Month: September 2024

Waves of Color and Light

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When I crack open
the door beyond
my ruminations,

I find starry
bouquets
of color—
crimson,
apricot,
and yellow
at the threshold.

Dahlias wrapped
in silk ribbon
wait for me
on the porch.

Their petals
long to touch
my face,

to widen
my eyes

so I may see
the waves

of pulsing light,
alive and fragrant,

like love
yearning
to share
her secrets.

I breathe in
tenderness
of flower bodies,

cherish
the blossoming
air in my chest,

I breathe out
from brightening
lungs,

a soul
soothed
by the scent
of earth,

a heart
encouraged
to bloom
at night.
~Claire Coenen “A Secret of Life” from The Beautiful Keeps Breathing

Is it possible for the heart to bloom
with a rainbow of colors that arise
from simple dust?

For we are made of blown dust,
with God-breathed air inflating our lungs,
as we become what He visioned us to be:

the blossoming manifestation of His Love

Vibrant, abundant, reflecting
Him with every twist and turn,
lovingly picked and gathered and cherished.

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Upon the Bough of Morning

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The crust of sleep is broken
Abruptly—
I look drowsily
Through the wide crack.
I do not know whether I see
Three minds, bird-shaped,
Flashing upon the bough of morning;
Or three delicately tinted souls
Butterflying in the sun;
Or three brown-fleshed, husky children
Sprawling hilarious
Over my bed
And me.
~Jeanne D’Orge “Matins” (published in 1917)

This morning I broke through the misty tides of my dreams,
surfacing to cool morning air and prelude of a dawn bird chorus.

Today I wake imagining who I might be from a myriad of dreams…

Sometimes I wake as if once again a young girl,
sun coming through frilly curtains to shower my face with a warming light.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a sleep-thirsty student, hoping to snooze another 15 minutes before class.

Sometimes I wake once again as if a new mother,
dripping and leaking at the sound of my baby’s cries.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a weary farmer, up much of the night with a laboring mare and slow-to-suck foal.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a preoccupied physician, mentally reviewing the night’s phone calls and concerns.

Today I wake as a grandma, wishing my bed would bounce with a pile of birds and butterflies and jubilant children, wishing me good morning and eager to see me up and at ’em.

So who am I?

I was, I am, I will be all those things, as I hang tight to the bough of morning.

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A World Upside Down

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Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course
in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
~Richard Wilbur “Praise in Summer”

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 
~G.K.Chesterton from Orthodoxy

I need no help to imagine this world feels upside down much of the time. When I read the headlines, I have difficulty understanding how anything makes any sense anymore.

Creation inversed: the birds somehow soar through the earth beneath us and the moles and mushrooms are populating the clouds. Instead of stars in the sky, there are innumerable molehills gracing the hillside. We are all mixed up in our perspective, turning creation on its head.

Thank goodness and thank God that everything is put back where it belongs when we are in sore need of reorientation. When we forget our purpose in creation, He reminds us by restoring predictable order and rhythms. When we destroy, He heals and protects. When we get bored with how things are – desperate for innovation and excitement in our attempt to turn the world upside down – He demonstrates contentment with how things were created, and turns it back to right again.

There is enough to keep us busy in this world: crazy weather, global pandemics, volcanic eruptions and quaking ground. We don’t need to complicate an already complicated creation with our designed messes.

We’re meant to admire the birds’ soaring in the skies and appreciate that grubs and gophers course through the soil beneath us. We can praise the sun as it rises each morning and the moon’s varied journey at night – so predictable and reliable and meant to be that way from the very beginning.

Keep it going, God. Do it again.

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Hiding Nothing

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You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him.
He wants to see you as you are,
He wants to be gracious to you.
You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers,
as if you were without sin;
you can dare to be a sinner.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together

In your hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know
They are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?

But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
The tulips, and the pines?

Listen, all you have to do is start and
There’ll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
Slipping over rocks?

And speaking of stones, what about
The little ones you can
Hold in your hands, their heartbeats
So secret, so hidden it may take years

Before, finally, you hear them?
~Mary Oliver “in your hands” from Swan: Prose and Poems

When I take myself to the doctor, I trust I’m seeing someone who tries to know me thoroughly enough that he or she can help me move out of illness into better health.

This is how acceptance feels: trusting someone enough to come out of hiding, allowing them to see the parts of me I prefer to keep hidden.

As a physician myself, I am reminded by the amount of “noticing” I did in the course of my work. Each patient, and there were so many,  deserved my full attention for the few minutes we were together.  I started my clinical evaluation the minute I entered the room and I began taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues offered up, sometimes unwittingly, by another human being.

During the COVID pandemic, my interactions with patients became all “virtual” so I didn’t have the ability to observe as thoroughly as I usually did. Instead, I needed them to tell me outright what was going on in their lives, their minds and their hearts in both spoken or written words. I couldn’t ‘see’ them, even on a screen, in the same way as face to face in the same room.

How can someone call out their worries to me when they are hidden behind a camera lens?

I can’t witness first hand the trembling hands, their sweatiness, their scars of self injury.  Still, I am their audience and a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand their fears to best help them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, accepting them for who they are, with every wart and blemish, offering them the gift of compassion and simply be there for them at that moment.

God isn’t blinded in His Holy work as I am in my clinical duties. He knows us thoroughly because He made us; He knows our thoughts before we put them into words. There is no point in trying to stay hidden from Him.

He holds us, little pebbles that we are, in His Hand, and He listens to our secret heartbeats.

Those of us who believe we can remain effectively hidden will never be invisible to God.

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Clearing the Fog of Medical Advice

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Be obscure clearly.
Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign … think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear!
~E.B. White from his classic book on writing well –The Elements of Style

As a family doctor with over forty years of clinical practice under my belt, I have found the E.B. White’s advice for writing can be applied to the field of medicine. I tried my best to clarify the obscurity of the human condition in my job, hoping my patients could provide me the information I needed to make a sound diagnosis and treatment recommendation.

Communication is hard work for many patients, especially when they are depressed and anxious on top of whatever they are experiencing physically. There is still plenty of unknowns in the psychology and physiology of humans. Then, throw in a disease process or two or three to complicate what appears to be “normal” and further consider the side effects and complications of various treatments.

Evidence-based decision making isn’t always perfectly equipped to produce the best and only solution to one individual’s problem.

Sometimes the solution to a patient’s symptom is foggy, muddy, and obscure, not at all pristine and clear. It is the physician’s job to try to bring everything into the best focus possible. Then it is our job to communicate our thinking and decision process in a way that respects the patient’s right to be skeptical.

A physician’s clinical work is challenging on the best of days when everything goes well. We see things we have never seen before, expect the unexpected, learn skills we never thought we’d need to know, and attempt to make the best choice between competing treatment alternatives. Physicians constantly unlearn things we thought were gospel truth, but have just been disproven by the latest, double-blind controlled study, which may soon be reversed by a newer study.

We find ourselves standing on evidence-based quicksand even though our patients trust that we are giving them rock-solid advice based on a foundation of truth learned over years of education and training. Add in medical decision-making that is driven by cultural, political, or financial outcomes, rather than what works best for the individual, and our hoped-for clinical clarity becomes even more obscured.

Forty-two years of doctoring in the midst of the mystery of medicine means learning, unlearning, listening, discerning, explaining, guessing, hoping, and remaining very humble in the face of a disease process or a public health threat like COVID. What works well for one patient may not be appropriate for another despite what the best evidence says or what insurance companies and the government are willing to cover. Each individual we see deserves the clarity of a fresh look and perspective, instead of being treated by cook-book algorithm.

So, as a physician and healer, be obscure clearly. 
A life may depend on it.

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We Are Lost…

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when the sun peeks over the horizon to greet
the day and spread golden honey warmth
to the dark, sleepy earth

when the birds begin to stir and twitter
and tune their songs to one another

when the trees rustle as the morning breeze
opens her eyes from slumber, and the dew is heavy
on the blades of grass

when I know morning has come once again
and we are not lost to the night, even as we
are not lost to the day

light dawns, and I can move again
breathing in streams of fresh morning air
lighting a candle for rejuvenation
and praying the day in with ginger and
salt and clay

oh how lovely it feels to be alive
how magical to wake with the light
and live
~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water

…deeds are done which appear so evil to us
and people suffer such terrible evils
that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them;
and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it 

so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; 

and this is why:

our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple

And this is what he means where he says, 
“You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well”, 
as if he said, “Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, 
and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.
~Julian of Norwich from Revelations of Divine Love

Even when,
yet again,
innocents – our children, our teachers –
do not wake, as if by magic, to see this golden morn

I’m heavy laden as the tears of this dewy dawn
touch every lost and grieving thing

there is no reason for this
to happen again and again and again
~we weep until we are dry as dust~

Pay attention to this now, to this mourning for innocents
who are lost to the night and the day.

If only we listen and act, shall this be made well.

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Zucchini Chronicles

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Recite fifty zucchini recipes!                                                                                     Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;                                                                                 sauté with olive oil and cumin,                                                                                casserole of lamb; baked                                                                                             topped with cheese; marinated;                                                                                stuffed; stewed….

Sneak out before dawn to drop                                                                                              them in other people’s gardens,                                                                                            in baby buggies at churchdoors.

 Shot, smuggling zucchini into                                                                                               mailboxes, a federal offense.
~Marge Piercy from “Attack of the Squash People”

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.
~Dave Barry

One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of [zucchini] hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight … Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.
~Barbara Kingsolver

It started innocently enough in April
with two-leaf seedlings labeled green and golden;
non-descript squash plants harboring
vast potential.

By June the plants crept across the ground with vines
reaching past the beans to threaten the cucumbers:
going where no vine has gone before,
to divide and conquer, leaving no dust untouched.

July buds formed blossoms inviting bees deep
into yellow-throated pollen pools
thickening within days to elongated flesh:
fecundity in action before our eyes.

The finger-like projections at first harvested
too small, but temptation overwhelms patience;
sauted, grilled with garlic, superb in
supreme simplicity.

But come back a day later: hose-like vines
pumping into each squash, progressive inflation like
balloon-man creations to be twisted and transformed,
but too plump, too distended, too insatiable.

It’s a race to keep up with the pace of production
eat some, give them away, leave on doorsteps like abandoned kittens,
in boxes in church lobbies, lunch rooms at work,
food banks posting signs: “No more zucchini please!”

They march in formation in the garden path
as they are yanked swelling from their umbilical cords
and lined up, stacked, multiplying
like the broom fragments of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

Once tossed on to the compost pile,
they rest in intimate embrace through heated decomposition
in dead of winter, amid steam rising,
a seedling, innocent enough, pokes through exploding with potential~

Run for your lives!

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Transfiguring the Trivial

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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing,
a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail,
the dust in the barn door; a moment,- –
and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect;
but it leaves a relish behind it,
a longing that the accident may happen again.
~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”

Man Scything Hay by Todd Reifers
dust motes and insects in the barn

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

The accident of light does happen,
again and again,
but when I least expect it. 

I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone. 

Yet in that moment,
everything is changed and transformed forever. 

The thing itself,
trivial and transient becomes something other, 
merely because of how it is illuminated. 

And so am I, trivial and transient,
lit from outside myself, winnowed and
transfigured by a love and sacrifice
that I can never deserve.

It was and is no accident.

My heart is readies for earth to be hurled to heaven’s Light.

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The Work of Weaving Dreams

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Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day.
Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly,
then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.

I too spin elaborate dreams at night:
some remembered,
some bare fragments,
some shattered,
some potentially yield a meal.

We work because we are hungry.
We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.

Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams
~out of thin air and gossamer strands~
where nothing existed before,
not as a trap or lure or lair
but as a work of beauty-
a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.

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And So It Goes…

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Toward the end of August I begin to dream about fall, how
this place will empty of people, the air will get cold and
leaves begin to turn. Everything will quiet down, everything
will become a skeleton of its summer self. Toward

the end of August I get nostalgic for what’s to come, for
that quiet time, time alone, peace and stillness, calm, all
those things the summer doesn’t have. The woodshed is
already full, the kindling’s in, the last of the garden soon

will be harvested, and then there will be nothing left to do
but watch fall play itself out, the earth freeze, winter come.
~David Budbill “Toward the End of August”

As the calendar page flips to September this morning, I feel sad for what we leave behind, while knowing what is coming.

Summer is filled with so much overwhelming activity due to 18 hours of daylight accompanying weeks of unending sunny weather resulting in never-enough-sleep. Waking on a summer morning is brim full with possibilities: there are places to go, people who visit, new things to explore and of course, a garden and orchard bearing and fruiting out of control.

As early September days usher us toward autumn, our older grandchildren will adjust to a more predictable routine of school days, ripe with learning opportunities. Great teachers will lead them into vast new worlds of knowledge.

My teacher friend Bonnie coordinates an innovative introduction to fifth grade by asking her students, with some parental assistance, to make (from scratch) their own personalized school desks that will go home with them at the end of the school year. These students create their own learning center with both brains and hands, applying wood-burned and painted designs, with inspirational quotes for daily encouragement. Their desks represent a solid reminder of what they leave behind each year, while striving to become something new.

And so it goes, year after year.

I am wistful about September’s quiet commencement despite no school or job to return to. There is a cool freshness in the air as breezes begin to pluck and toss a few drying leaves from the trees. 

I watch the days play themselves out. No longer do I feel I must direct each moment. 

And so it goes, and so it goes.
And you are the only one who knows.

Mrs. Bonnie Patterson’s fifth graders’ handmade desks
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