Category: anxiety

The Path of Life

barnstormingblog3 Comments

moodypath

 

pathwaylight2

 

Our last five minutes on earth are running out.

We can spend those minutes in meanness, exclusivity,
and self-righteous disparagement of those who are different from us,
or we can spend them consciously embracing every glowing soul
who wanders within our reach – those who, without our caring,
would find the vibrant, exhilarating path of life just another sad and forsaken road.
~Alice Walker from Anything We Love Can Be Saved

 

darkhedges2antique

 

During these summer weeks of orientation of new college students and their parents, I speak to several thousand people, all looking nervous in unfamiliar territory among strangers.

They are about to embark on a road that rises to meet them and leads them to parts unknown.

I try to say, as I shake each hand, and give out my card with my personal phone number:
this too will be okay.  This too will bless you.  Even when there are potholes, uneven surfaces and times when you want to turn back to more familiar territory, you will find the road to your next destination fulfilling and welcoming.

Embrace the journey…and each other.

And I embrace you.

(Thanks Ann Voskamp for sharing your message to your college-bound son here)

 

 

centralroadoct

 

roadeast921171

 

darkhedgesboost

Heart Strung on Tethers

barnstormingblog2 Comments

webyard3

 

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin
black legs and their needle-nail toes across
the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist
at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato.

Although blind at night, she nevertheless
fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry
on one side of the path, links it to a limb
of shining sumac opposite, latches the scaffold
to ground stone and brace of rooted grasses.
And the structure takes dimension.

Skittering upside down across and around,
she hooks the hooks, knots the widening
spirals, the tightened radii, orbs and hubs,
bridges and bridgeheads. We can never hear
the music she makes as she plucks her silk
strings with all the toes and spurs and tarsal
tufts of her eight legs at once. She performs
the reading of her soul.

She expands the sky, her completed grid
a gamble, a ploy played on the night. The silk
is still, translucent and aerial, hanging in a glint
of half-moon. The work is her heart strung
on its tethers, ravenous, abiding.
~Pattiann Rogers from  “Hail, Spirit”

 

silentweb

 

I too often feel stretched between several points as well.

I attach to important touch points and I weave between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll connect with or what I’ll leave behind.

Sometimes what I create is beautifully delicate and functional.
Sometimes it is blurry and out of focus.
The center doesn’t always hold.  The tethers loosen.  The periphery frays.

But it was once something.  That’s all that matters.

 

 

webyard2

 

IMG_1225

 

Warm and Steady Sweetness

barnstormingblog1 Comment
sunrise89181
wwucarpet
begonia611155
melon
It’s ripe, the melon 
by our sink. Yellow, 
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes 
the house too sweetly. 
At five I wake, the air 
mournful in its quiet. 
My wife’s eyes swim calmly 
under their lids, her mouth and jaw 
relaxed, different. 
What is happening in the silence 
of this house? Curtains 
hang heavily from their rods. 
Ficus leaves tremble 
at my footsteps. Yet 
the colors outside are perfect– 
orange geranium, blue lobelia. 
I wander from room to room 
like a man in a museum: 
wife, children, books, flowers, 
melon. Such still air. Soon 
the mid-morning breeze will float in 
like tepid water, then hot. 
How do I start this day, 
I who am unsure 
of how my life has happened 
or how to proceed 
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
~Albert Garcia from Skunk Talk 
sunrise88182
How do I start this day?
When sleep was elusive, the air still with heat at midnight.
When even a melon-colored sky looks dry along with everything beneath it.
When wildfire smoke drifts in on waves from north and south, obscuring, rounding out the sharp edges.

I accept the sweetness that is offered this tepid summer morning that will turn too hot.

I’m here.
Let the day begin.

treelayers2
wwupacview
canadians

My Own Bursting Heart

barnstormingblog1 Comment

tomatoes

 

tomatoshine

 

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.
~Anne Higgins “Cherry Tomatoes”  from At the Year’s Elbow

 

tomatobug

 

Is there another sensation as blissful as a cherry tomato bursting inside my mouth?
Yes, I can think of one or two.

But never like this, when restoration is needed in the middle of a sweaty hot day, in a garden that needs weeding, when all else feels lost.

Pure gift, this bursting heart.

 

autumn9271415

 

IMG_6147

The First Week of August

barnstormingblog2 Comments

sunrise82414

 

dand7819175

 

sunrise81115

 

IMG_1136

 

sunrise813151

 

 

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer,
the top of the live-long year,
like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring,
and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn,
but the first week of August is motionless, and hot.

It is curiously silent, too,
with blank white dawns and glaring noons,
and sunsets smeared with too much color.
~Natalie Babbitt from Tuck Everlasting

 

dandysunset8

 

sunrise8114

 

After a few days of milder summer respite, we’ve returned to temperatures in the nineties this week.  No one asked me if enduring such heat was a reasonable way to usher in the first week of August.

So here I sit silently rocking and sweating in the highest vantage point of this year’s ferris wheel ride, hanging breathlessly mid-air, appreciating the brief pause in the endless cycle of days.

Having just arrived at the top, I will venture to look down, knowing I am simply along for the ride, and Someone else is at the controls.  I might as well enjoy the view of all that is behind, alongside and in front of me, but especially what is below, holding me up in thin air.

All too quickly will come the descent into autumn, my stomach leaping into my chest with the lurch forward into the unknown.  As the climb to get here took so long, I am not quite ready for this inevitable drop back into the chill.

Hot or not, it’s best to celebrate this first week in August for all it’s splash and glare.  At least I’m swinging in what little breeze there is, endeavoring to capture the moment forever.

 

sunset8243

 

sunset825165

 

 

 

IMG_1114

 

Whirling in Circles

barnstormingblog2 Comments

yinandyang

 

kittensjuly27172

 

waspnest11

 

Now all the doors and windows
are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
Heat, Horatio, heat makes them
put this antic disposition on!

This year’s brown spider
sways over the door as I come
and go. A single poppy shouts
from the far field, and the crow,
beyond alarm, goes right on
pulling up the corn.
~Jane Kenyon, “Philosophy in Warm Weather” from Otherwise

 

web1

 

spiderdrizzle

 

Whether weather is very or very cold, so go our molecules — indeed our very atoms are constantly awhirl to keep us upright whenever we sweat or shiver.

This summer my doors and windows have been flung wide open; I’m seeing and hearing and feeling all that I can absorb, never to forget the gift of being human witness to it all.

Like a dog trying to catch its tail, I’m whirling in circles, trying to grab what will always elude me.

 

frillypoppy

 

sunsetcornfield

 

homermaple

 

homerroll2

A Threshold Between Earth and Heaven

barnstormingblog4 Comments

qal731181

 

sprinklermagic

 

I know for a while again,
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which I may even step
forth from myself and be free.
~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2000

 

 

baker8118

 

 

I was told once by someone I respected that my writing reflected “sacramental” living —  touching and tasting the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread that sustains us daily.

I have allowed that feedback to sit warmly beside me, like a welcome companion during the many hours I struggle with what to share here.

It is now apparent to me it is all too tempting to emphasize sacrament over the sacrifice it represents.  As much as I love the world and the beauty in the moments I find here, my search should be for the entrance to the “thin places” between heaven and earth, by forgetting self and stepping forth through a holy threshold into something far greater.

There is a scary freedom in the sacrificial life, a wonderful terrifying illuminating freedom, still far beyond my grasp.

I may even step
forth from myself and be free.

 

 

dandy731181

To Get a Better View

barnstormingblog5 Comments

IMG_7666

 

buttercups

 

rooster

 

 

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.
~Jane Mead “Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty” from The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 2015

 

johnshens

 

IMG_7667

I want to be that chicken.

When life is an anxious,
even terrifying journey
and everything around me is a swirl of chaos –
I want to be able to stick my head up above the fray,
feel the wind as opportunity rather than threat
and exist content in the moment,
looking ahead to what may happen,
unperturbed.

Reaching my mind beyond what I can hardly grasp,
I want to be that chicken
who experiences life like a dog.

 

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
~Robert Browning from “Andrea Del Sarto”

 

earsgrass

 

samgrass

The Presence of Stillness

barnstormingblog7 Comments

shuksan102161

 

mejierreflection

 

heronvolunteer

 

tacomadeer1

 

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” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

 

chelanducklings5

 

duckchelan2

 

When our young grandchild visits
and I watch her discover
the joys and sorrows of this world,
I remember there is light beyond the darkness we feel,
there is peace amid the chaos,
there is a smile behind the tears,
there is stillness within the noisiness,
there is grace as old gives way to new.

 

reflection2

 

reflection

 

crescentvenus

A Slender Cord

barnstormingblog6 Comments

webleash

 

morningweb9

 

wetweb2

 

silverdollar
The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,
Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,   
Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite   
Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands   
To grasp upon the further cliff and draw
A greater cord, and then a greater yet;   
Till at the last across the chasm swung   
The cable then the mighty bridge in air!
So we may send our little timid thought   
Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands—
Send out our love and faith to thread the deep—
Thought after thought until the little cord
Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
And we are anchored to the Infinite!
suspendedleaf1
We dangle from a slender thread,
twisting and turning, swinging to and fro
with the breezes.
This silken line connects us in ways we barely see
to hold on to us when buffeted
by storms and rain and drought.

We are anchored fast to eternity, and never let go.

From here to infinity.

suspendedleaf4
hangingout
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