurance.
I’ve scratched the ears of dogs, laughed at the ballet of cats. I’ve heard the cry and gurgle of the newborn, played with children, rocked with grandmothers, learned from hundreds of teachers, some of them homeless, poor, and uneducated.
I’ve been loved and forgiven beyond all deserving, and all breath to tell of it, by family and friends and God.
I’ve been shaken, changed, and blessed a thousand times — and still — by the prophets, and by Christ. I’ve felt the touch of God, each time before I realized that’s what it was. I’ve shared in the cantankerous yet remarkable family of faith called the church. I’m conscious of being conscious and alive. And all that’s just for starters.
How much does it take to praise God? I have a couple of trips around the Milky Way past enough for that, no matter if I never receive another thing. So I best get on with it . . . and praise God that I can.
— Ted Loder from The Haunt of Grace
dog ears
cat ballet
play with children
grandmothers
We forget, in our ever-inward focus, we were created for praise and to give all glory to God. We are given mouths to sing, hands to clasp, eyes to witness His wonders, forgiveness to try once again to get it right.
Even so, we don’t even recognize the touch of God.
May we, the flawed and broken, meet together today in His church as a family of faith to praise God that we are able to praise Him.
What greater reason is there to exist?
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
~Mary Oliver
Some mornings it is impossible to stay a silent and passive observer of the world. It demands a response.
The overnight wind and rain have pulled down nearly every leaf, the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, the dropping temperatures have robed the surrounding foothills in vibrant color and the peaks in a bright new snow covering.
There can be no complacency in witnessing this startling transition in progress. It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries. Nothing remains as it was.
And here I am, alive.
Awed.
Responding.
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
~Donald Hall “Name of Horses”
As a child, not yet a teenager, I regularly visited the horse grave dug by hand by my father in an open clearing of our woods where our horse rested in the ground. She was felled by a vet’s bullet to the head after an agonizing bout with colic. At first it was a place to cry where no one but the trees and wild flowers could see. When the tears dried up, it was a place to sing loudly where no one but chipmunks and my dog could hear. Later it became the sanctuary I retreated to talk to God when my church no longer was.
Your bones lie there still and no one but me knows where. The dent in the ground will always betray the spot.
I’ll always remember you.
After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth…
The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch.
The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze.
The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels, emerald and topaz and garnet.
Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her…
In October any wonderful unexpected thing might be possible.
~Elizabeth George Speare from The Witch of Blackbird Pond
I wander, deafened by the shouts and songs of October color. It is more than I can bear some mornings, knowing the stillness and silence that is to come.
I hear the same anguish
from one patient after another:
their struggle with life makes them
frantic to avoid the fight and flee~
they would
commit suicide,
yet not believing
in God
would mean
jumping from
the pain of living
into
…nothing at all…
I thought
feeling nothing
was the
point
of ceasing
to be
still in their unbelief
they do not recognize
the God who wrestles relentless with them,
who heaven-flung them here
for such sacred struggle
Perhaps they can’t imagine
a God
(who created
doubters
sore afraid
of His caring
enough to die)
so no one
is ever now,
nor ever will be,
~nothing.
Autumn is the eternal corrective.
It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity;
but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance.
What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop
and fail to see the span of this world
and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
~Hal Borland
Summer, waning and wistful, has packed up and moved on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds spewing long overdue rain. Though we need a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, apples to harvest, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick.
I’m not ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies and the lush richness of summer.
The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is to come: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture-filled air, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes. There is no negotiation possible. I 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 has brought its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues. It is an eternal corrective for what ails us.
The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.
He found himself wondering at times, especially in the Autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself ‘Perhaps I shall cross the river myself one day.’ To which the other half of his mind always replied ‘Not yet.’
~J.R.R. Tolkien — Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings
When you live in Whatcom County, as we do, it is possible to cross the river (several times) over 90 minutes of two lane highway switchbacks to arrive in these wild lands, breathless and overcome by majesty.
Visions of mountains from our dreams become an overwhelming 360 degree reality.
God touches every square inch of earth as if He owns the place, and He does, but these square inches are particularly marked by His artistry. It is a place to feel awed by His magnificence.
As we crossed the river to return home last night, I was left to wonder, much like Tolkien’s Frodo pondering of wild land dreams, what bridges God is building to bring us back home to Him.
(these are photos I took yesterday of Mt. Shuksan from Heather Meadows and Picture Lake, as well as Mt. Baker and Table Mountain from Artist Point)
Barnstorming 