Month: August 2019

Here You Are, Alive

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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

I’d like to make a comment this morning. Here we are, alive.

Too much time is spent trudging through the hours, unaware of the privilege of each breath.

The just-born and the nearly-dying know the preciousness of each moment. The rest of us need regular reminders each day- being alive is the responsibility to not waste a single minute.

As I look in the eyes of this new little soul, I am struck dumb and all my senses wrung dry: we are like bells pealing our witness of Glory. We are meant to respond.

Struck and wrung. Struck and ringing.

A Glimmering Landscape

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Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight, 
         And all the air a solemn stillness holds…
~Thomas Wolfe from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” 

Some moments are glimmering stillness and overwhelming joy.

We Come and Go

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The land belongs to the future; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it–for a little while.

~Willa Cather from O Pioneers!

As we travel through the prairie to meet our new grandson, the expanse of land flies by just as it did when I was a child traveling with my family. The skies are just as dramatic, the horizons lay beyond what can be easily discerned, the grasses plentiful and brown. Sixty years have made little discernible difference to these plains but have made incredible difference to me. I am barely recognizable in comparison.

We are born as images of God to stay awhile to love this land as best we can; we come and go. Today we celebrate the coming of a new grandson born of the mountains and farmland and the prairies.

He belongs to the future.

Finding My Way Home

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Bees do have a smell, you know,
and if they don’t they should,
for their feet are dusted with spices
from a million flowers.”
~Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine


I studied bees, who were able
to convey messages through dancing
and could find their ways
home to their hives
even if someone put up a blockade of sheets
and boards and wire.
Bees had radar in their wings and brains
that humans could barely understand.
I wrote a paper proclaiming
their brilliance and superiority
and revised it at a small café
featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers
in silver honeypots
at every table.
~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Bees Were Better”

Suddenly a bee, big as a blackberry,
bumbles against my window, knocking
for attention. Rolling in azalea cups all morning,
she weaves in slow motion then hovers
like a helicopter, humming
to herself. The key, C major.
No black notes, no sharps, no flats.
Only naturals—the fan of her own wings,
the bliss of her own buzz.

She doesn’t practice.
She doesn’t have to. She knows.
To make honey, you follow the dance.
~Alice Friman  from “The Key”

I wish I had a homing device in my body that would bring me home no matter where I wander. I simply turn my face to the sun and my wings take me back there, even if I wasn’t paying attention to the dance of others and I’m off kilter or too stubborn to admit home is where I need to be.

After a summer of watching thousands of bees making a “bee-line” to home at night as if they are on a superhighway to their very own hive and honey cell, I need to be just as determined, just as committed, just as confident that I’m heading to where I belong.

The rest are waiting for me and have left the light on.


Having Clean Earth to Till

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The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences:

the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.

I must study Politics and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy.

My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture,

in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelain.
~John Adams in a letter to his wife Abigail Adams

“Plowing the Field” by Joyce Lapp

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world,
but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know,
so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
~J.R.R. Tolkien from The Return of the King

As we watch family generations build one atop another:
great grandparents fighting wars to bring peace for their children
grandparents attending school to bring culture to their children
parents bringing music and poetry and beauty to their children
the children returning to the garden, tending the soil.

they all work the land,
turning the earth
planting and weeding
growing and harvesting
preserving so the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren
have succor and sustenance.

Clean earth to till, good food to share, mighty blessings to bestow.

Through it all, we watch the skies,
wondering whether the weather
might take it all away
as it has before.
We are not its master
so pray for His merciful Hand on us.

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.


The Road From Here to There

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A spoon in a cup of tea.
Letters in yellow envelopes,
the way a hand pushed lines
into the soft paper.
Morning laughter.
A white shirt draped
over her chair.
An open window. The air.
Call of one blackbird.
Silence of another.
November. Summer.
My love for you, I say.
My love for you infinity
times a million, my son says.
Sounds of piano notes
as they rest in treetops.
The road from here to there.
Grief, that floating, lost swan.
~Paige Riehl “Things That Cannot Die” from Suspension

photo by Nate Gibson

Anticipation of an early morning call so not much sleep last night.
When the call came – a new grandson announced from miles away-

we laughed gleefully at this gift

our love expanded infinity times a million for these brand new parents, this new life joining the world,
this new road to travel together from here to there.
All that is ordinary is now new and extraordinary.

Love through the generations cannot die but thrives and pulses alive. We laugh and cry at once at the generous grace of our good God who turns all human grief to joy.

photo of Ben Gibson and baby Daniel by Kathy Mulhern (grandma!)
photo by Lea Gibson

Holding My Feet to the Fire

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God is the fire my feet are held to.
~Charles Wright, from “Ars Poetica II” in Appalachia

If we think we’re going to get off easy in this life
because we do what we’re told to do:
keeping the Sabbath
and our noses clean,
saying what we ought to say
when we should say it
and keeping our mouths shut when
it is best to say nothing at all.

If we think our good deeds
and relative lack of bad deeds will save us,
we have another think coming
and a lot of explaining to do.

We walk through fire
because nothing about God’s glory
is easy. We are hidden in the cleft because He is too much for our eyes to behold.
We remove our sandals
to feel the hot coals of holy ground.
He burns without being consumed
so our hearts are scorched in His presence.

Yet His feet are blistered too.
He knows exactly how this feels.





Summer’s Parting Sighs

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When summer’s end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

So here’s an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer’s parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.
~A.E. Houseman from “XXXIX” from Last Poems

Mornings bring cooler air now, and there is haze hanging over lower ground where the previous day’s heat is rising. We are fast approaching the end of summer season, with its overabundance of constant activity, light and warmth. To be honest, I too am fried to a crisp; increasingly grateful for moisture, a bit of clinging mist, the reappearance of green shoots from parched ground. There is need for restoration after so much overproduction.

I don’t regret growing older, considering the alternative, but do feel sadness about not spending my younger years more aware of how quickly this all passes. I wish my eyes had been more open, my hearing more acute, my tongue devoted to silence, my skin sensitive to the slightest feather touch.

So I make up for it now as best I can – though my vision is cloudy at times, I strain to hear the quietest sounds, I talk when I should be listening, my skin wrinkling and dry. Each day brings new opportunity to finally get it right.

As the days end with foreshortened flare and our weather vane points from the north, I sigh deeply for all that has been.

And my heart replies. Indeed, my heart replies.

A Diffusion of Sunlight

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There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light…
~Donald Justice from Collected Poems

The Beeches, painting by Asher Brown Durand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Living in a place where golden light is scarce amidst the universal gray, I find myself watching out for it to capture it. Like happiness, I am grateful for its unexpected appearance, no matter how brief.

Having witnessed gilded light and known happiness, I know they will come again. It takes getting up early and being opened to joy coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Blessings abound when I ready myself for them.

Petal By Petal

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Life is a stream 
On which we strew 
Petal by petal the flower of our heart; 
The end lost in dream, 
They float past our view, 
We only watch their glad, early start. 

Freighted with hope, 
Crimsoned with joy, 
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; 
Their widening scope, 
Their distant employ, 
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows 
Sweeps them away, 
Each one is gone 
Ever beyond into infinite ways. 
We alone stay 
While years hurry on, 
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays. 
~Amy Lowell “Petals”

The stream of time flows ever faster,
rushing away my remembrance of yesterday,
the quiet moments today,
my hope for tomorrow.
Every day – a petal thrown into the cascade –
disappears one by one, never to return.
What of my dreams will last
as they droop and drop and scatter?
It is a lingering fragrance their roots leave behind;
that is how to be remembered.