Last evening, As I drove into this small valley, I saw a low-hanging cloud Wandering through the trees. It circled like a school of fish Around the dun-colored hay bales. Reaching out its foggy hands To stroke the legs of a perfect doe Quietly grazing in a neighbor’s mule pasture.
I stopped the car And stepping out into the blue twilight, A wet mist brushed my face, And then it was gone. It was not unfriendly, But it was not inclined to tell its secrets.
I am in love with the untamed things, The cloud, the doe, Water, air and light. I am filled with such tenderness For ordinary things: The practical mule, the pasture, A perfect spiral of gathered hay. And although I should not be, Consistent as it is, I am always surprised By the way my heart will open So completely and unexpectedly, With a rush and an ache, Like a sip of cold water On a tender tooth. ~Carrie Newcomer “In the Hayfield” from A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays
deer running in the foreground
Cool water on a tender tooth describes it exactly:
a moment of absolute wonder brings exquisite tears to my eyes. I’m so opened and exposed as to be painful, feeling a clarity of being both sharp and focused.
it’s gone as quickly as it came, but knowing it was there – unforgettable – and knowing it is forever only a memory, both hurts, and comforts…
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There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice. ~John Calvinas quoted in John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988)byWilliam J. Bouwsma
It is too easy to become blinded to the glory surrounding us if we allow it to seem routine and commonplace.
I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a blade of grass, given how focused I am in mowing it into conformity and submission.
During the summer months, I’m seldom up early enough to witness the pink sunrise. In the winter, I’m too busy making dinner to take time to watch the sun paint the sky red as it sets.
I miss opportunities to stop and notice what surrounds me innumerable times a day. It takes only a moment of recognition and appreciation to feel the joy, and for that moment time stands still. So life stretches a little longer when I stop to acknowledge the intention of creation as an endless reservoir of rejoicing.
If a blade of grass, if a palette of color, if all this is made for joy, then perhaps, so am I. Even colorless, commonplace, sometimes stormy me. Indeed, so am I.
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ― Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields… Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. ~Mary Oliver from “Why I Wake Early”
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. ~Wendell Berry from “How to Be a Poet”
Here I am, telling you what I pluck out of silence every morning, tossing my prayer to the world to share what is astonishing to me so as not to forget each moment.
Here you are, listening to this silence every morning, reacting with kindness, receiving my heart – this is even more astonishing to me and sacred.
Thank you for being here to see what I find. Thank you for sharing with others in your life. Thank you for letting me know it makes a difference. Thank you for making the best of my little words and pictures.
Welcome back, each and every day. Happy you are here.
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What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in your hand Ah, what then? ~Samuel Coleridge “What if you slept”
What do our dreams tell us of heaven?
Perhaps our dreams are lush with exotic flowers never imagined growing in earthly soil.
We hold tightly to a vision of divinely strange and beautiful, to remind us of heaven in our waking hours.
My dream of heaven blooms plain and simple, strangely beautiful in its familiarity, held firmly in my hand each day.
The dreams welcome me home, asleep or awake.
Ah, what then? What if heaven is the divine brought home in our hand?
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Just down the road… around the bend, Stands an old empty barn; nearing the end. It has sheltered no animals for many years; No dairy cows, no horses, no sheep, no steers. The neigh of a horse; the low of a cow; Those sounds have been absent for some time now. There was a time when the loft was full of hay, And the resounding echoes of children at play. At one time the paint was a bold shade of red; Gradually faded by weather and the sun overhead. The doors swing in the wind… the hinges are loose, Windows and siding have taken a lot of abuse. The fork, rope and pulleys lifted hay to the mow, A task that always brought sweat to the brow. But those good days are gone; forever it seems, And that old barn now stands with sagging beams. It is now home to pigeons, rats and mice; The interior is tattered and doesn’t look very nice. Old, abandoned barns have become a trend, Just down the road… around the bend. ~Vance Oliphant “Old Barn”
We will call this place our home The dirt in which our roots may grow Though the storms will push and pull We will call this place our home
We’ll tell our stories on these walls Every year, measure how tall And just like a work of art We’ll tell our stories on these walls
Let the years we’re here be kind, be kind Let our hearts, like doors, open wide, open wide Settle our bones like wood over time, over time Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine
A little broken, a little new We are the impact and the glue Capable more than we know To call this fixer upper home
With each year, our color fades Slowly, our paint chips away But we will find the strength And the nerve it takes To repaint and repaint and repaint every day
Let the years we’re here be kind, be kind Let our hearts, like doors, open wide, open wide Settle our bones like wood over time, over time
Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine Let the years we’re here be kind, be kind Let our hearts, like doors, open wide, open wide Settle our bones like wood over time, over time
Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine
Smaller than dust on this map Lies the greatest thing we have The dirt in which our roots may grow And the right to call it home ~Ryan O’Neal “North” (listen to the choral versions below)
Each of us needs a home. Every creature needs a place to put down roots and rest their head.
Yet, due to ravages of time, a poverty of spirit and strength, discouragement and discord, natural disasters and drought, or the devastation of politics and war — too many find themselves chipped away until nothing is left.
It is time for restoration. It is time for renewal.
It is time for kindness: the broken repaired, the lonely made welcome, the hungry fed.
Somehow, someway, we rebuild, repaint and restore so all put down roots and thrive and are welcomed home.
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One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. ~Richard Wilbur “The Beautiful Changes”
I am changed again, as I blend into autumn.
We can’t help but be transformed by everything around us, you know.
Beautiful is the dying meadow, the shedding of dry reddened leaves, the tidal wave of wildflowers nodding goodbye until next summer.
Beauty is beheld with wonder and then lost to the ages. We cannot change what we see, but treasure its transience, as we cherish our own brief moments here.
We hold on lightly, ready to let go when the time comes. What comes next is beautiful beyond imagining.
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O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart,– Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me,– let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call. ~Edna St. Vincent Millay “God’s World”
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute? I’m ready to go back. I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people. ~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town
Let me not wear blinders through my days. Let me see and hear and feel it all even when it seems too much to bear.
Lord, prepare me to be so whelmed at your world, that Heaven itself will be familiar, and not that far, Just round the corner.
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The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us, and God. ~Stephen Paulus “The Old Church”
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower Under the blazing summer sky On a back road seldom traveled Where the shadows of tall trees Graze peacefully like a row of gallows…
The congregation may still be at prayer. Farm folk from flyspecked photos Standing in rows with their heads bowed As if listening to your approaching steps. So slow they are, you must be asking yourself How come we are here one minute And in the very next gone forever? Try the locked door, then knock once.
High above you, there is the leaning spire Still feeling the blow of the last storm. And then the silence of the afternoon . . . Even the unbeliever must feel its force. ~Charles Simic, from “Wooden Church” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
Mom, You raised your hands while we sang this morning like I’ve never known you to, but I guess until recently I’ve never really known you in a church that let you feel alive.
There is so much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We who look odd and lean awry, so keen to find flaws in one another when we are already cracked open and spilling with our own.
Yet what is right with the church is Who we pray to, why we sing and absorb the Word- we are visible people joined together as a body so bloodied, so bruised, yet being healed despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
We are simply grateful to be alive, eating a meal together, mourning those we have lost, coming together to raise our hands, to kneel and bow in a humble house God calls His very own.
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The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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I must go in; the fog is rising… ~Emily Dickinson, her last words
And when it lifts, the fog lifts what it buried, the tall pines stand taller, the valley breathes a magnanimous air, the green grass hills stir in wonder, the fleeting white clouds flee with their shadows, a bale of hay makes the case for being alone, and what was erased and briefly forgotten retrieves its mother tongue, speaking truth to the hour. And to be a witness to such plumes of mist dissolve into the vastness is to be the vastness, the Earth’s step our step, the observer and the observed holding hands with time, blankets of grief the years have cottoned over uncovered, the pallbearer–– coffin on shoulder––in view of the mound of soil up ahead summoned to his depths; dear father, here I am. ~Howard Altmann “The Fog”from In This House
Fog swallows us whole, not unlike being lowered into the depths of the grave.
Immersed so thoroughly, surrounded and muffled, yet still breathing in the chill mist.
But then the fog lifts. It rises. And takes us with it.
Father, here I am, holding hands with time.
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