What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Inversnaid”
In my anguish at the chaos in the world, let me remember, when I look closely, through the rain, even the weeds, the unruly, unholy weeds are connected in this wilderness.
There is order here even if I can’t feel it now. Let us weeds be left. We are meant to be.
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~Lustravit lampade terras~ (He has illumined the world with a lamp) The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter. – Blaise Pascal from “Miscellaneous Writings”
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment … a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present… ~Wendell Berry from Hannah Coulter
Early morning, everything damp all through. Cars go by. A ripping sound of tires through water. For two days the air Has smelled like salamanders. The little lake on the edge of town hidden in fog, Its cattails and island gone. All through the gloom of the dark week Bright leaves have been dropping From black trees Until heaps of color lie piled everywhere In the falling rain. ~Tom Hennen “Wet Autumn” from Darkness Sticks to Everything.
An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear. – Denise Levertov “The Breathing“
Worry and anger and angst can be more contagious than the flu.
I want to mask up and wash my hands of it throughout the day. There should be a vaccination against the fear of reading headlines.
I want to say to myself: Stop now, this moment in time. Stop and stop and stop.
Stop needing to be numb to all discomfort. Stop resenting the gift of each breath. Just stop. Instead, simply be still, in this moment
I want to say to myself: this moment, foggy or fine, is yours alone, this moment of weeping and sharing and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it. Celebrate it. I am alive in it, even in worry.
Be thankful for tears that flow over grateful lips just as rain clears the fog. Stop holding them back.
Just be– be blessed in both the fine and the foggy days– in the now and now and now.
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It happens in an instant. My grandma used to say someone is walking on your grave.
It’s that moment when your life is suddenly strange to you as someone else’s coat
you have slipped on at a party by accident, and it is far too big or too tight for you.
Your life feels awkward, ill fitting. You remember why you came into this kitchen, but you
feel you don’t belong here. It scares you in a remote numb way. You fear that you—
whatever you means, this mind, this entity stuck into a name like mercury dropped into water—
have lost the ability to enter your self, a key that no longer works. Perhaps you will be locked
out here forever peering in at your body, if that self is really what you are. If you are at all. ~Marge Piercy “Dislocation” from The Crooked Inheritance
This Self—Hispanic, Latin, blond, black, olive-skinned, native and immigrant— dispersed far and wide was here with everyone, yesterday and again today;
I am large, I contain multitudes. They will not manage to deny me or ignore me or declare me undocumented: I am written in you, in all, as all are in me… ~Luis Alberto Ambroggio from We Are All Whitman: #2:Song of/to/My/Your/Self
Each of us a work of art, heaven-sent, called to reflect on our own creation, placed in this world to feel grace when we stumble, unsure where we are to go, who we are meant to be, as if we don’t really belong here, a feeling of jamais vu when the familiar becomes strange.
This is who we are: called to act out that grace – to praise goodness, to protest evil, to grapple with reality, to respond to injustice, to change the direction we’re heading fearing who we become if we don’t .
A traditional Catalan Song from Pablo Casals, a symbol of peace and freedom worldwide
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Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills— A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things So that they stand in the glow of ripeness. It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves: Who serves best doesn’t always understand. ~Czeslaw Milosz “Love” from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass, And look at light reflected by the ground. There he will find everything we have lost… ~Czeslaw Milosz from “The Sun”
It’s not easy to subdue the needy ego and let the life-giving soul take control, even though doing so saves us grief and serves the world well. So if you see me on the street one day, quietly muttering, “Only one thing among many, only one thing among many…,” you’ll know I’m still working on it, or it’s still working on me. ~Parker Palmer “The Big Question: Does My Life Have Meaning?”
It is always tempting to be self-absorbed; since my heart stent placement nearly 8 months ago, I tend to analyze every sensation in my chest, fuss over how many steps I take daily, and get discouraged when the scale doesn’t register the sacrifices I think I’m making in my diet.
In other words, in my efforts to heal my physically-broken heart, I become the center of my attention, rather than just one among many things in the days/months/years I have left. I need to look at myself from a distance rather than under a microscope.
It is a skewed and futile perspective, seeking meaning and purpose in life by navel gazing.
Instead, I should be concentrating on the ripeness of each day. I’ve been given a second chance to recalibrate my journey through the time I have left, focusing outward, gazing at the wonders around me, sometimes getting down on my knees.
I don’t fully understand how I might serve others by what I share here online, or what I do in my local community with my hands and feet. I now know not to miss the moments basking in the glow of loving those around me, including you friends I may never meet on this side of the veil.
May you glow in ripeness as well.
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A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority.
Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils.
Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods.
Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.
*
The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry?
*
A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket …
In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away.
The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps.
Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had. ~Jane Kenyon from “Three Songs at the End of Summer”
Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— different than locking a door, or the shutdown we invented at the start of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks swept quickly between us, a sign designed especially for school.
My son spent his first years a different kind of locked up—an orphanage in Bangkok, where he didn’t speak and they couldn’t sign. He came home, age four, silent. We thought being here could open doors. It has, of course. He’s learned so much at the deaf school; the speech therapist calls it a Language Explosion. I keep lists of the words he’s gathered: vanilla, buckle, castle, stay. And lockdown. He absorbs it like the rest. Now the schools he builds with Magna-Tiles have lockdowns. I worry in trying to give him keys, we’ve only changed the locks.
To lock down a deaf school, we use a special strobe. When it flashes, we flip switches and sign through darkness. The children know to stay beneath the windows. Every five minutes a robot texts: “Shelter in place is still in effect. Please await further instructions.” Then we pull the fire alarm, a tactical move to unsettle the shooter. Hearing people can’t think with noise like that. A piercing thing we don’t detect, to cover the sounds we make, the sounds we don’t know we’re making. ~Sara Nović “Lockdown at the School for the Deaf”
The first day back to school now isn’t always the day after Labor Day as it was when I was growing up. Some students have been in classes for a couple weeks already, others started a few days ago to ease into the transition more gently.
Some return to the routine this morning – school buses roar past our farm brimming with eager young faces and stuffed back packs amid a combination of excitement and anxiety.
I remember well that foreboding that accompanied a return to school — the strict schedule, the inflexible rules and the often harsh adjustment of social hierarchies and friend groups. Even as a good learner and obedient student, I was a square peg being pushed into a round hole when I returned to the classroom. The students who struggled academically and who pushed against the boundaries of rules must have felt even more so. We all felt alien and inadequate to the immense task before us to fit in with one another, allow teachers to structure and open our minds to new thoughts, and to become something and someone more than who we were before.
Growth is so very hard, our stretching so painful, the tug and pull of friendships stressful. And for the last two decades, there is the additional fear of lockdowns and active shooters.
I worked with students on an academic calendar for over 30 years, yet though I’m now retired, I still don’t sleep well in anticipation of all this day means.
So I take a deep breath on a foggy post-Labor Day morning and am immediately taken back to the anxieties and fears of a skinny little girl in a new home-made corduroy jumper and saddle shoes, waiting for the schoolbus on our drippy wooded country road.
She is still me — just buried deeply in the fog of who I became after all those years of schooling, hidden somewhere under all the piled-on layers of learning and growing and hurting and stretching — I do remember her well.
Like every student starting a new adventure today, we could all use a hug.
Lo! I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold; Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out The year and I are old.
In youth I sought the prince of men, Captain in cosmic wars, Our Titan, even the weeds would show Defiant, to the stars.
But now a great thing in the street Seems any human nod, Where shift in strange democracy The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the golden flower Hidden in wood or wold, But I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold. ~G.K. Chesterton “Gold Leaves”
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“They’re benign,” the radiologist says, pointing to specks on the x ray that look like dust motes stopped cold in their dance. His words take my spine like flame. I suddenly love the radiologist, the nurse, my paper gown, the vapid print on the dressing room wall. I pull on my radiant clothes. I step out into the Hanging Gardens, the Taj Mahal, the Niagara Falls of the parking lot. ~Jo McDougall, “Mammogram” from In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems
Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine. ~Lisel Mueller “In November”
It does not escape me, especially on call-back mammogram days when I’m asked to return for a “closer look” at something that wasn’t there before.
which turns out to be a 1 cm. nonspecific solid something, maybe getting smaller over the past ten days.
Maybe a bruise. Maybe not. Check again in a month. A brief reprieve that some in the dressing cubicles around me don’t get.
I wake every day knowing: an earthquake happens somewhere else, a war is leaving people homeless and lifeless, a tornado levels a town, a drunk driver destroys a family, a fire leaves a house in ashes, a famine causes children to starve, a flood ravages a town, a devastating diagnosis darkens someone’s remaining days.
No mistake has been made, yet I wake knowing recently it was my turn to hear bad news, my heart was heavy, yet it still beats, still breaks, still bleeds, still believes in the radiance of each new day I’m given. I was reminded again today.
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In none of her other ages had she noted her age or its burden and bounty of expectations. The future was as flexible as the past, and, in between, moments like unstrung pearls strewn across velvet grieved and gladdened her and always astonished her with their perfection. There was no nothingness: there was only being.
Slowly she wakes from what had seemed a dream to realize that this is her final age— of indeterminate length and quality. Things are ending, or have ended, or will end. The pearls are strung with care, it is quite clear. There is no nothingness—but she can almost, some days, picture the world without her in it. ~Jane Greer “In none of her other ages” (Jane died after a short illness last week at the age of 72)
I have always been well aware we each arrive here with an expiration date hidden from view.
We may live for decades assuming the circled length of our own string of pearls will continue indefinitely with the latch closed and tight.
A few months ago, my clasp opened unexpectedly, my finite days of carefully strung pearls threatening to spill, forever lost to me.
I realized things could end without any hugged goodbyes.
Later, having been emergently restrung, at least for the time being, the look in my eyes prompted the surgeon to say “now you can live out your full life span.”
What I wanted to ask him but couldn’t: “and just how long might that be?” knowing he had no true reassurance for something only God can promise:
There is no nothingness.
By grace and a surgeon’s skill, I gained nearly six months of pearls. I’m still here, looking back at the carefully strung hours and days and weeks behind and before me.
Right now I remain clasped tight, hugging and held secure, though one day I know it will be time to let go.
There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end. ~Augustine of Hippo from The City of God, Bk. XXII, Chap. 30
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In June’s high light she stood at the sink With a glass of wine, And listened for the bobolink, And crushed garlic in late sunshine.
I watched her cooking, from my chair. She pressed her lips Together, reached for kitchenware, And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said. “You light the candle.” We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle. ~Donald Hall “Summer Kitchen”
Day ends, and before sleep when the sky dies down, consider your altered state: has this day changed you? Are the corners sharper or rounded off? Did you live with death? Make decisions that quieted? Find one clear word that fit? At the sun’s midpoint did you notice a pitch of absence, bewilderment that invites the possible? What did you learn from things you dropped and picked up and dropped again? Did you set a straw parallel to the river, let the flow carry you downstream? ~Jeanne Lohmann “Questions Before Dark”from The Light of Invisible Bodies
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. ~C.S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces
When the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, what a gift is a wonderful evening meal, conversation at the dinner table and falling asleep with a gentle sigh of contentment.
These are sweet moments are worth remembering.
It is easy to get swept up in frustration with a plethora of angry public opinions and even angrier societal actions. Yet I find that only leads to indigestion, irritability and insomnia.
I ask myself thoughtful and sometimes troubling questions at the end of the day that too often feel unanswerable — only because I’m not paying attention to the ultimate Answer to all questions.
Each day I should be ready to be changed by His call to me to finish well.
I must not take any day for granted. Each is a sweet day to be remembered for some special moment that made me hope it could last forever.
And then to bed and sleep. It is a miracle.
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Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd— The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in Their supine stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love. ~Philip Larkin “An Arundel Tomb”
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down just the way it was.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand out in the sun again.
We wake each morning, not knowing what to expect of the day. So much sadness, the news of suffering, of unimaginable tragedies.
How do we ready ourselves for what is sent for us to endure?
This is how: right now, there is morning, there is noon, there is evening. And there will always be Love as we sleep and as we wake. God holds our hand to keep us from getting lost.
Lyrics by Arthur Sullivan: No star is o’er the lake, its pale watch keeping, The moon is half awake, through grey mist creeping. The last red leaves fall round the porch of roses, The clock has ceased to sound. The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth in calm endeavour, To count the sound of mirth, now dumb forever. Heed not how hope believes and fate disposes: Shadow is round the eaves. The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim are fading slowly. The fire that was so trim now quivers lowly. Go to the dreamless bed where grief reposes. Thy book of toil is read. The long day closes.
It’s an early summer day, going to be a hot one. I’m away from home, I’m working; the sky is solidly blue with just a chalk smear of clouds. So why this melancholy? Why these blues? Nothing I’ve done seems to matter; I could leave tomorrow and no one would notice, that’s how invisible I feel. But look, there’s a pair of cardinals on the weathered table, pecking at sunflower seeds which I’ve brought from home. They don’t seem particularly grateful. Neither does the sky, no matter how I transcribe it. I wanted to do more in this life, not the elusive prizes, but poems that astonish. A big flashy jay lands on the table, scattering seeds and smaller birds. They regroup, continue to hunt and peck on the lawn. ~Barbara Crooker, “Melancholia” from Some Glad Morning
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the green heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~Wendell Berry “The Peace of Wild Things” fromThe Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
Three years ago, I laid awake thinking about our son and his family’s ten hour overnight flight from Tokyo in progress. Our two young grandchildren were arriving here after 30 months of pandemic separation – to them, we were just faces on a screen.
They said a sorrowful sayonara to their grandparents and family there, arriving here to a new life thanks to my daughter-in-law’s newly issued green card after two years of waiting, new jobs, new language, new everything, with all their worldly belongings in suitcases.
From the largest city in the world to our little corner of the middle of nowhere.
Over the past three years, I have watched them discover for themselves the joys and sorrows of this part of the world. When I look at things through their eyes, I am reminded of the light beyond the darkness I fear, there is peace amid the chaos, there is a smile behind the tears, there is stillness within the noisiness there is rest despite our restlessness, there is grace as we who are older give way to the younger.
I have given up on astonishing others. Instead, astonishing is happening all around me; I need only be a witness.
Measure me, sky! Tell me I reach by a song Nearer the stars; I have been little so long.
Weigh me, high wind! What will your wild scales record? Profit of pain, Joy by the weight of a word.
Horizon, reach out! Catch at my hands, stretch me taut, Rim of the world: Widen my eyes by a thought.
Sky, be my depth, Wind, be my width and my height, World, my heart’s span; Loveliness, wings for my flight. ~Leonora Speyer “Measure Me, Sky”
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