The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn throughout the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the cast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire.
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine
Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain,
Thinking that never he would wake again.
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green,
Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain.
Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
~John Crum
The ground is slowly coming to life again;
snowdrops and daffodils are surfacing from months of dormancy,
buds are swelling
the spring chorus frogs have come from the mud to sing again
and birds now greet the lazy dawn.
Everything, everyone, has been so dead, so hidden;
His touch calls us back to life,
love is come again
to the fallow fields of our hearts.
Under the giving snow blossoms a daring spring.
~Terri Guillemets
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
~Tess Gallagher “Choices”
Such tenderness,
such recognition of the other,
to save the nest
and all future potential nests
rather than a clear cut stripping
for the sake of unimpeded world view,
when the freedom of a mountain backdrop
is sacrificed–
such tenderness
when the right to choose can only mean
choosing to do right.
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
~William Carlos Williams “Spring and All”
It is still January
with much of the country
in deep freeze,
covered in snow and ice
and bitter wind chill.
Yet outside begins to awaken–
tender buds swelling,
bulbs breaking through soil,
in reentry to the world
from the dark and cold.
Like a mother who holds
the mystery of her quickening belly,
so hopeful and marveling,
she knows soon and very soon
there will be spring.
I embarrass our daughter annually on January 5 with her birthday story because it was so dramatic (for us!) and though she was the main character in the drama, it is all myth to her. Lea is 21 today! Inconceivable! Yet it is so and we celebrate the Author of the drama that ensured she would have many birthdays to come. Happiest of birthdays to you, Lea!
I couldn’t sleep that snowy stormy night even though I was not in earnest labor, and safely tucked into a hospital bed on the Labor and Delivery unit, my husband sleeping soundly in the other bed in the room. It had been plenty harrowing just getting to the hospital in a northeaster, getting stuck in a snow drift, and being dug out by a bulldozer.  I knew our long-awaited third baby, over a week overdue, would be born the next day, blizzard or no blizzard, and then as soon as I could stand up and walk, we would head right back to the farm to our sons, where our neighbors were staying with them. At least that’s what I had planned.
It didn’t work out that way. Not even close.
This baby wasn’t going to enter the world without a little more drama. Instead of stoically agreeing along with me…
View original post 101 more words
O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum
O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum
Ut animalia viderent Dominum natum
Viderent Dominum natum
Jacentem in proesepio, jacentem in proesepio
O beata virgo, cujus viscera me ruerunt portare
Dominum Jesum Christum
Alleluja, Alleluja, Alleluja
Alleluja, Alleluja, Alleluja
Alleluja!
English translation:
He appeared in the flesh,
    was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
    was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
    was taken up in glory.
1Timothy 3:16
Perhaps it is the mystery of the thing that brings us back, again and again, to read the story.
How can this be? God appearing on earth first to animals, then the most humble of humans.
How can He be? Through the will of the Father and the breath of the Spirit, the Son was, and is and yet to be.
O great mystery beyond all understanding.
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be.
When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying,
“Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.”
I don’t try to control a sunset.
I watch with awe as it unfolds.
~Carl Rogers
Our son Ben turns 25 years old today, spending this quarter century birthday as he does every day: teaching math to high school students on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  We watch in awe as his life unfolds, wonderful and rich, its warmth and love reflected like an orange sunset onto all he touches.
At dusk, everything blurs and softens…
The horse bears me along, like grace,
making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,
or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?
~Linda McCarriston from “Riding Out At Evening”
Remembering nearly three score of younger birthdays on my 59th~~
What I think or say or see is whole
in these tender moments
of my lengthening life
in this weeping world:
I am so glad to be so well.
A changeless changing, transforming into
An ethereal storming, freshening, continuous…
~Jean Garrigue “The Flux of Autumn”
If you were aware of how precious today is,
you could hardly live through it.
Unless you are aware of how precious it is,
you can hardly be said to be living at all.
~Frederick Buechner
Barnstorming 