Category: anxiety

Living in the Changing Light

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It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”

A strange empty day. I did not feel well, lay around….
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever. Tonight I do feel in a state of grace, limbered up, less strained.
~May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude (January 18, 1971 entry)

Once in your life you pass
Through a place so pure
It becomes tainted even
By your regard, a space
Of trees and air where
Dusk comes as perfect ripeness.
Here the only sounds are
Sighs of rain and snow,
Small rustlings of plants
As they unwrap in twilight.
This is where you will go
At last when coldness comes.
It is something you realize
When you first see it,
But instantly forget.
At the end of your life
You remember and dwell in
Its faultless light forever.
~Paul Zimmer “The Place” from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited

My family members and I have had weeks of feeling just on the verge of conquering the latest viral upper respiratory illness, but then would find ourselves welcoming the next cold as if it were a long lost friend.

I’m discouraged by ongoing fatigue and need for isolation that has accompanied these illnesses, due to our persistent sneezes and coughs.

All this has forced me to rest, take a breath and feel lucky to be alive, even if feeling unwell. I know too many folks who are dealing with much greater burdens.

Indeed, this morning brought a moment of grace for me.
I witnessed manna falling from the sky.

Often times a sunrise is as plain and gray as I am,
but at times, it is fire lit from above and beneath,
igniting and transforming the sky, completely overwhelming me.

I was swept away, transfixed by colors and swirls and shadows,
forever grateful to be fed by such heavenly bread broken over my head.

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Let Plainness Enter the Eye

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I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish-
ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of
the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings,
failing to distinguish between them.

I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me,
tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass,
of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake,
of peering into the dark, hoping to find
an image of a self as yet unborn.

Let plainness enter the eye,
plainness like the table on which nothing is set,
like a table that is not yet even a table.
~Mark Strand “Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon” from Almost Invisible

I’m only 24 hours into a week-long winter northeaster blow with sub-zero windchills. Already I want to hang up my Carhartts and retire my Muck Boots and toss my work gloves for a warmer easier life somewhere else.

This is just plain hard being a farmer. I feel like I’m losing my bona fides as a tough-as-nails rural person.

Nothing that entrances me about living on a farm in temperate weather is remotely attractive now. Windstorms like this mean I worry our power will go out, the generator won’t work, the water will freeze up and we’ll fall and break bones … and, and, and…

So many fourth dimensional worries, whining, and weariness to spare.

What I seem to forget is that the generations of tough people I descend from made it through far worse than this. They didn’t do it as a hobby, like us; it was their livelihood. Trees were felled and sawed to become tables and furniture and fences and roofs and walls of houses and barns. Animals gave milk and meat and fields yielded grain and hay and gardens and orchards grew enough to store for winter food.

A few days of winter misery is a small price to pay for that kind of sustainability.

Let the plainness of the past inspire the plain hard work needed today and over the next few days.

It is worth doing it without complaining because it is the plain hard work needed. It always has been.

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No Longer Homeless

barnstormingblog2 Comments

God makes us happy as only children can be happy.
God wants to always be with us, wherever we may be –
in our sin, in our suffering and death.
We are no longer alone;
God is with us.
We are no longer homeless;
a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us. 
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today is my mother’s birthday,
but she’s not here to celebrate
by opening a flowery card
or looking calmly out a window.

If my mother were alive,
she’d be 114 years old,
and I am guessing neither of us
would be enjoying her birthday very much.

Mother, I would love to see you again
to take you shopping or to sit
in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea,
but it wouldn’t be the same at 114.

And I’m no prize either,
almost 20 years older than the last time
you saw me sitting by your deathbed.
Some days, I look worse than yesterday’s oatmeal.

It must have been frigid that morning
in the hour just before dawn
on your first December 1st
at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.

Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you.
~Billy Collins from “December 1”

December 1st is not my mother’s birthday;
this was her death day fifteen years ago.

Yet it felt a bit like a birth.

The call came from the care center about 5:30 AM that Monday after Thanksgiving on a frozen morning: the nurse gently said her breathing had changed, it wasn’t long now until she’d be gone. My daughter and I quickly dressed and went out into a bleak and icy darkness to make the ten minute drive to her bedside.

Mom had been wearily existing since a femur fracture 9 months earlier on a cruel April 1st morning. Everything changed for her after nearly 88 years of being active at home. It was the beginning of the end for her, unable to care for herself.

She had been born in the isolation of a Palouse wheat and lentil farm in eastern Washington, delivered into this life in a two story white house located down a long lane and nestled in a draw between the undulating hills. 

It occurred to me as we drove to her bedside: the past nine months had been a different type of gestation, anticipating the end of her life. After nearly dying at age 13 from a ruptured appendix in a pre-antibiotic era, she now was facing her long-awaited yet long-feared transition to death. That near-miss in childhood seemed to haunt her, filling her with worry that it was a mistake that she survived that episode at all. Yet she had thrived despite the anxiety, and ended up, much to her surprise, living a long life full of family, fruitfulness, and faith.

Elna Schmitz Polis – age 87

We arrived to a room darkened, except for the multicolored lights on the table top artificial Christmas tree I had brought her a few days earlier. It cast colorful shadows onto the walls and the white bedspread on her hospital bed. It even made her look like she had color to her cheeks where there actually was none.

There was no one home any longer.

She had already left, flown away while we drove the few miles to come to her. There was no reaching her now. Her skin was cooling, her face hollowed by the lack of effort to breathe, her body stilled and sunken.

I could not weep at that point – it was time for her to leave us behind. She was so very tired, so very weary, so very ready for heaven. And I, weary too, felt much like yesterday’s oatmeal, something she actually very much loved during her life, cooking up a big batch a couple times a week, enough to last several days.

I knew, seeing what was left of her there in that bed, Mom was no longer settling for yesterday’s oatmeal and no longer homeless. I knew now she was present for a feast, would never suffer insomnia again, would no longer be fearful of dying, that her cheeks would be forever full of color.

I knew this was her new beginning: the glory of rebirth thanks to her Savior who had gently taken her by the hand to a land where joy would never end.

Happy Birthday today, Mom. Happy December 1st Birthday to you.

I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away

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Another and Another

barnstormingblog1 Comment

l (a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l
iness…

~e.e. cummings “(A Leaf Falls with Loneliness)”

The trees are undressing, and fling in many places—
On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill—
Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces;
A leaf each second so is flung at will,
Here, there, another and another, still and still.

A spider’s web has caught one while downcoming,
That stays there dangling when the rest pass on;
Like a suspended criminal hangs he, mumming
In golden garb, while one yet green, high yon,
Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon.
~Thomas Hardy from “Last Week in October”

Some feel such loneliness,
as if being the only one to fall
until landing gently cushioned
among so many others, still and still.

A few end up suspended, here and there,
twisting and turning in a chill wind,
helplessly awaiting what is to come.

So I dangle in suspense,
held by sheer faith to a slender thread,
hoping for rescue while others pass me by ~~
another and another, still and still
until that apprehensive moment
when I too am let go,
though no longer lonely.

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Raking and Piling the Past

barnstormingblog2 Comments

I.
Cats pad from one sun-warmed
stone to another. Bees lament
the sweet ripe fruit

denied by spring’s late hard frost.
Birds stow mating calls
for another season.

Clouds scribble pithy prose,
criss-cross pages surrendered
by autumn’s azure.

Flower beds brown as they thin
and cricket song stitches  
a coverlet against evening chill.

II.
In my first autumn at home
since I was three
I rustle leaves at my feet
like a past I can rake and pile.
Energized by autumn’s aura
I glean clarity
of what lies fallow
and what I’ve put up for my winter.
~Nancy Jentsch “October Afternoon”

Out through the fields and the woods
   And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
   And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
   And lo, it is ended.
 
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
   Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
   And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
   When others are sleeping.
 
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
   No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
   But the feet question ‘Whither?’
 
Ah, when to the heart of man
   Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
   To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
   Of a love or a season?
~Robert Frost “Reluctance”

As I kick through piles of fallen leaves in the barnyard, I realize how close I am to becoming one of them. Within my own changing seasons, I have flourished and bloomed and fruited, but am now reminded of my fading, withering and eventual letting go.

I find I’m not nearly so bold anymore, instead trembling nervously when harsh winds blow me about, hoping the roots I’ve always depended upon will continue to nourish and sustain me.

This time of year, everything feels transitory — especially me.

When these thoughts overwhelm, I tend to hang on tighter rather than simply giving up and letting go. My feet stumble when I try to do the same tasks I did so smoothly years ago. I’m stubbornly wanting things to stay the same, reluctant for a transition to something different.

My only solace is that the heart of man — indeed my own hole-y heart — is transient compared to the holy Heart of the Creator. I am sustained by His steady Pulse, His ubiquitous Circulation, His impeccable Rhythm of Life and Death.

In that I trust.
In that I come to abandon my stubborn reluctance.

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Anatomy Lesson

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Thumb stuck out as I go
I’m just travelin’ up the road
Maps don’t do much for me, friend
I follow the weather and the wind

I’m hitch hikin’ all day long
Got what I can carry and my song
I’m a rolling stone just rolling on
Catch me now ’cause tomorrow I’ll be gone
~Bruce Springsteen from “Hitch Hikin'”

His reputation was well known and all the medical students had heard the stories about Dr. Rosse. As the Anatomy Professor, his class would become the primary focus of student energy in the first year of medical school, with other classes seeming like so much background noise.

Dr. Rosse believed in active student participation in class, in the cadaver lab, on oral tests. He told us from the first day on: ” You will learn to THINK in this class like you’ve never thought before! Your patient’s lives depend on this. You will be prepared for my class each and every day, just as you must be prepared for whatever your patients will need from you.”

He was correct.

There were 110 of us in the lecture hall that first day, looking nervously at each other and at the empty podium down in front. We had been assigned three chapters in the anatomy textbook before Dr. Rosse’s first lecture and were expected to know the names of the bones and major blood vessels.

Dr. Rosse’s assignment for himself was to memorize our names and faces from a photo directory provided to him two days previously.

He began his lecture in the barely darkened room, running quickly through a carousel of slides of graphic photos and drawings of body parts. Within five minutes, he stopped and in his thick European accent, pointed at a student in the second row said: “Mr. Davis, can you tell me the name of this blood vessel on this slide?”

The student sat up startled, and sat silent, gathering his wits. Dr. Rosse looked pointedly at his wrist watch and started saying, “Drip. Drip. Drip.”  The student started to sweat.

“Drip, drip, drip, your patient is losing blood, Mr. Davis.”

The student, in a moment of enlightenment asked,” the inferior vena cava?” and Dr. Rosse said, “Very good, Mr. Davis!” and made a notation on the tablet on the podium in front of him.

The rest of our hearts immediately were in our throats, something that Dr. Rosse would later tell us was an anatomic impossibility, no matter how much it felt like it. There would be no dozing off, daydreaming or not preparing for this class.

My turn came the following week as he called out my name, his steely eyes fixed on only me. I got off fairly easy with a question from Dr. Rosse about the attachments for the extensor pollicis longus. I had memorized all the arm muscles the night before so was prepared.

“Yes, very good, Miss Polis.  Now tell me, if I were to fall off this podium right now, land on my outstretched arm and rupture my extensor pollicis longus, what would I not be able to do with my arm?”

I had no idea. I looked at him somewhat aghast. I thought I had done the necessary preparation to be ready for his questioning. My memorizing names and locations of muscles and tendons had only taken me so far. I had not really thought about the functionality of what I was learning and how it might be relevant to my future patients.

“Think now Miss Polis! This is not so very hard that you can’t THINK it out!”  Dr. Rosse demanded from the podium.

So I guessed. “Uh, you can’t grip?”

“Exactly wrong! Take a hike back to your study carrel, Miss Polis. You have not prepared yourself well enough. Go back to your book, and with each muscle you memorize, you must feel it on yourself or your study partner and think about how it works. Your patient will thank you for that someday.”

I was mortified that day, but survived that anatomy class, survived six oral exams over the cadaver with Dr. Rosse, and although I didn’t get an A in his class, I was very relieved to get a B+. As a student, I had never been asked before to actually apply what I was learning to make it relevant to my future work. Dr. Rosse was right. I had learned to not just memorize, but to think.

And when I saw my first extensor pollicis longus rupture seven years later in my practice, I was absolutely confident of the diagnosis because my patient could not lift up his thumb when asked to act like he was hitchhiking.  And my patient did thank me.  Dr. Rosse was right again.

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The Dark Blooms and Sings

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
~Linda Pastan “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?”

photo by Harry Rodenberger

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry “To Know the Dark” from Soul Food – Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds

photo by Bob Tjoelker

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
~Mary Oliver “The Uses of Sorrow”

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
~John O’Donohue from “Beannacht”

photo by Josh Scholten

Ask what the moon has witnessed.
Ask what we, as fallen creatures, have witnessed.
Darkness was not banished by God in the beginning,
so we might search, blinded, for Him.

We are promised this in the Word: “and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light… Revelation 22:5.

The Word in the beginning set a dark universe in motion.
The Word is both flesh and Savior to a world dwelling in darkness.
The Word as Spirit thrives eternally to enlighten our hearts, our minds and hands.

Darkness is not banished. But it is overcome.
And so, we shall have a lit pathway leading us home.

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Alive and Limber

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Deciding whether or not to trust a person
is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree
because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch
or you might simply get covered in sap
and for this reason many people choose
to spend their time alone and indoors
where it is harder to get a splinter.
~Lemony Snicket from The Penultimate Peril

Heaven knows how many trees I’ve climbed…
when my body was still in a climbing way.

How many afternoons, especially Windy ones,

I sat perched on a limb that rose and fell with every invisible blow

Each tree was a green ship in the wind-waves,

every branch a mast

every leafy height a happiness that came without even trying.

I was that alive

and limber

now I walk under them-cool… beloved….

the household of such tall, kind sisters.
~Mary Oliver “Trees”

Don’t you dare climb that tree
or even try, they said, or you will be
sent way to the hospital of the
very foolish, if not the other one.
And I suppose, considering my age,
it was fair advice.

But the tree is a sister to me, she
lives alone in a green cottage
high in the air and I know what
would happen, she’d clap her green hands,
she’d shake her green hair, she’d
welcome me.  Truly.

I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be.  It’s impossible not
to remember wild and not want to go back.  So

if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or—of course
it’s possible—under it.
~Mary Oliver, “Green, Green is My Sister’s House,” from A Thousand Mornings

As a child, I was always very cautious about climbing anything, never trusting my judgement or my balance. Perhaps this was because my mother was very fearful about all risk-taking in her children and instilled that caution in me from the start, discouraging me from ever reaching for the sky or dangling from a branch.

So when the neighbor children come with their families for an evening at our farm, I marvel and cringe at them being drawn as if by a magnet to climb the tall big leaf maple tree in our front yard. I imagine this tree has hosted several generations of children who have scrambled over its twisted trunk, sat in its central saddle to catch the view of the surrounding countryside, and reached its upper limits before being called back down by a nervous adult.

No doubt it is a feeling of incredible freedom to be limber enough to scrabble up a rough-barked branch, placing fingers and feet just-so into perfectly placed nooks and crevices.

No doubt being just out of reach of a fretful parent reinforces independence and autonomy.

No doubt there are leafy heights of happiness up there I’ll never know, way high above my head.

Yet here I stand in the cool shade and breezy evening, looking up, wishing I could be alive and limber like them, praying they will safely make their way down without a trip to the ER, while still honoring my mother’s cautioning pleas to keep my two feet well-grounded.

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Gathering the Heavens

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With my arms raised in a vee,
I gather the heavens and bring
my hands down slow together,
press palms and bow my head.

I try to forget the suffering,
the wars, the ravage of land
that threatens songbirds,
butterflies, and pollinators.

The ghosts of their wings flutter
past my closed eyes as I breathe
the spirit of seasons, the stirrings
in soil, trees moving with sap.

With my third eye, I conjure
the red fox, its healthy tail, recount
the good of this world, the farmer
tending her tomatoes, the beans

dazzled green al dente in butter,
salt and pepper, cows munching
on grass. The orb of sun-gold
from which all bounty flows.
~Twyla Hansen “Trying to Pray” from Rock. Tree. Bird. 

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
~Mary Oliver from  “Morning Poem”

A Sabbath sunrise becomes unspoken prayer –
I open my hands and arms to it,
closing my eyes, bowing my head,
giving myself over to silent gratitude.

Gathering up the heavens, the sun moves
from subtle simmer to blazing boil.

I trudge forward every day,
each step in itself a prayer answered;
thankful I can still take a next step,
and a next, until I reach tomorrow
and again after that, I celebrate
there will be a next tomorrow.

Amen.

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To Be At Home in the World

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A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
~Robert Frost in a letter to Louis Untermeyer

What is your malady?

Asks the form at the community acupuncture clinic.
My pen hovers—so many to choose from:
the thyroid, the gut, the face.
I find myself writing instead:

Homesickness.

I hand in my form. I wonder if the doctor
with the needles will laugh at me,
but he says instead:

I am homesick too.

And then he puts needles in my ears and my ankles
and I fall asleep.
Around me, strangers sleep
needled dreams, under warm blankets.

And I think:
at home in the world.
The endless desire to be
at home in the world.
~Sarah Ruhl “On Homesickness”

Leaving home has always been difficult for me. As a child, I was hopelessly homesick whenever I stayed overnight elsewhere. Going to college two states away was a complete ordeal – it took me a long time to let go of home and finally settle into a new life away from all that was familiar. Nothing felt right or normal, a disorienting sickness from clinging too tightly to home base, unwilling to launch, barely able to wave good-bye.

Even now, as I travel away from the farm for a week for this or that, I might get the lump-in-the-throat feeling that I remember keenly from my childhood years — knowing I am out of my element, like a fish out of water gasping for breath, stretched out of my comfort zone, not feeling at home while away from home.

Will I ever grow out of this now that I’m nearly seventy, or will it only get worse? Will I ever embrace a lovesickness, a yearning for the rest of the world?

I keep trying – but the return trip is still the sweetest remedy for this malady.

There’s no place like home…