Author: barnstormingblog

I'm a wife, mother, farmer and family physician living the rural life in northwest Washington.

Let Us Gather a Vase of Flowers

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Master, how serene
Are all the hours
We waste
If, as we waste them,
We place them in a vase
Like flowers.

There are no sorrows
In our lives
Nor joys either.
Let us learn then,
Innocent sages,
Not to live life,

But to pass through it,
Tranquil, serene,
Taking children
As our teachers,
Eyes full
Of Nature . . .

Beside a river,
Beside a road,
Wherever we are,
Living life
With the same
Light ease.

Let us gather flowers.
Let us bathe our hands
In the calm rivers,
And from them
Learn their calm.

[12 June, 1914]
~Fernando Pessoa from “Ode 1” translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean 
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; 
To which, besides their own demean, 
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. 
Grief melts away 
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing. 

Who would have thought my shriveled heart 
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 
  Quite underground; as flowers depart 
To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 
Where they together 
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 

 These are thy wonders, Lord of power, 
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell 
And up to heaven in an hour; 
Making a chiming of a passing-bell. 
We say amiss 
This or that is: 
Thy word is all, if we could spell. 

         Oh that I once past changing were, 
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! 
Many a spring I shoot up fair, 
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; 
Nor doth my flower 
Want a spring shower, 
My sins and I joining together. 

But while I grow in a straight line, 
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, 
Thy anger comes, and I decline: 
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone 
Where all things burn, 
When thou dost turn, 
And the least frown of thine is shown? 

And now in age I bud again, 
After so many deaths I live and write; 
I once more smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing. Oh, my only light, 
It cannot be 
That I am he 
On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

These are thy wonders, Lord of love, 
To make us see we are but flowers that glide; 
Which when we once can find and prove, 
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; 
Who would be more, 
Swelling through store, 
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
~George Herbert “The Flower”

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee from “From Blossoms”

Our small church has a couple of gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards and fields each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.

It is a special treat to walk into church and see what they brought to the altar to share with us all on Sunday morning. I keep a photo album of these very unique Sunday “pulpit posies” our keepers of gardens share.

Why are these arrangements special?
After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.

These are special as many of these flowers are seeded, watered, fertilized and nurtured by one of our own, grown with love and caring, just as God cares for each of His children.

These are special as some are considered simple weeds, and are gleaned from ditches and hedges. They are part of God’s creation and have a wild beauty that can be as breathtaking as a hothouse orchid.

These are special because they often go home with a congregant or visitor who will enjoy their loveliness for many more days, as if they represent the manifestation of God’s Word itself.

Some of us are dahlias, zinnias and roses.
Some of us are rare gardenias and orchids.
Most of us are dandelions, sagebrush, Queen Anne’s lace,
fireweed, burdock, and daisies thriving
in the crevasses, ditches and hedgerows of life.

No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of our loving gardening God. He created us to take care of His creation.

Each week, we bud afresh for Him.

Come and See: Who Do You Think You Are?

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The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”

“I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”

At this they exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets.

Who do you think you are?”

Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”

 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
John 8: 48-59

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice.

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. …

Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
~C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity

I am all at once what Christ is,
since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection“

He says emphatically: Before Abraham, I am.

He is the Lord,
not liar nor lunatic.

He rains upon our thirsting earth
with shining drops of living water.

We are saved from the drought
of unbelief and skepticism.

Who do we think He is?
He is the immortal I AM.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Trembling for our Country

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The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
~George Washington to his troops July 2, 1776

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time:
the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
–Thomas Jefferson, in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America”
Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever…
― Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia on the need for abolition of slavery

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.
We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it.

We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.

The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
~Abraham Lincoln in his 1862 address to Congress

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.
~ Theodore Roosevelt

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
~James Madison

Fifty years ago this week, I was impatiently marking time as a new college graduate awaiting my first day of medical school to commence. I was too self-absorbed to pay much attention to the significance of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from British rule.

That changed when two British student friends arrived in my home town on a summer Greyhound Bus tour of the U.S. right before the 4th. They were most gracious watching the extravagant folderol of a community’s traditional Fourth of July patriotism and fireworks. It was a curiosity to them, given their visitor perspective, coming from “historical enemy” territory.

Their perception was: the U.S. as a broiling work in progress, still much unsettled and somewhat unsettling.

I wonder if Thomas Jefferson, architect of the words we celebrate today, would still be trembling for his country?

I believe he would, considering his views were radical in his day, his religious convictions unconventional, and his plantation managed by slaves of African descent. He personally understood the moral quicksand on which he tenuously stood–the conflict he felt was as close as the maintenance of his home and his own mixed-race children. He would mourn the modern abuse of our liberties secured through the blood of our forefathers, our brothers, sisters and children.

Today we are sinking deeply in that same quicksand, having done no better than Jefferson at forging a personal and moral foundation on which to firmly stand. We have squandered our autonomy with selfishness rather than a selflessness borne of gratitude for the gift of freedom.

Some in leadership want to exponentially increase and secure what they consider their personal due, before considering, out of humility, others who have greater needs first. We use up land and animals and water without regard to those who will come after us, failing to be stewards of the garden so generously given to our care. 

History as recorded in the Word and elsewhere shows when everyone does as they see fit, there is no immunity from judgment and wrath:

In those days there was no king in Israel,
but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Judges 17:6

And how well is that working out for us with the attitudes of our current leadership? We continue unsettled and unsettling, a country of paradoxical perspective about what true freedom means.

In Biblical times, it took a true servant King sacrificing Himself to save us from destroying ourselves. Even now, He continues to try, awaiting our sincere repentance and response.

We should be trembling…

partial lyrics:
And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

But it’s alright, it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what has gone wrong

Lyrics:
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is,
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

So let us raise this melody together,
Beneath the stars that guide us through the night;
If we choose love, each storm we’ll learn to weather,
Until true peace and harmony we find,
This is our song, a hymn we raise together;
A dream of peace, uniting humankind.

As If in Prayer

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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”

Two horses
lean in the field
clasped against each other as if in prayer,
grooming each other’s manes the way
my thumb strokes the back of my thumb.

Together, tall, conductive
around them, fenced lightning,
above, a promise of more rain to come,
the force of faith condensing, cumulative—

A wave tries to return to the river what it has been given, futile.

Two swans, only ever as far apart as palms, a wingspan,
float by shore, sucking up silt, throats rippling,
taking in something as vast as the sea in small sips.

If, on cold nights,
before bed,
I pray for something as simple as the warmth of my hands—
~Ace Chu “Dear” from The Hopper

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.   
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me   
And nuzzled my left hand.   
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
~James Wright “A Blessing”

May we easily find one another’s itches, just as we know our own.
May we greet all visitors with a gentle and humble welcome.
May we bow our heads together when in need of community.
May we clasp hands in prayer to God, warming each other’s hands
when the world is feeling far too cold.


Lyrics:
Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night. ​​​​​​​​
(Mark Twain left this poem on his daughter’s tombstone)

Seeing Clearly

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Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
~William Butler Yeats from “Vacillation”

photo by Emily Dieleman

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”
~Czeslaw Milosz “At a Certain Age”

photo by Nate Gibson

I have a brief confession
that I would like to make.
If I don’t get it off my chest
I’m sure my heart will break.

I didn’t do my reading.
I watched TV instead—
while munching cookies, cakes, and chips
and cinnamon raisin bread.

I didn’t wash the dishes.
I didn’t clean the mess.
Now there are roaches eating crumbs—
a million, more or less.

I didn’t turn the TV off.
I didn’t shut the light.
Just think of all the energy
I wasted through the night.

I feel so very guilty.
I did a lousy job.
I hope my students don’t find out
that I am such a slob.
~Bruce Lansky “Confession”

Norman Rockwell’s “Before the Shot”
photo by Barb Hoelle

We all have confessions we could make.
We all want to avoid admitting mistakes and failings.
We all live under the black cloud of knowing our guilt and shame.

I have plenty of opportunity to replay the many moments I’ve regretted what I said or did,
or what I could have said or did….and didn’t.
Recalling remorse is far easier and stickier
than replaying joy that seems so fleeting in my memory.

There are times when I feel both weighed down by memories
and freed at the same time.

It almost always happens while sitting in worship in church,
silently confessing how I have wronged those around me
or turned my face from God.

Yet in the next moment,
I feel the embrace of a Creator who never forgets but still forgives.
It is an overwhelming knowledge that brings me to tears every time.

It is in that moment that my joy no longer is fleeting;
it lives deeply in my cells since I, like all around me,
am created in His image.

And no, we don’t look like a toad.

God saw what He made in His image,
and it was, and still is, good –
though flawed in our own choices.
He made each of us out of love for us,
not out of regret.
We each open our heavy eyelids, see His Face
and can say, “That’s me.”

toad picture by Josh Scholten

Best of Barnstorming Photos: January/June 2026

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Thank you for following along with me
through days, weeks, months, and years ~

of sunrises and sunsets, changes of seasons,
while together, we witness time as it flows unimpeded…

Ask me no more where Jove bestows, 
When June is past, the fading rose; 
For in your beauty’s orient deep 
These flowers as in their causes, sleep. 

Ask me no more whither doth stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.
~Thomas Carew from “A Song: When June is Past”

Previous collections of “Best of Barnstorming” photos:

Summer/Fall 2025

Winter/Spring 2025

Summer/Fall 2024

Winter/Spring 2024

Summer/Fall 2023

Winter/Spring 2023

Summer/Fall 2022

Winter/Spring 2022

Summer/Fall 2021

Winter/Spring 2021

Summer/Fall 2020

Winter/Spring 2020

Summer/Fall 2019

Winter/Spring 2019

Summer/Fall 2018

Winter/Spring 2018

Summer/Fall 2017

Winter/Spring 2017

Summer/Fall 2016

Winter/Spring 2016

Summer/Fall 2015

Winter/Spring 2015

Summer/Fall 2014

Winter/Spring 2014

Best of 2013

Seasons on the Farm:

BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter, 
at Year’s End

A Stone Where the Crust of Time is Thin

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I went by the Druid stone 
   That stands in the garden white and lone,   
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   
   That at some moments there are thrown
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   
   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,
   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me,   
   Though how do you get into this old track?”
   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   
   As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see
   That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision   
   A shape which, somehow, there may be.”
   So I went on softly from the glade,
   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   
As she were indeed an apparition—
   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
~Thomas Hardy “The Shadow on the Stone”

Scarce images of life,
one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways;
like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones,
upon a forlorn moor…
~John Keats from “Hyperion”

As living stones around a font today,
Rejoice with those who roll the stone away.
~Malcolm Guite from “Baptism”

hole

When Dan discovered this mighty boulder completely underground, near our family’s swing set, he decided it was to be unearthed to create our own standing stone garden close by.

Pulling out the stone took much digging and a strong tractor-pulled chain around its girth, but now here it sits, a Whatcom County sitting stone, where the crust of time is thin…

Big Rock Garden, Bellingham, WA
This dolmen is above the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland
Legananny Dolmen, Northern Ireland

Just as a signpost warns of rockfalls near a cliff-edge,
the standing stones were meant to mark a spot of danger.
A spot where … what?
Where the crust of time was thin?
Where a gate of some sort stood ajar?
~Diana Gabaldon from Outlander

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria, UK

Within That Grip Until the End of Time

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The severest pain will send you
to your bed, drop you to the floor.

The severest pain will roll you
into a fetal ball, and squeeze.

Within that grip, you might descend
into your long-abandoned core,

where, mid uncommon darkness, you
may find the door, whose opening

avails at last that lacuna
wherein the nous proves yet to be

also more spacious than heaven,
bearing also the Very God,

who is most pleased to meet you there.
~Scott Cairn “The End of Suffering” from Lacunae

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path—but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.
~William Stafford “Cutting Loose” from Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems

Before my fever broke,
And the pains lessened, I could actually see
Myself, in the exact center of that square.
How still it had become in my absence, & how
Immaculate, windless, sunlit. I could see
The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree,
See it more clearly than ever, more clearly than
I had seen anything before in my whole life:
Against the modest, dark gray, solemn trunk,
The leaves were becoming only what they had to be—
Calm, yellow, things in themselves & nothing
More—& frankly they were nothing in themselves,
Nothing except their little reassurance
Of persisting for a few more days, or returning
The year after, & the year after that, & every
Year following—estranged from us by now—& clear,
So clear not one in a thousand trembled; hushed
And always coming back—steadfast, orderly,
Taciturn, oblivious—until the end of Time.
~Larry Levis from The Widening Spell of the Leaves 

I did not sleep well last night —
my mind would not stop turning over and over,
my blankets twisted in turmoil,
my muscles too tense and tight.  

The worries of the day
needed serious wrestling in the dark
rather than settling forgotten under my pillow.

Yet this morning dawns anew.

I’m comforted by the rhythm
of hours starting fresh, like leaves on the trees
steadfast, orderly,
taciturn, oblivious—until the end of Time…

So today, I’ll get my hands dirty
digging a hole deep enough to hold my worries;
tomorrow I’ll forget where exactly I buried them.

Come and See: Holding On Will Set You Free

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To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.  So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.  I know that you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word.  I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you are doing what you have heard from your father.”

“Abraham is our father,” they answered.

“If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do what Abraham did. As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the works of your own father.”

“We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.”

Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!  Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me?  Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”
John 8:31-47

I threatened to observe the strict decree
Of my deare God with all my power & might.
But I was told by one, it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light.
Then will I trust, said I, in him alone.
Nay, ev’n to trust in him, was also his:
We must confesse that nothing is our own.
Then I confesse that he my succour is:
But to have nought is ours, not to confesse
That we have nought. I stood amaz’d at this,
Much troubled, till I heard a friend expresse,
That all things were more ours by being his.
What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.
~George Herbert “The Holdfast”


…if nature abhors a vacuum,
Christ abhors a vagueness.
If God is love,
Christ is love
for this one person,
this one place,
this one time-bound and
time-ravaged self.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss

no matter
how much
life is lived—

dandelion
pappus flies
~Francis Weeks “Unfinished”

God’s Word is full of paradox:

We do not recognize how being free to act as we wish enslaves us,
preventing the joy of communion with our Father.

We must hold on to the truth of Christ the Son’s divinity
in order to be set free from sin.

We own nothing separate from what is always His,
but in believing, we gain all He offers.

Rooted in truth, attached to the Son, nourished by the Spirit;
with one Holy Breath, we are freed to dwell with Him forever.

There are dandelions on fire everywhere I look.
Like its pappus seed released when jostled
or simply blown aloft at the moment of ripeness,
may I be the unquiet spirit
carrying His Word on fragile wings
to far corners and hidden places;
settling softly, taking root
wherever His breath takes me.

the “holdfasts” of a Virginia Creeper vine

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

The Melt and Flow of Cut Grass

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had 
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
~Philip Larkin “Cut Grass” from The Complete Poems

June is the month when grass grows exponentially, taking over all open spaces and every nook and cranny

Light and wind work magic on a field of flowing tall grass. The blades of the mower lay it to the ground in green streams that course up and down the slopes. It lies orderly in stoneless cemetery rows.

Farmer’s fields are lined with rows of mown grass, a precious commodity to be harvested for the livestock to eat the rest of the year. Some of the green is bagged up like big marshmallows for easy storage and some put in silos for later in the winter.

The shorn grass is critical to the life of the animals we raise.

What was once waving and bowing to the wind is cut and crushed:
no longer bending but bent,
no longer flowing but flown,
no longer growing but mown.

At summer’s pace, while the clouds saunter overhead, grasses are stored as fodder for the beasts of the farm on those cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.

It will melt in their mouths. As we watch them chew, we’ll remember overflowing abundance of those summer days in June.