It’s deep time here, this barrow grave five thousand years old, where we follow like sheep behind the guide to the heart of its cruciform center.
I’ve never been in a space so dark. What was it like to fear that the sun would not return, that crops would wither, deer flee, that night’s dark cloak was all there was?
But miraculously, on the lip of the solstice, the light returned, liquid and golden, ran down the narrow corridor, hit the back wall, splashed in the stone basin, and they knew summer would come back, run to fruit. Light, dark, freeze, thaw, seedtime, harvest, wheel of the year, the spiral dance.
What would they make of our device-laden lives, fossil-fueled cars, over-stocked larders? Who stands in the dark and listens now, gaping at the stars? — Barbara Crooker, “Newgrange” from The Book of Kells
There is nothing so dark as centuries-old underground tunnels and portal tombs, some positioned with an opening to capture a beam of light exactly at either the winter or summer solstice, illuminating what dwells in blackness the rest of the year.
The more recent ninth century soutterain tunnels were refuge for Christians hiding from invaders, keeping whole villages safe from capture.
The dolmens and portal graves are Neolithic structures built before the pyramids. They still exist today as they were constructed to last by people serious about their beliefs.Though those people are long dust, the stones and tunnels remain as they were, to protect the spirits of the departed.
What would they think now of our extravagance, our plethora of goods and foods, our ways of crippling others remotely using weapons dropped from the sky, but also the weapons of internet disinformation and hacking, hallucinations and lies from artificial intelligence?
Our ways make stealing, pillaging, raping and enslaving strangers seem so… messy.
We mustn’t fool ourselves. We are still messy.
We moderns are lost in our over-abundance of light year round, scarcely noting the calendar or the passing of the longest and shortest days.
I bow my head to the remarkable people of strength who have preceded us, who sought mightily to preserve the significance of a Light returning to penetrate their darkness.
Legananny Dolmen, Northern IrelandLegananny dolmenKilfeaghan DolmenAI image created for this post
Lyrics: Daylight comes and nighttime goes, nighttime falls, day flies Round and round the cycle goes, we live and then we die and then we live and then we die. The seasons of my life go round, the sunshine and the rain The fallow and the fruitful days, the joy and then the pain and then the joy and then the pain. As light below, so light above, so light in all we see
The light is in the act of love, the light that sets us free, yes, it’s the light that sets free. Daylight comes…
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Our shadows bring them from the shadows: a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales. A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple and a patch of gray. One with a gold head, a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins like half-folded fans of lace. A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one, and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water. They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us as we lean on the cement railing in indecisive late-December light, and because we do not feed them, they pass, then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop. “Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them, like a subplot or a motive, is a school of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned, perhaps another species, living in the shadow of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white, seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses, unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet. ~Susan Kolodny “Koi Pond, Oakland Museum”
The boardwalk, a treachery of feathers ready to receive another broken bone, looms just above the surface. Step deliberately when approaching. With few exceptions, ice has claimed this part of the pond.
This is where you see her, moving through what free water remains: a sluggish ghost in the shadows, slow, conserving the fragile heat she still has in this late winter. A canopy of juniper dressed with light snow overhangs, watching.
Last year, a quorum of her kind was lost, turned to stone, to frigid silence. She doesn’t know that story, but some instinct guides her to keep what warmth she can, to cruise in stubborn torpor.
In her drift, she remembers the summer, her long, languid vowels, the accompanying texts of her companions. How they interwove manuscripts, narrations of sky, tree, sun, and moon. Warm days are a memory now, and thoughts rest lightly in her body.
She has held the same posture for an hour. Her bones have reached a conclusion— an idea about hope itself— there, near the indifferent bridge, inches from the force that will take her ~Carolyn Adams, “Koi Pond” from Going Out to Gather
The water going dark only makes the orange seem brighter, as you race, and kiss, and spar for food, pretending not to notice me. For this gift of your indifference, I am grateful. I will sit until the pond goes black, the last orange spark extinguished. ~Robert Peake from “Koi Pond”
Koi and goldfish thrived in our pond after we covered it with netting, finally thwarting the herons arriving at dawn for breakfast.
Thus protected, our fish grew huge, celebrating each feeding with a flurry of tail flips and gaping mouths as I tossed pellets to them each evening.
When the pond cooled in the fall and sometimes ice-covered in winter, the fish settled at the bottom, barely moving silhouettes of color in the darkness. Spring would warm them to action again. As the water temperature rose, so did they, eager and hungry to flash their color and fins again.
Two winters ago, the chill winds and low temperatures lasted longer than usual. As the pond ice began to melt, the fish at the bottom remained still as stones. Netting them for burial felt like burying the sun and the moon and the stars, relegating their rainbows of light and color deep into the earth.
No longer would their colorful glory shine, an illumination now extinguished.
I haven’t had the heart to try again. I need a pond heater, a new filter system, and a total clean out of the pond if I am going to restock.
But then I remember the joy of feeding those flashes of fins and fish mouths, so I just might try again.
Rainbows promise to return, even from buried stone.
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Lyrics From the love of my own comfort From the fear of having nothing From a life of worldly passions Deliver me O God From the need to be understood From the need to be accepted From the fear of being lonely Deliver me O God And I shall not want I shall not want When I taste Your goodness I shall not want From the fear of serving others From the fear of death or trial From the fear of humility Deliver me O God
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Our memories are, at best, so limited, so finite, that it is impossible for us to envisage an unlimited, infinite memory, the memory of God.
It is something I want to believe in: that no atom of creation is ever forgotten by him; always is; cared for; developing; loved. ~Madeleine L’Engle from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
…a friend told me a story about a little girl who wanted time alone with her infant brother. Her parents were suspicious of her motives. What if she did something to harm the baby? The big sister was so persistent that her mom and dad finally decided to allow her ten minutes alone with him in his room. After they closed the door, they listened quietly.
They felt chills when they heard their daughter say, “Baby tell me what heaven is like. I’m starting to forget.” ~Sue Shanahan from “Fresh from Heaven”
He of strength and hope, of infinite memory and everlasting love:
He knows us down to our very atoms ~~ even we who are weak, broken, and undeserving.
He causes us to burst into bloom in remembrance of having been in His presence.
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Some claim the origin of song was a war cry some say it was a rhyme telling the farmers when to plant and reap don’t they know the first song was a lullaby pulled from a mother’s sleep said the old woman
A significant factor generating my delight in being alive this springtime is the birdsong that like a sweeping mesh has captured me like diamond rain I can’t hear it enough said the tulip
Lifetime after lifetime we surged up the hill I and my dear brothers thirsty for blood uttering our beautiful songs said the dog ~Alicia Suskin Ostriker “Song” from The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
To be blessed is to know God is inside all created things, even those seemingly hopeless.
To be blessed is to sing a lullaby of loving kindness that settles a restless heart.
To be blessed is to become a blessing so contagious, there is no hope of cure.
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Lyrics: Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us, And black are the waters that sparkled so green. The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us, At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow, Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease! The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, Asleep in the arms of the slow swinging seas! ~Rudyard Kipling “The White Seal”
translated lyrics from the Lakota: Ah I say, I say to you I am speaking to you… Ah I say, I say to you To you I am saying it My kind-hearted boy go to sleep Tomorrow will be nice I am speaking to you
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A day is nothing if not a disappearing act held fast by ropes of sunlight and breeze until rain comes or a tree coughs to shake night along;
then there are the shadows that feel like yesterday’s distance but become only apparitions when we haul them into light or move beyond their pull—
I wish for mornings, still, days full of violets— and the beautiful clouds, where in their always- disappearing, their solemn ache, I find poems. ~Sarah Etlinger “Evanescence (with Clouds)” from The Weather Gods
I look for poems everywhere, even in colorless misty mornings, chill and stormy winds, humid breathless afternoons.
It is as if a Poet is saying to me: I feel this ache today. You too?
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Remember the tree house? I suppose that was less us than perhaps the music at church, or the car—my bad, bad cars. But remember anyway.
There were the grass fires we saw when I was young. You don’t know this yet, but I’ve written about them, the smell of smoke and vanilla.
The business trips you took us on. The short stories said while waiting at the post office. How you tried to convince us that camping was fun; it was
in retrospect. The tree house, hung from an ageless pine, provided a new perspective on everything I saw from ground- level, our whole backyard. ~David K. Wheeler “Father’s Day” from Contingency Plans
To every man His treehouse, A green splice in the humping years, Spartan with narrow cot And prickly door.
To every man His twilight flash Of luminous recall of tiptoe years in leaf-stung flight;
To every man His house below And his house above— With perilous stairs Between. ~James Emmanuel from “The Treehouse”
photo by Dan Gibson
My father’s treehouse dream is thirty years old this summer, lonesome and empty in our front yard, a constant reminder of his own abandoned Swiss Family Robinson dreams. Over the years, it has been the setting for a local children’s TV show, laser tag wars, sleep overs and tea parties, even briefly my writer’s retreat with a deck side view of the Cascades to the east, the Canadian Coastal Range to the north and Puget Sound to the west.
Now it is a sad shell no longer considered safe, as the support branches in our 110+ year old walnut tree are weakening with age and time. It is on our long list of farm restoration projects, but other falling down buildings must be prioritized first.
My father’s treehouse idea began in February 1995 when our sons were 8 and 6 years old and our daughter just 2. We had plenty of recycled lumber on our old farm and a perfect front yard walnut tree. Dad, retired from his desk job and having recently survived a lymphoma diagnosis and treatment, had many previous daunting building projects to his credit, and a few in his mind that he was yet to get to. He was eager to see what he could construct for his grandkids by spring time. He doodled out some sketches of what might work in the tree, and contemplated the physics of a 73 year old man scaling a tree vs. building on the ground and hoisting it up mostly completed. I got more nervous the more I thought about it and hoped we could consider a project less risky, and hoping the weather wouldn’t clear enough for construction to start any time soon.
The weather cleared as simultaneously my father’s health faded. His cancer relapsed and he was sidelined with a series of doctor’s appointments, hospitalizations and treatment courses. He hung on to that hope of getting the treehouse going by summer, still thinking it through in his mind, still evaluating what he would need to buy to supplement the materials already gathered and piled beneath the tree. In the mean time he lost physical strength day by day.
His dream needed to proceed as he fought his battle, so I borrowed library books on treehouses, and hired two college age brothers who lived down the road to get things started. I figured if my dad got well enough to build again, at least the risky stuff could be already done by the young guys. These brothers took their job very seriously. They pored over the books, took my dad’s plans, worked through the details and started in. They shinnied up the tree, put up pulleys on the high branches and placed the beams, hoisting them by pulling on the ropes with their car bumper. It was working great until the car bumper came off.
I kept my dad updated long distance with photos and stories. It was a diversion for him, but the far off look in his eye told me he wasn’t going to be building anything in this world ever again. He was gone by July. The treehouse was done a month later. It was everything my dad had hoped for, and more. It had a deck, a protective railing, a trap door, a staircase. We had an open tree celebration and had 15 neighbors up there at once. I’m sure dad was sipping lemonade with us as well, enjoying the view.
Now all these years later, the treehouse is tilting on its foundation as the main weight bearing branch is weakening. We’ve declared it condemned, not wanting to risk an accident. As I look out my front window, it remains a daily reminder of past dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled. Much like my father’s body, the old walnut tree is weakening, hanging on by the roots, but its muscle strength is failing. It will, some winter, come down in one of our frequent fierce windstorms, just as its nearby partner did decades ago.
The treehouse dream branched out in another way. One of the construction team brothers decided to try building his own as a place to live in his woods, using a Douglas Fir tree as the center support and creating an octagonal two story home, 30 feet off the ground. He worked on it for two years and moved in, later marrying someone who decided a treehouse was just fine with her, and for 25+ years, they’ve been raising five children there. Those treehouse kids have worked for me on our farm, a full circle feeling for me. This next generation is carrying on a Swiss Family Robinson dream that began in my father’s mind and our front yard.
I still have a whole list full of dreams myself, some realized and some deferred by time, resources and the limits of my imagination. I feel the clock ticking too, knowing that the years and the seasons slip by me faster and faster. I passed the age my father was when he first learned he had cancer. It would be a blessing to me to see others live out the dreams I have held so close.
Like my father, I will some day teeter in the wind like our old tree, barely hanging on. When ready to fall to the ground, I’ll reach out with my branches and hand off my dreams too. The time will have come to let them go.
Thank you, Dad, for handing me yours.
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As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end. ~Wislawa Szymborska “Vermeer” tr. by Claire Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak from Here
Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
As ever, the sun rises and the sun sets, day after day. God continues to pour out His colors across the skies.
God loves us enough to plant each of us here with a plan for our redemption.
We don’t know how much longer.
Today we wave flags, some in a show of power, some in a show of gratitude, some in a show of discontent.
Instead, I pour milk as a daily sacrament: quietly, with great concentration and appreciation, as that is the work I must do, day after day.
To milk the cows and raise wheat for bread and conceive children and raise them up to pour and bake.
This is God’s created world, after all. We must do our best to restore and preserve all that He has made.
So keep milking and keep pouring.
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One grief, all evening—: I’ve stumbled upon another animal merely being itself and still cuffing me to grace.
This time a bumblebee, black and staggered above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop at what I think is dying
to deny loneliness one more triumph, I see instead a thing drunk with discovery—the bee entangled
with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly I receive the cold curves and severe angles
from this morning’s difficult dreams about faith:—certain as light, arriving; certain as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.
How many strokes of undivided wonder will have me cross the next border, my hands emptied of questions? ~Geffrey Davis “West Virginia Nocturne”from Night Angler
So much happens in the lives of creatures in the world above, around, and beneath our feet. The dewy immobilized bumblebee, the ladybug floating, rescued by a cloverleaf, the translucent spider hiding in a blossom fold.
Most of the time we are oblivious, absorbed in our own joys, fears, and sorrows, struggling to understand our own place in the world, unsure if we people are the only image of our Creator.
But life’s drama doesn’t just belong to us.
It is the baby bird fallen from the nest too young, rescued from mouth of the barn cat. It is the farmyard snake abandoning its ghost-like skin. It is the spider residing in the tulip, ready to grab the honey bee. It is the praying mantis poised to swallow the fly. It is the katydid, the cricket, the grasshopper trying to blend in.
When I struggle with my faith in this often cruel world, I realize not every question, not every doubt, needs answers. It is enough, as a trusting witness of all that is wondrous around me, to pray someday it will no longer be mysterious.
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When I drink in the stars and upward sink into the theater your words have wrought, I touch unfelt immensity and think— like Grandma used to pause in patient thought before an ordinary flower, awed by intricacies hidden in plain view, then say, “You didn’t have to do that, God!”— Surely a smaller universe would do!
But you have walled us in with open seas unconquerable, wild with distant shores whose raging dawns are but your filigree across our vaulted skies. This art of yours, what Grandma held and I behold, these flames, frames truth which awes us more: You know our names. ~Michael Stalcup“The Shallows”
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the “snow” that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn’t working. Soldiers will toss their weapons in the grass. The oceans will stop their inexorable rise. No one will have to sit on a committee. When twilight falls, the aurora borealis will cut off cell phones, scramble the Internet. We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek, decorate our hair with fireflies, spin until we’re dizzy, collapse on the dew-decked lawn and look up, perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines of cold code written in the stars. . . . ~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning
But when Aurora, daughter of the dawn, With rosy lustre purpled o’er the lawn. ~Homer from the Odyssey
Aurora is the effort Of the Celestial Face Unconsciousness of Perfectness To simulate, to Us. ~Emily Dickinson
…for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Luke 23:45
A little over a year ago, an incredible display of aurora borealis paid a rare visit to our part of the Pacific Northwest. It felt appropriate to whoop and holler when the expanse of multicolored lights began to shimmer and shift above us.
Yet as the colors deepened and danced, what struck me most was the sense of how the heavens and earth seek a “thin place” where the space between God and us narrows to a hair-breadth, summoning us to communion with Him.
Just as the curtain barring us from the holy of holies in the temple was torn in two at Christ’s moment of death, with this display, the curtain between heaven and earth seems pulled apart allowing His Light to reach us.
All earthly matters which cause grief cease to matter, such as wars and talk of wars, with politicians grandstanding 24/7.
Sadly though, our flawed and fallen human foibles continue on, oblivious to the perfection of our Creator and His universe.
We are unable to separate ourselves from God’s grandeur and creation when He bids us to witness His celestial face.
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