Ten more miles, it is South Dakota. Somehow, the roads there turn blue, When no one walks down them. One more night of walking, and I could have become A horse, a blue horse, dancing Down a road, alone.
I have got this far. It is almost noon. But never mind time: That is all over. It is still Minnesota. Among a few dead cornstalks, the starving shadow Of a crow leaps to his death. At least, it is green here, Although between my body and the elder trees A savage hornet strains at the wire screen. He can’t get in yet.
It is so still now, I hear the horse Clear his nostrils. He has crept out of the green places behind me. Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder These words I have written. He has lived a long time, and he loves to pretend No one can see him. Last night I paused at the edge of darkness, And slept with green dew, alone. I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow To the shadow of a horse. ~James Wright “Sitting in a small screenhouse on a summer morning”
I have a sense of someone reading over my shoulder as I write.
It keeps me honest to feel that warm breath on my hair, its green smell reminding me where I am and who I am. It is encouraging to know what I do matters to someone.
I do not try to be anyone else.
When my words don’t say exactly what I hope, I feel forgiveness from the shadow beside me.
It’s all softness and warm breath. It’s all okay even when it’s not.
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The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions, his voluble strength as provider. But where is the female he drums for? Where? I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding, the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate. ~Jane Hirshfield “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning”
A woodpecker once, A sort of a dunce, And who as a warbler not much of a siren, Passed by many trees Where he might have with ease Bored out a nice hole to his hunger appease, For a lofty church steeple made out of sheet iron.
He whetted his bill, And then with good-will And a thrumpty-thrum-thrum he started to bore, Nor let up until The end of his bill Was worn off so much that it gave him a chill And the back of his bobber began to get sore.
A black bird and wren, A rooster and hen, A crow and a sparrow were watching him drill, And squinted one eye At his birdship so high, So far from the earth that he looked like a fly And wondered how long he could work with good-will.
When his bobber gave out He gave a faint shout To the crowd that was watching him down on the ground, And said, Come up here Where the air is so clear And lend me a hand, for a worm is so near Whenever I peck I can hear his faint sound.
Then the blackbird and wren And the sparrow and hen And the crow that were watching him, called from below And said, “Silly Goose, Your work’s of no use, You might drill in that iron until your head’s loose. You have no more sense than some men that we know.” ~Ed Blair “The Foolish Woodpecker”
Piliated woodpecker
A bold piliated woodpecker in Rockport, Massachusetts made the news last week about his destructive rampage through that community, cracking mirrors and windows on vehicles. He is attacking his reflection as a potential competitor.
He’s been nicknamed the “piliated pillager.” His aggressive attitude and bright topknot of unruly feathers is reminiscent of another public figure who won’t be stopped from destroying things.
We have a variety of these little fellows here on the farm. One would think the loud rat-a-tats emanating from trees and buildings would be due to similar bold and fearless birds. Yet our woodpeckers tend to be visitors seldom-seen yet most-audible. They project a loud and noisy presence to the ear but prefer to be invisible to the eye.
These noisy birds are a reminder of how some people hammer away on social media, often using lots of capital letters. They desperately want to be heard and acknowledged, wanting their opinions to resonate and reverberate for all to hear.
Whenever I hear an insistent pecking echoing from on high, I try to spot the offending and ornery woodpecker who is claiming dominance over the airwaves and his intended targets. There is no question he has once again succeeded in getting my attention, even if my sole reaction is to shake my head at his utter foolishness — he has no more sense than some men I know…
FlickerDowny woodpecker
“If only, if only, ” the woodpecker sighs The bark on the trees was as soft as the skies… ~from the story “Holes”
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The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side. ~G. K. Chesterton, on his death bed
God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?
For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.
It will be too late then to choose your side.
There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not.
Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. ~C.S. Lewis – from Mere Christianity
…our hands have always been able to heal as much as harm. …since the dawn of humanity, each of us contains three people— the angel, the demon, and the one who decides which we will obey. ~Billy Coffey
It shouldn’t take plunging into a profound darkness, swallowed in a pit of sadness and sorrow to experience God’s immense capacity for love and compassion, but that is when our need for light and forgiveness is greatest.
It should not take sin and suffering to remind us life is precious and worthy of our protection, no matter how tempted we are to choose otherwise.
We are created, from the beginning, in the beginning, with the capacity to choose sides between darkness and light.
We choose too often to remain cloaked in darkness.
Our God chooses to shine the light of His Creation, to conquer our darkness through illuminating grace, dispersing our shadows, suffering the deepest darkness on our behalf to guarantee we are eternally worthy of His loving protection.
How then will we choose when He so clearly chooses us?
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Perhaps she came down for the apples, or was flushed out by the saws powering the far woods, or was simply lost, or was crossing one open space for another.
She was a figure approaching, a presence outside a kitchen window, framed by the leafless apple trees, the stiff blueberry bushes, the after-harvest corn, the just-before-rain sky,
a shape only narrow bones could hold, turning its full face upward, head tilted to one side, as if to speak.
Everything changing faster than we can respond: loss of jobs, research halting mid-study, inconsistency abounds, families shattered, uncertainty prevails.
What happened to of the people, by the people, for the people rather than dictated by just a few
We are so lost, how to find our way back to caring for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable with a spirit of commitment, compassion and sacrifice.
For God alone – no one else – remains our strength and shield. Lost and afraid, we want our lives back.
We need His Refuge where we may rest. We seek Sanctuary from this darkness, to once again awaken hopeful to a new morning.
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Lined with light the twigs are stubby arrows. A gilded trunk writhes Upward from the roots, from the pit of the black tentacles.
In the book of spring a bare-limbed torso is the first illustration.
Light teaches the tree to beget leaves, to embroider itself all over with green reality, until summer becomes its steady portrait and birds bring their lifetime to the boughs.
Then even the corpse light copies from below may shimmer, dreaming it feels the cheeks of blossom. ~May Swenson “April Light”
This world is not defeated by death.
An unprecedented illumination emerged from the tomb on a bright Sabbath morning to guarantee that we struggling people, we who feel we are no more than bare twigs and stubs, we who aren’t budging from where we are rooted, are now begetting green, ready to burst into blossom, our glowing cheeks pink with life, a picture of our future fruitfulness.
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Old friend now there is no one alive who remembers when you were young it was high summer when I first saw you in the blaze of day most of my life ago with the dry grass whispering in your shade and already you had lived through wars and echoes of wars around your silence through days of parting and seasons of absence with the house emptying as the years went their way until it was home to bats and swallows and still when spring climbed toward summer you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened you and the seasons spoke the same language and all these years I have looked through your limbs to the river below and the roofs and the night and you were the way I saw the world ~W.S. Merwin “Elegy for a Walnut”from The Moon Before Morning
Today I stood under the kitchen archway and stepped into my new body. Pasta was on the stove, a cold Tupperware of string beans on the counter. But I knew. I knew I would never be the same— the way I’m certain the magnolia down the block has lost all its petals. I haven’t checked in days, but I’m convinced tomorrow when I take my son to the bus stop, I’ll see them splashed on the sidewalk. What I’m trying to say is sometimes your old skin falls breathlessly off your body in late April, as you slice a cucumber into half moons for your child, and you just stand there and let it. ~Wendy Wisner “Shedding” from The New Life: Poems
This grand old tree defines the seasons for me while it parallels my own aging.
This past winter’s storms took its branches down in the night with deafening cracks so loud I feared to see what remnant remained in the morning.
Yet it still stands, intrepid, ready for another round of seasons– though tired, sagging, broken at the edges, it’s always reaching to the sky.
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Before the second summit party began the ascent of the princess of mountains, an ominous black cloud settled slowly around the summit block, persuading us to take a rest day, but morale was good. The next day at seven in the evening, my daughter Devi was on her last pitch, and it took her until midnight to haul up over the final lip. A long day.
Two days later, a blizzard kept us in our tents, but the next morning, Devi was stricken, saying calmly, “She is calling me. I am going to die,” before she fell into unconsciousness. I tried to revive her, mouth-to-mouth, but felt her lips grow cold against mine. We had lost her. My daughter was gone. I and the other climbers wept.
Her fiancé Andy and I bundled her in her sleeping bag and slipped her off the precipice of the North- East face. I said we had committed her to the deep. She had been the driving force behind this expedition, as she was inexorably drawn to her namesake. The Bliss-Giving Goddess had claimed her own. An excerpt from her last diary is inscribed on a stone placed in a high-altitude meadow of Patai:
“I stand on a windswept ridge at night with the stars bright above and I am no longer alone but I waver and merge with all the shadows that surround me. I am part of the whole and I am content.” ~Eleanor Swanson, Last Light on the West Face of Nanda Devifrom Non Finito
Nanda Devi peak, courtesy of Stanford Alpine Club
The ripple effect from Nanda Devi Unsoeld’s arrival as a new junior in Olympia High School in 1970 reached me within minutes, as I felt the impact of her presence on campus immediately. One of my friends elbowed me, pointing out a new girl being escorted down the hall by the assistant principal. Students stared at the wake she left behind: Devi had wildly flowing wavy long blonde hair, a friendly smile and bold curious eyes greeting everyone she met.
From the neck up, she fit right in with the standard appearance at the time: as the younger sisters of the 60’s generation of free thinking flower children, we tried to emulate them in our dress and style, going braless and choosing bright colors and usually skirts that were too short and tight. There was the pretense we didn’t really care how we looked, but of course we did care very much, with hours spent daily preparing the “casual carefree” look that would perfectly express our freedom from fashion trends amid our feminist longings.
Practicing careful nonconformity perfectly fit our peers’ expectations and aggravated our parents.
But Devi never looked like she cared what anyone else thought of her. The high school girls honestly weren’t sure what to make of her, speculating together whether she was “for real” and viewed her somewhat suspiciously, as if she was putting on an act.
The high school boys were mesmerized.
She preferred baggy torn khaki shorts or peasant skirts with uneven hems, loose fitting faded T shirts and ripped tennis shoes without shoelaces. Her bare legs were covered with long blonde hair, as were her armpits which she showed off while wearing tank tops. She pulled whole cucumbers from her backpack in class and ate them like cobs of corn, rind and all. She smelled like she had been camping without a shower for three days, but then riding her bike to school from her home 11 miles away in all kinds of weather accounted for that. One memorable day she arrived a bit late to school, pushing her bike through 6 inches of snow in soaking tennis shoes, wearing her usual broad smile of satisfaction.
As a daughter of two Peace Corps workers who had just moved back to the U.S. after years of service in Nepal, Devi had lived very little of her life in the United States. Her father Willi Unsoeld, one of the first American climbers to reach the summit of Mt. Everest up the difficult west face, had recently accepted a professorship in comparative religion at new local Evergreen College. He moved his wife and family back to the northwest to be near his beloved snowy peaks, suddenly immersing four children in an affluent culture that seemed foreign and wasteful.
Devi recycled before there was a word for it simply by never buying anything new and never throwing anything useful away, involved herself in social justice issues before anyone had coined the phrase, and was an activist behind the scenes more often than a leader, facilitating and encouraging others to speak out at anti-war rallies, organizing sit-ins for world hunger and volunteering in the local soup kitchen. She mentored adolescent peers to get beyond their self-consciousness and self-absorption to explore the world beyond the security of high school walls.
Regretfully, few of us followed her lead. We preferred the relative security and camaraderie of hanging out at the local drive-in to taking a shift at the local 24-hour crisis line. We showed up for our graduation ceremony in caps and gowns while the rumor was that Devi stood at the top of Mt. Rainier with her father that day.
I never saw Devi after high school but heard of her plans in 1976 to climb with an expedition to the summit of Nanda Devi, the peak in India for which she was named. She never returned, dying in her father’s arms as she suffered severe abdominal pain and irreversible high altitude sickness just below the summit. She lies forever buried in the ice on that faraway peak in India.
Her father died in an avalanche only a few years later, as he led an expedition of Evergreen students on a climb on Mt. Rainier, only 60 miles from home. Her mother, Jolene, later served in Congress from our district in Washington state.
Had Devi lived these last 50 years, I have no doubt she would have led our generation with her combination of charismatic boldness and excitement about each day’s new adventure. She lived without pretense, without hiding behind a mask of fad and fashion and conformity and without any desire for wealth or comfort.
I wish I had learned what she had to teach me when she sat beside me in class, encouraging me by her example to become someone more than the dictates of societal expectations. I secretly admired the freedom she embodied in not being concerned in the least about fitting in. Instead, I still mourn her loss all these years later, having to be content with the legacy she has now left behind on a snowy mountain peak that called her by name.
Mt. Shuksan, Washington state
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The fields are snowbound no longer; There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green. The snow has been caught up into the sky— So many white clouds—and the blue of the sky is cold. Now the sun walks in the forest, He touches the boughs and stems with his golden fingers; They shiver, and wake from slumber. Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls. … Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears…. A wind dances over the fields. Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter, Yet the little blue lakes tremble And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver. ~Katherine Mansfield “Very Early Spring”
You might say that clouds have no nationality Being flags of no country, flaunting their innocent neutrality Across frontiers, ignorant of boundaries; But these clouds are clearly foreign, such an exotic clutter Against the blue cloth of the sky I want to rummage among them, I want to turn them over With eager fingers, I want to bargain For this one or that one, I want to haggle and dicker Over the prices, and I want to see my clouds wrapped up In sheets of old newspapers, and give them away To young girls to pin in their hair Or tuck them, glossy as gardenias, behind an ear, Or stretch one out to the length of a lacy shawl And toss it over a shoulder, or around a waist. ~Constance Urdang “Clouds”
Our farm sits about 9 miles from an international border. The sky and clouds are oblivious to the line drawn by two governments, and don’t bother to stop at the border stations controlling access of humans across that line.
The clouds are free to go where they please, so they do, while we watch. They are both a foreign and domestic cloud of witnesses to our earthbound follies and foolishness.
No passports or IDs, no being pulled into “secondary” for more intensive searches and questioning, no being “turned back” not allowed across, no deportations.
They simply float and glide where the breezes take them, assuming whatever shape, identity or characteristics they wish.
What a beautiful day in the neighborhood if one happens to be a cloud or a cloud of witnesses…
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Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody’s voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. ~William Butler Yeats from “Easter, 1916”
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. ~Wendell Berry from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
It had been a slow coming of spring this year, seeming in no hurry whatsoever. Snow has remained in the foothills and the greening of the fields only begun.
Bravely, flowering plum and cherry trees burst into bloom despite a continued chill, and the pink dogwood and apple blossoms are now emerging. The perfumed air of spring permeates the dawn.
Such variability is disorienting, much like standing blinded in a sudden spotlight in a darkened room, practicing resurrection.
Yet this is exactly what eastering is like. It is awakening out of a restless sleep, opening a door to let in fresh fragrant air, and the heavy stone locking us in the dark is rolled back.
Overnight all changed, and changed utterly.
He is not only risen. He is given indeed.
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It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there. ~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary
Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. John 21:12
It is too easy, by the next day, to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to get through each day, our jaws set, our teeth gritted, as we have before.
We are blinded by our grief, shivering in misery, thinking Him only the Gardener as He passed by. We don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, Who is always tending us: the new Adam, caring for a world desperate for rescue.
God knows this about us. So He invites us to breakfast on Monday and every day thereafter.
He feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and welcomes us to join Him, as if nothing extraordinary has just happened.
Just yesterday evening he reviewed His Word and broke bread in Emmaus, opening the eyes and hearts of those like us who failed to see Who this is walking beside them.
This is no ordinary Gardener.
When He offers up a meal of His Word, the gift is nothing less than Himself.
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