Month: January 2025

Coming and Going

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Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be,
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.
~Thomas Kelly from his hymn “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him”

Because I was not marked.
Because I had neither fame
nor beauty nor inquisitiveness.
Because I did not ask.
Because I used my hands.
Because I finished my term on earth
and had no knowledge of either
fear nor care, no morning knowledge,
no knowledge of evening,
and those who came before
and those following after
had no more knowledge of me
than I had of them.
~Mary Ruefle from “Marked”

Whether we are coming or going,
beginning or ending,
leading or following,
rising or setting,
north or south,
east or west ~
one day we shall be
where or what we should be,
without fear nor care nor knowledge.

We’ll journey the continuum of grace and comfort,
part of our Creator’s purpose and design.

So even if not now in our comings and goings,
we will never be lost nor adrift.

We are forever found.

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Peace Rising in the Dark

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In winter, the earth remembers its hidden life;
a silence deepens that is not emptiness but preparation.
~Rowan Williams

When, in the middle of the night,
you wake with the certainty you’ve
done it all wrong, when you wake
and see clearly all the places you’ve failed,
in that moment, when dreams will not return,
this is the chance for your most gentle voice—
the one you reserve for those you love most—
to say to you quietly, oh sweetheart,
this is not yet the end of the story.
Sleep will not come, but somehow,
in that wide-awake moment there is peace—
the kind that does not need
everything to be right before it arrives.
The kind that comes from not fighting
what is real. The peace that rises
in the dark on its sure dark wings
and flies true with no moon, no stars.
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “With Astonishing Tenderness” from The Unfolding

Peaceful sleep has been elusive over the last 10 nights.

I realize a significant number of people are resting more easily. They celebrate an overwhelming number of rapid changes instituted by a new government administration over a few days.

I’m not among them.

Sweetheart, this is not yet the end of the story.
It never is.

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A Flurry of Owls

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Each night, an owl cries out from the redwoods. He calls, and I call back. I call, and he answers. We share the same bright moon, the same shadows, and the same fate. The possibility of discussion is limitless;  we have no secrets. This morning I discovered an owl pellet by the front door—a wad of fur, and a jumble of femurs and little ribs—oracle bones, easy to decipher.
~Gary Young [Each night, an owl cries out from the redwoods.]

Once again a child asks me suddenly What is a poem?,
And once again I find myself riffing freely and happily
Without the slightest scholarly expertise or knowledge;
But I am entranced by how poems can hint and suggest
And point toward things deeper than words. A poem is
An owl feather, I say. It’s not the owl—but it intimates
Owlness, see what I mean? You imagine the owl, owls,
Silent flight, razors for fingers, a wriggle of mouse tail
Slurped up right quick like the last strand of angel hair,
A startle of moonlight, a fox watching from the thicket,
All that from a feather. It’s like an owl is in the feather.
A poem is a small thing with all manner of bigger in it.
Poor poems only have a writer in them, but better ones
Have way more in them than the writer knew or knows
About. This poem, for example, amazingly has owls in
It—who knew we’d see a flurry of owls this afternoon?
~Brian Doyle, “A Flurry of Owls”

Once in awhile I walk into our big hay barn to retrieve a few barn owl feathers and owl pellets.

They were left behind, waiting for a poem to hide within.

The barn owls stay tucked invisibly in the rafters
until dusk and hunger lures them to the hunt,
swooping outside to capture both moonlight and mice
to be coughed up in pellets of fur and bones.

These feathers, dropped like so many random snowflakes,
carry within them the glint and glow of the moon.

A reminder:
what we leave behind matters,
whether it be feather or fur
or a wee dry skeleton,
a shell of who we once were
yet are no longer.

We leave more than shadow.

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Learning the Hard Way

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There are three kinds of men.
The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation. 
The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
~Will Rogers

We living creatures learn from the moment we take our first breath. We continue to learn until our last breath. With that lifetime of learning, one would think eventually we should find some semblance of wisdom.

But we don’t. We tend to learn the hard way especially when it comes to matters having to do with our (or others’) health and well-being.

Within a community, we want autonomy to do as we like, no matter what the science says. You’d think we’d know better, but as fallible human beings, we may impulsively make decisions about health issues. Is it evidence-based or simply an anecdotal story about what “worked” or “didn’t work” for someone else?

We’re facing at least four years of a new administration encouraging us all to “pee on the electric fence” and learn for ourselves rather than trust science. Careful research, years of observed experience, and plain common sense isn’t enough to trust public health and infectious disease experts to make wise recommendations about community and individual risk and prevention strategies.

The cows and horses on our farm need to touch an electric fence only once when reaching for greener grass on the other side. That moment provides a potent learning curve for them to make important future decisions. They won’t try testing it again no matter how alluring thngs appear on the other side. Humans should learn as quickly as animals but unfortunately don’t.

I know all too well what a shock feels like and I want to avoid repeating that experience.  Even so, in unguarded careless moments of feeling invulnerable (it can’t happen to me!) or annoyed at being told what I can and can’t do, or simply indulging in magical thinking, I find myself reaching for the greener grass. 

I suspect I’m not alone in my surprise when I’m jolted back to reality.

Many great minds have worked out various theories of effective learning, but, great mind or not, Will Rogers confirms a common sense suspicion: an adverse experience, like a “bolt out of the blue,” can be a powerful teacher. 

So we call peeing on an electric fence it “a teachable moment.”

Sadly, when we learn the hard way, it often ends up hurting everyone.

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The Hard Knuckle of the Year

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I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
~Jane Kenyon “Otherwise”

…this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.
~Barbara Crooker from “Ordinary Life” in Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems

…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
God, grant me the grace of a normal day.
~Billy Coffey

…there is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them.
~Katrina Kenison from The Gift of an Ordinary Day

These dead of winter days are lengthening, slowly and surely. I’m thankful I’m retired now so I no longer I leave the farm in darkness to head to work in town, and return in darkness at the end of the workday.  I’m able to do my barn chores at either end of the day as the sun is rising to chase away the moon, and later as the sun is chased away by starlight.

I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday. The distinct blessings of an ordinary day are lost in the rush of moving forward to whatever comes next. Poet Jane Kenyon wrote her poem with the knowledge she was dying of leukemia, which meant each ordinary day was precious indeed.

The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of each day.
It might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise. That is the hard knuckle of the days we are given, each a gift, each peaches and cream.

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A Prayer for Being Here

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I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.
~David Budbill from Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.

It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings.

It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”

I began to write regularly after September 11, 2001 because that day it became obvious to me I was dying too, though more slowly than the thousands who vanished in fire and ash, their voices obliterated with their bodies.   So, nearly each day since, while I still have voice and a new dawn to greet, I speak through my fingers to others dying around me.

We are, after all, terminal patients, some of us more prepared than others to move on, as if our readiness has anything to do with the timing.  When our small church lost one of its most senior members to metastatic cancer, he announced his readiness once the doctor gave him the dire news (he liked to say he never bought green bananas as he wasn’t sure he’d be around to use them), but God had different plans and kept him among us for several years beyond his diagnosis.

Each day I too get a little closer to the end, but I write in order to feel a little more ready.  Each day I detach just a little bit, leaving a trace of my voice behind.  Eventually, through unmerited grace, so much of me will be left on the page there won’t be anything or anyone left to do the typing. I will be far out of the park, far beyond here.

Not a moment, not a sunrise, not a sunset, and not a word to waste.

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Winter Quickening

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By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
~William Carlos Williams “Spring and All”

A week still left of January
with much of the country
in deep freeze,
covered in snow and ice
with bitter wind chill.

Yet the wintry outsides begin to awaken–
tender buds swelling,
bulbs breaking through soil,
in reentry to the world
from the dark and cold.

Like a mother holding
the mystery of her quickening belly,
so hopeful and marveling –
she knows soon and very soon
there will be spring.

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Ain’t It Good to Know…

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Because I know tomorrow
his faithful gelding heart will be broken
when the spotted mare is trailered and driven away,
I come today to take him for a gallop on Diaz Ridge.

Returning, he will whinny for his love.
Ancient, spavined,
her white parts red with hill-dust,
her red parts whitened with the same, she never answers.

But today, when I turn him loose at the hill-gate
with the taste of chewed oat on his tongue
and the saddle-sweat rinsed off with water,
I know he will canter, however tired,
whinnying wildly up the ridge’s near side,
and I know he will find her.

He will be filled with the sureness of horses
whose bellies are grain-filled,
whose long-ribbed loneliness
can be scratched into no-longer-lonely.

His long teeth on her withers,
her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild.
Her long teeth on his withers,
his oiled-teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild.
Their shadows’ chiasmus will fleck and fill with flies,
the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth.
From ear-flick to tail-switch, they stand in one body.
No luck is as boundless as theirs.
~Jane Hirshfield “The Love of Aged Horses”

We all know that something is eternal. 
And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, 
and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars 
. . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, 
and that something has to do with human beings. 
All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that 
for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised 
how people are always losing hold of it. 
There’s something way down deep that’s eternal ….
~Thornton Wilder, from “Our Town”

Is there anything as wonderful as a good friend when times get tough?

Someone who doesn’t mind if you are getting long in the tooth and fluffy around the waist and getting white around the whiskers?

Someone who will listen to your most trivial troubles and nod and understand even if they really don’t?

Someone who will fix you up when you are hurt and celebrate when you are happy?

Someone who knows exactly where your itches are that need scratching, even if it means a mouthful of hair?

We all need at least one. We all need to be one for at least one other.

Ain’t it good to know?
You’ve got a friend in me…

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The Dark Abyss of Hatred

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Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.
~Martin Luther King, Jr. from A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

I would permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
~Booker T. Washington from Up from Slavery

Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that. 
Hate cannot drive out hate:
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction….
The chain reaction of evil —
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars —
must be broken,
or we shall be plunged
into the dark abyss of annihilation.
~Martin Luther King Jr. from Strength to Love

Do not be overwhelmed with evil but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:21

The goal of this life is to live with love and compassion for others, even those who try to pull us deep into the abyss of hatred.

Each of us, whether president, prince or pauper, is called to give up our own selfish agendas and consider the dignity of others and their greater good.

Cherish life: all lives – as is crystal clear from Christ’s example on the cross – including those who do hateful things and want to harm us. Let us not be pulled down to their level, spewing angry vindictive words rather than words of grace and peace.

Our only defense against evil is God’s love as sacrifice; only He can lead us to “where everything sad will come untrue”, where tears are no longer shed in anger, sorrow, and fear.

The light beam of His love finds us in the dark abyss.
The great shadow of meanness and hatefulness departs.

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Sticking Together

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But a dragon lies in ambush for the traveler;
take care he does not bite you and inject you his poison of unbelief.
Seeing this numerous company winning salvation,
he selects and stalks his prey.
In your journey to the Father of souls,
your way lies past that dragon.
How shall you pass him? You must have
“your feet stoutly with the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15)
so that, even if he does bite you,
he may not hurt you.
~St. Cyril of Jerusalem

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote:
“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.”

No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.
~Flannery O’Connor from “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”

Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
Whatever I do, he wants to do,
“Where are you going today?” says Pooh:
“Well, that’s very odd ‘cos I was too.
Let’s go together,” says Pooh, says he.
“Let’s go together,” says Pooh.

“Let’s look for dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“Yes, let’s,” said Pooh to Me.
We crossed the river and found a few-
“Yes, those are dragons all right,” said Pooh.
“As soon as I saw their beaks I knew.
That’s what they are,” said Pooh, said he.
“That’s what they are,” said Pooh.

“Let’s frighten the dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“That’s right,” said Pooh to Me.
“I’m not afraid,” I said to Pooh,
And I held his paw and I shouted “Shoo!
Silly old dragons!”- and off they flew.

“I wasn’t afraid,” said Pooh, said he,
“I’m never afraid with you.”

So wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
“What would I do?” I said to Pooh,
“If it wasn’t for you,” and Pooh said: “True,
It isn’t much fun for One, but Two,
Can stick together, says Pooh, says he.
“That’s how it is,” says Pooh.
~A.A. Milne from “Us Two”

<Here there be dragons>
was any place on ancient maps
that was unknown and unexplored-
a place to avoid at all costs~
or for the daring traveler,
pointing to exactly the place to explore.

Here there be dragons
marks the remainder of our days
that dwell at the edge of life’s roadmap
~ unknown and full of peril ~

So many dragons to encounter,
ready to swallow us whole
if we follow a careless leader,
make a wrong turn,
ignore all signs of impending hazards.

Dragons singe our britches when we stray
beyond the known borders of the map.

There are dark valleys to pass through,
so many mysteries unsolved,
so many stories of frightening journeys told –
yet we stick together through troubles.

We pull on our stoutest shoes,
ready to trek where ever we must go,
never straying from the well-worn path
of those faithful few who have managed
to stay out of the jaws of dragons
to tell the cautionary tale.

“I’m never afraid with you… and that’s how it is…”

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