Month: October 2023

A Common Hand

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Because what’s the alternative?
Because of courage.
Because of loved ones lost.
Because no more.
Because it’s a small thing; shaking hands; it happens every day.
Because I heard of one man whose hands
haven’t stopped shaking since a market day in Omagh.
Because it takes a second to say hate, but it takes longer,
much longer, to be a great leader.
Much, much longer.

Because shared space without human touching
doesn’t amount to much.
Because it’s easier to speak to your own
than to hold the hand of someone whose side
has been previously described, proscribed, denied.
Because it is tough.
Because it is tough.
Because it is meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory,
the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading.
Because it has taken so, so long.
Because it has taken land and money and languages
and barrels and barrels of blood.

Because lives have been lost.
Because lives have been taken.

Because to be bereaved is to be troubled by grief.
Because more than two troubled peoples live here.
Because I know a woman whose hand hasn’t been shaken
since she was a man.
Because shaking a hand is only a part of the start.
Because I know a woman whose touch calmed a man
whose heart was breaking.
Because privilege is not to be taken lightly.

Because this just might be good.
Because who said that this would be easy?
Because some people love what you stand for,
and for some, if you can, they can.
Because solidarity means a common hand.
Because a hand is only a hand; so hang onto it.

So join your much discussed hands.
We need this; for one small second.
So touch.
So lead.
~Pádraig Ó Tuama “Shaking Hands”

Nothing is new about conflicts over borders and religion and politics. What is new is the ability of an individual to share the terror and hatred to the rest of the world in mere seconds. We all become unwitting witnesses to human pain and suffering, eager to take sides if we can bear to watch.

We each share a common hand. We need leaders who reach out to touch one another with more than words. They represent the human beings who lost limbs and lives in the battle for supremacy.

Historic handshakes are never meaningless, but even more vital is a connection between humans steeped in historical hatreds. We need to reach out and help lift each other’s burdens.

Take my hand. Look in my eyes. Even for one small second.

Sculpture by Artist Albert Gyorgy

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Singing in the Leaves

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Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds
Loud — landmark — now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.
~Wendell Berry “October 10” from New Collected Poems.

If I were a color, I would be green, turning to gold,
turning to bronze, turning to dust.
If I were a sound, I would patter like raindrops and children’s feet.
If I were a smell, I would be dry earth soaking up a shower.
If I were a touch, I would be a leaf landing softly.
If I were a taste, I would be a bit sweet and a bit sour.
If I were a season, I would be the wistful goodbye hug of autumn.
But I am none of these, being enough for now.
Singing in the leaves,
I will come rejoicing,
Singing in the leaves.

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A Solitary Maple

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When I visited as a boy, too young for chores,
a pair of maples flared before the farmhouse.
My grandfather made me a swing, dangling
rope from stout branches. I hurtled
between them high as I could, pumping
out half the day while my mind daydreamed
the joy of no school, no camp, no blocks
of other children fighting childhood’s wars.
With the old people I listened to radio news
of Japanese in Nanking, Madrid on fire,
Hitler’s brownshirts heiling. The hurricane
of 1938 ripped down the older maple.

When I was twelve and could work the fields,
my grandfather and I, with Riley the horse,
took four days to clear the acres of hay
from the fields on both sides of the house.
With a scythe I trimmed the uncut grass
around boulders and trees, by stone walls,
and raked every blade to one of Riley’s piles.
My grandfather pitched hay onto the wagon
where I climbed to load it, fitting it tight.
We left the fields behind as neat as lawns.
When I moved back to the house at forty,
a neighbor’s machine took alfalfa down
in an afternoon. Next morning, engines
with huge claws grappled round green bales
onto trucks, leaving loose hay scattered
and grass standing at the field’s margin.

A solitary maple still rises. Seventy years
after my grandfather hung the swing,
maple branches snap from the old tree.
I tear out dead limbs for next year’s sake,
fearing the wind and ice storms of winter,
fearing broken trees, cities, and hipbones.
~Donald Hall “Maples” from The Back Chamber.

Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County courtesy of Tayler Rae
Benjamin Janicki of Sedro Woolley raking hay with his team of Oberlanders

I sit with braided fingers   
and closed eyes
in a span of late sunlight.   
The spokes are closing.

It is fall: warm milk of light,   
though from an aging breast.   
I do not mean to pray.   
The posture for thanks or   
supplication is the same   
as for weariness or relief.   
But I am glad for the luck   
of light. Surely it is godly,   
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become   
actual to each other.

Light that’s sucked into   
the eye, warming the brain   
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.
~May Swenson from “October”

portrait of Dan’s mom, Emma Gibson, praying, by granddaughter Sara Larsen

I know all too well that by this time in October, the light is changing, the colors have faded, and the chill sets in. I grasp for memories of Octobers past and bundle up the scenes I can preserve now, like harvesting hay to be tied up in bales and stored safely until the middle of winter. 

Then, at the right time, when I’m most hungry for color and light,  when I’m most worried about what lies in store for us in the future, I loosen the strings on the memories and let the images tumble out, feeding me like mother’s milk.

And grateful, I fill up rather than break into pieces…

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No Place to Call Home

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My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
~Fady Joudah “Mimesis” from Alight

Like these lands we travel through,
I have grown weary, so rough, so dry.
I wet a finger to give suck
but it never lasts longs. When the baby
cries, the sound comes sharper. It cuts me.

Some didn’t believe the stories
of soldiers pouring south, what they did
to the women, to children.
Made the men watch then let them live.
Some didn’t believe, but my husband
did not hesitate: we cannot wait, he said.

We travel between slaughter and exile.
A foreign land, people who already hate us.
How will they ever take us in? What will we do
when they turn us back? Afraid ourselves,
we instruct the little ones to be quiet,
but an infant only understands hunger.

I lay him against me, try the finger trick;
he snuggles in and falls asleep, his lips
still moving. The moon was full
but is now empty, like me. I was a child
but now am woman, a mother. Is this all

I can give this child—a world of rage and shame,
of bloodshed and vengeance?
~Edward Dougherty from “Between Slaughter and Exile”

Over the eons of human history, very few people groups have been able to remain exactly where they first settled.

The forces that drive tribes, cultures and communities to move on or be chased out are multiple and often overlapping: natural disasters, poverty, disease, prejudice, persecution, oppression, drought, starvation, war, politics.

Some simply seek refuge in hope of a better life.

We who sit safe and snug in our homes forget there was no such comfort for many of the generations preceding us. Those displaced faced terrible risks as they sought out safety. Millions have suffered and died in the hope of securing a future for themselves and their descendants. Countries – even ours, the richest on earth – struggle to house and feed their own residents, much less able to cope with those who arrive even more destitute and desperate. Doors and borders around the world slam shut and remain closed.

No child should be caught in this ongoing cycle of grief and weeping, rage and shame, bloodshed and vengeance, slaughter and exile. We watch history repeat itself, again and again; we become history in the making.

May God work out a solution when mere people cannot.

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Born Broken

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Man is born broken.
He lives by mending.
The grace of God is glue.
~Eugene O’Neill

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.
~Mary Oliver “The Journey”

When I first read <Mary’s poem> years ago, I had trouble with it. It seemed to advocate the kind of self-centered life that’s one of the core pathologies of modern culture.

But life experience—hard experience—has led me to see the wisdom here. None of us can “mend” another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it.

Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.

What we can do is walk alongside the people we care about, offering simple companionship and compassion. And if we want to do that, we must save the only life we can save, our own.

Only when I’m in possession of my own heart can I be present for another in a healing, encouraging, empowering way. Then I have a gift to offer, the best gift I possess—the gift of a self that is whole, that stands in the world on its own two feet.

…anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.
~Parker Palmer writing about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”

We are born hollering,
so abruptly separated
from warmth and comfort.
Broken in emptiness
from the first breath,
every alveoli fills up
with the air of a fallen world.

Yet air is never enough for us.

The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether lungs
or stomach
or starving synapses,
still hollering in our loneliness
and heart-
broken.

I spent over forty years
devoted to the mending business,
patching up the breaking and broken.

Yet I know I was never enough.

We heal best
through our walk with others
who are also broken.
We bridge the gaps
by knitting together scraggly fragments
of each other’s shattered lives.

The crucial glue is
boiled from gifted Grace –
our filled holes miraculously made holy.

So it is – Immanuel, God with us, is always enough.

The Mending Song – lyrics from Arnold Lobel’s poem below

There was an old woman of long ago who went about her mending;
She sewed the wind against the clouds to stop the trees from bending;
She stitched the sun to the highest hill, to hold the day from ending.

Her thimbles and threads were close at hand for needlework and quilting,
For sewing gardens to the sky to keep the blooms from wilting,
For lacing the land to the crescent moon, to save the world from tilting.

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Lapsed Ordinary

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Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.
~Seamus Heaney  “Had I Not Been Awake”

October is the month of the sudden warm wind-blow, usually arriving from the south, intent on scattering leaves and slamming doors on its way past to head north to Canada. Our wind chimes outside clang a cacophony rather than the usual gentle harmonic tones. The window shades become percussion instruments over our still-open windows. Anything not fastened down goes airborne.

The air blows in a rush from somewhere else, bringing new smells and sensations, surging with an electric energy even as it tries to pull power lines down to render us powerless.

Nothing feels ordinary in a windstorm; there is no easy sleep.

And just as suddenly, the autumn storm passes and is gone. The trees have been stripped, embarrassed at their sudden nakedness. Branches litter the yard and driveway like so many toothpicks. My illusion of comfort and control has been undone by such a show of force and power.

I face my own frailty in the wake of life’s storms.
Had I not been awake, I might have missed that altogether.

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Days of Special Radiance

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Now over everything the autumn light is thrown
And every line is sharp and every leaf is clear,
Now without density or weight the airy sun
Sits in the flaming boughs, an innocent fire
That shines but does not burn nor wither.
The leaves, light-penetrated, change their essence,
Take on the gold transparence of the weather,
Are touched by death, then by light’s holy presence.

So we, first touched by death, were changed in essence,
As if grief grew transparent and turned to airy gold
And we were given days of special radiance,
Light-brimmed, light-shaken, and with love so filled
It seemed the heartbeat of the world was in our blood,
And when we stood together, love was everywhere,
And no exchange was needed, if exchange we could
The blessedness of sunlight poised on air.
~May Sarton “Poem in Autumn”

The brightness of the day becomes
the brightness of the night;
the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I think
sunlight has failed her.
Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.
Between herself and the sun,
something has ended.

She wants, now, to be left alone;
I think we must give upturning to her for affirmation.
Above the fields, above the roofs of the village houses,
the brilliance that made all life possible
becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch: they give nothing but ask nothing.
From within the earth’s bitter disgrace,
coldness and barrenness
my friend the moon rises:
she is beautiful tonight,
but when is she not beautiful?
~Louise Glück from “October”

photo by Ben Gibson

This October Sabbath morning,
gray clouds lie heavy and unrelenting,
hovering low over the eastern hills.

A moment’s light snuck out from under the covers,
throwing back the blankets
to glow golden over the valley.

Only a minute of unexpected light underneath the gray,
then gone in a heartbeat (as are we) – yet –
O!  the Glory when we shine luminous together.

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These Things We Depend On

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This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.
~Louise Glück “The Night Migrations”

(Louise Glück died yesterday at age 80; she was both a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry)

All through August and September
            thousands, maybe
tens of thousands, of feathered
            creatures pass through
this place and I almost never see
            a single one. The fall
wood warbler migration goes by here
            every year, all of them,
myriad species, all looking sort of like
            each other, yellow, brown, gray,
all muted versions of their summer selves,
            almost indistinguishable
from each other, at least to me, although
            definitely not to each other,
all flying by, mostly at night, calling to each
            other as they go to keep
the flock together, saying: chip, zeet,
            buzz, smack, zip, squeak—
            those
sounds reassuring that we are
            all here together and
heading south, all of us just passing
            through, just passing
through, just passing through, just
            passing through.
~David Budbill “Invisible Visitors” from Tumbling Toward the End

Some feathered travelers slip past us unseen and unheard. 
They may stop for a drink in the pond
or a bite to eat in the field and woods,
but we never know they are there – simply passing through.

Others are compelled to announce their journey
with great fanfare, usually heard before seen. 
The drama of migration becomes bantering conversation
from bird to bird, bird to earth, bird to sun, moon and stars,
with unseen magnetic forces pointing the way.

When not using voices, their wings sing the air
with rhythmic beat and whoosh.

We’re all together here — altogether —
even when our voices are raised sharply,
our silences brooding, our hurts magnified, our sorrows deep.
Our route and mode of travel become a matter of intense debate.

The ultimate destination is not in dispute however. 
It isn’t simply enough to just be,
but to be heading to where we belong,
to that which we depend upon.
We are migrating souls finding a way back home
where all is solace, all is meaning,
all is grace, all is peace.

We’re just passing through,
just passing through, just passing through.

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Each, Ever and All

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I’ve fallen many times:
the usual stumbles
over secret schoolgirl crushes,
head-over-heels for teen heartthrobs.
I loved them all.

I’ve fallen so many times:
tripped down the aisle
over husband, daughter, son.
Madly and deeply,
I love them all.

I’ve fallen again and again:
new friends, a mentor, a muse,
numerous books, a few authors,
four dear pups and a stranger, or two.
I loved them all.

I’ve fallen farther,
fallen faster,
now captivated, I tumble—
enthralled with my grandchildren.
I love them each, ever and all.
~Jane Attanucci, “Falling” from First Mud

Six grandchildren in less than seven years
brings a bounty of baby hugs and snuggles.

With each one,
I fall farther and faster than ever before.

In a lifetime of falling head over heels
for those most precious to me,
a loving husband, two sons and a daughter,
dear friends and mentors,
numerous pups and ponies…

still none could prepare me for this ~

the blessing of loving our children’s children,
their smiles and giggles and arms wrapped around us

these have become most cherished
each, ever and all.

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Choosing to Protect Unseen Nests

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I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
~Tess Gallagher “Choices” from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

Might I be capable of such tenderness?
Might I consider the needs of others,
by saving not just one nest,
but all future nests,
rather than exercise my right
to an unimpeded view,
wanting the world to be exactly
how I want it?

I must not forget:
my right to choose
demands that I
choose to do right by those
who have no choice.

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