When I take the chilly tools from the shed’s darkness, I come out to a world made new by heat and light.
Like a mad red brain the involute rhubarb leaf thinks its way up through loam. ~Jane Kenyon from “April Chores” from Collected Poems
…a pruning knife’s hooked blade biting through the stalks with a flick of her wrist and a quick snap.
The one time I tried this I sliced deep into my thumb knuckle at first swipe. We were both red inside, me, the rhubarb. That’s the stuff I didn’t really think about at ten, how everything bleeds; how everything must die somehow— the stupid ones poisoned, the hard workers heart-worn and wrecked.
We ate the rhubarb raw, stripped of all its leaves. Dipped in sugar, it still lingered bitter on our tongues as some inoculation against the worst of what was yet to come. ~Matthew Burns from “Rhubarb”
Over the last two weeks, the garden is slowly reviving, and rhubarb “brains” have been among the first to appear from the garden soil, wrinkled and folded, opening full of potential, “thinking” their way into the April sunlight.
Here I am, wishing my own brain could similarly rise brand new and tender every spring from the dust rather than leathery and weather-toughened, harboring the same old thoughts and patterns. Indeed, more wrinkles accumulate on the outside of my skull rather than the inside.
Still, I’m encouraged by my rhubarb cousin’s return every April. Like me, it may be a little sour in need of some sweetening, but its blood courses bright red and it is very very much alive.
and just because this is fun but has nothing to do with rhubarb…
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At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats with the possible company of my death, this sprawling miscellany of people— carry-on bags and paperbacks—
that could be gathered in a flash into a band of pilgrims on the last open road. Not that I think if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together, holding hands like a ring of skydivers, into a sudden gasp of brightness, or that there would be some common place
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment, some spaceless, pillarless Greece where we could, at the count of three, toss our ashes into the sunny air.
It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase so carefully arranged, the way that girl is cooling her tea, and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter’s hair . . . and when you consider the altitude, the secret parts of the engines, and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . .
well, I just think it would be good if one of us maybe stood up and said a few words, or, so as not to involve the police, at least quietly wrote something down. ~Billy Collins “Passengers”
Tell us of a bypassed heart beating in 12C, how the woman holds a stranger’s hand to the battery sewn in beneath her collarbone, and says feel this. Tell us of the man’s ear listening across the aisle, hugging itself, a fist long since blistered by blaze. Outside, morning sun buckling up. Inside, twitching bonesacks of bat, birdsong erupting as light cracks the far jungle canopy. Ten thousand feet below ours, a grey cat tongues the morning’s butter left out to soft. Last night we broke open the sweet folds around two paper fortunes. One said variety. One said caution. The woman in 12C would hold that her heart needs its hidden spark, but the man shows how some live the rest of their lives with half a face remembering its before expression. Who was it that said our souls know one another by smell, like horses? ~Jenny Browne “Love Letter to a Stranger”
These days, I spend as little time as possible in airports and airplanes among strangers. As an introvert who prefers to read quietly and stay securely in my shell, I politely converse with the people next to me but prefer a book and silence.
It is always a wonder to me when seat partners across from me or in front of me will spend the trip finding out all about each other’s lives, destinations and feelings about the state of the world.
Even so, like Billy Collins in his poem, I’m struck by the affinity I feel for my fellow passengers as we embark on a trip by air – so different from each of us independently traveling down a highway in our individual vehicles.
In an airplane, our fates are lashed together. What happens to one will happen to all.
Because we are bound together – sometimes randomly, sometimes not – I do believe that we should try to find kindred and sympathetic souls in a mysterious way when we are thrust among strangers.
We are created for connection, whether by smell or sight or spirit.
And perhaps, scrolling through the internet, as we all do at times, you ran across this Barnstorming blog…not expecting a connection to happen.
And here we are –connected because I wrote something quietly down. One never knows how we may become bound together.
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April is like the raggedy, wandering gypsy lad of the fairy tale. When he moves, streaks of gold show beneath his torn garments and you suspect that this elfin creature is actually a prince in disguise.
April is just that.
There are raggedy, cold days, dark black ones, but all through the month for a second, for an hour, or for three days at a stretch you glimpse pure gold.
The weeks pass and the rags slip away, a shred at a time. Toward the end of the month his royal highness stands before you. ~Jean Hersey from The Shape of a Year
I avoid spending much time in front of mirrors now. I’m thinning on top, thickening a bit lower, sagging and stretching, wrinkled and patched and, let’s face it…raggedy.
Still, if I look closely past the rags and sags, I see the same eyes as my younger self peering back at me.
There are some things that age does not disguise.
The lightness and freshness of youth might be covered up with the trappings of aging, but I’m overjoyed to still be here, just as I am.
Every once in awhile, I believe I glimpse a little gold under my wrinkly surface.
I’m no queen or princess in disguise, but breathing in the scents of certain perfumed days of April can make me feel like one.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ~Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken”
Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled.
Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone’s eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home.
But I didn’t go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out.
I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity. ~Robert Frost from “Selected Letters”
What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me? I can’t
turn in any direction but it’s there. I don’t mean
the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s silk song, but the far-off
fires, for example, of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning
theater of light, or the wind playful with its breath;
or time that’s always rushing forward, or standing still
in the same — what shall I say — moment.
What I know
I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small! While everything else continues, unexplained
and unexplainable.How wonderful it is to follow a thought quietlyto its logical end.
….mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing in and out… ~Mary Oliver from “What is there beyond knowing”
When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson from “Quotation and Originality”
Robert Frost enjoyed how readers misinterpreted his ironic “The Road Not Taken” poem. His point was not the road less traveled “made all the difference” but that the roads were in fact the same.
As humans living our daily lives, we have to make decisions that take us one way or the other, uncertain where our choices may lead us and likely never knowing if that choice made a difference at all.
Our assurance lies in understanding the Hand that guides us, should we allow Him to do so. We may choose a path that leads us astray; God continually puts up signposts that will guide us home. Our journey may be arduous, we may get terribly lost, we may walk alone for long stretches, we may end up crushed and bleeding in the ditch.
He follows the footprints we have left behind, so we that we may be found, rescued and brought home, no matter what.
And that — not the road we chose at the beginning — is what makes all the difference.
Lyrics
Those lives were mine to love and cherish To guard and guide along life’s way Oh God forbid that one should perish That one alas should go astray
Back in the years with all together Around the place we’d romp and play So lonely now and oft’ times wonder Oh will they come back home some day
I’m lonesome for my precious children They live so far away Oh may they hear my calling… calling.and come back home some day
I gave my all for my dear children Their problems still with love I share I’d brave life’s storm, defy the tempest To bring them home from anywhere
I lived my life my love I gave them, to guide them through this world of strife I hope and pray we’ll live together In that great glad here after life
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Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.
After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.
Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, “In April” translated by Jessie Lamont
A Light exists in Spring Not present on the year At any other period – When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad On Solitary Hills That Science cannot overtake, But Human Nature feels. ~Emily Dickinson from 85- Part two: Nature
I do not know what gorgeous thing the bluebird keeps saying, his voice easing out of his throat, beak, body into the pink air of the early morning. I like it whatever it is. Sometimes it seems the only thing in the world that is without dark thoughts. Sometimes it seems the only thing in the world that is without questions that can’t and probably never will be answered, the only thing that is entirely content with the pink, then clear white morning and, gratefully, says so. ~Mary Oliver “What Gorgeous Thing” from Blue Horses
Maybe it is the particular tilt of the globe on its axis, or the suffusion of clouds mixing with the perpetually damp atmosphere, or perhaps the knowledge the darkness no longer claims us most of our waking time.
The light of gentle April has its own sacred whispering voice orchestrated with myriad birdsong.
We are immersed inside it for just a few weeks, yet it belongs framed on gallery walls for perpetuity to be admired at any time of the year, whenever we seek sweet slumber on a soft cushion of golden pastels.
Surrounded by such sacrament without and within, our recreated life in the Lord gently glows.
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Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe.All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.
For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.
For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” John 6: 35-40
Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns; Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth; Unfold thy forehead gather’d into frowns: Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth: Awake, awake; And with a thankfull heart his comforts take. But thou dost still lament, and pine, and crie; And feel his death, but not his victorie.
Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand, Christs resurrection thine may be: Do not by hanging down break from the hand, Which as it riseth, raiseth thee: Arise, Arise; And with his buriall-linen drie thine eyes: Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief. ~George Herbert “The Dawning”
On my doubting days in this fraught world, too frequent and discouraging, I remember the risen Christ who awoke, left behind His folded grave clothes, so we could dry our tears of grief.
He reached out to place Thomas’s hand in His wounds, gently guiding Thomas to His reality, to become our new reality~ His open wounds called to Thomas’s mind and heart, His flesh and blood awakening a struggling faith by a simple touch.
Leave it God to know how to dry our tears when we grieve. Leave it to God to know how to raise the unreachable.
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.
Text by Mechthild of Magdeburg Effortlessly, Love flows from God into man, Like a bird Who rivers the air Without moving her wings. Thus we move in His world One in body and soul, Though outwardly separate in form. As the Source strikes the note, Humanity sings — The Holy Spirit is our harpist, And all strings Which are touched in Love Must sound.
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Though I know well enough To hunt the Lady’s Slipper now Is playing blindman’s-buff, For it was June She put it on And grey with mist the spider’s lace Swings in the autumn wind, Yet through this hill-wood, high and low, I peer in every place; Seeking for what I cannot find I do as I have often done And shall do while I stay beneath the sun. ~Andrew Young “Lady’s Slipper Orchid”
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful. ~Mark Nepo “Adrift” from Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness
Under the pines, near the murmuring brook, I know the wild orchids grow, Fair and pure in their shady nook, A page in God’s own wonderful book With a message for me to know.
Come in the Spring to that beautiful bower And pause by the moss and the fern To study. And know from the little flower God’s promise of hope is ready to shower On those who will trust and learn.
Over the land, with colors so bright, Leaves whirl in the chill, fitful breeze. The gurgling brook, ice-coated and white; Ferns, mosses and orchids have vanished from sight, Dead and lost in the Winter’s first freeze.
In weakening faith and hopeless despair, Black winters of woe hold my soul. For death is the end; and each mortal must share The fate of the orchids that once blossomed there. Oblivion marketh the goal.
Hold thy hope, faithless soul, for again in the Spring Neath the pines, the wild orchids will bloom. Struggle upward toward God, thy Creator and King. The Saviour is risen and Nature doth sing, Christ overcomes death and the tomb! ~Joseph Pullman Porter “Wild Orchids”
How strange to find you where I did along a path beside a road, your legs in graceful green dancing to music made by wind and woods.
Like ladies from a bygone age, you left your slippers there to air in dappled shade, while you, barefoot, relaxed your stays, let loose your hair.
The treasures of this world might be as simple as an orchid’s bloom; how sad that so much time is spent in filling coffers for the tomb.
If only life could be so fresh and free as you in serenade, we might learn we value most those things found lost in woodland shade. ~Mike Orlock “Lady Slipper Serenade (in 4/4 time)”
My grandmother’s house where my father was born had been torn down. She sold her property on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, Washington to a lumber company – this was the house where all four of her babies were born, where she and my grandfather loved and fought and separated and finally loved again, and where we spent chaotic and memorable Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. After Grandpa died, Grandma took on boarders, trying to afford to remain there on the homesteaded wooded acreage on Similk Bay, fronted by meadows where her Scottish Highland cattle grazed. Her own health was suffering and she reached a point when it was no longer possible to make it work. A deal was struck with the lumber company and she moved to a small apartment for the few years left to her, remaining bruised by leaving her farm.
My father realized what selling to a lumber company meant and it was a crushing thought. The old growth woods would soon be stumps on the rocky hill above the bay, opening a view to Mt. Baker to the east, to the San Juan Islands to the north, and presenting an opportunity for development into a subdivision. He woke my brother and me early one Saturday in May and told us we were driving the 120 miles to Anacortes.
He was on a mission.
As a boy growing up on that land, he had wandered the woods, explored the hill, and helped his dad farm the rocky soil. There was only one thing he felt he needed from that farm and he had decided to take us with him, to trespass where he had been born and raised to bring home a most prized treasure–his beloved lady slippers (Calypso bulbosa) from the woods.
These dainty flowers enjoy a spring display known for its brevity–a week or two at the most–and they tend to bloom in small little clusters in the leafy duff mulch of the deep woods, preferring only a little indirect sunlight part of the day. They are not easy to find unless you know where to look.
My father remembered exactly where to look.
We hauled buckets up the hill along with spades, looking as if we were about to dig for clams at the ocean. Dad led us up a trail into the thickening foliage, until we had to bushwhack our way into the taller trees where the ground was less brush and more hospitable ground cover. He would stop occasionally to get his bearings as things were overgrown. We reached a small clearing and he knew we were near. He went straight to a copse of fir trees standing guard over a garden of lady slippers.
There were almost thirty of them blooming, scattered about in an area the size of my small bedroom. Each orchid-like pink and lavender blossom had a straight backed stem that held it with sturdy confidence. To me, they looked like they could be little shoes for fairies who may have hung them up while they danced about barefoot. To my father, they represented the last redeeming vestiges of his often traumatic childhood, and were about to be trammeled by bulldozers. We set to work gently digging them out of their soft bedding, carefully keeping their bulb-like corms from losing a protective covering of soil and leafy mulch. Carrying them in the buckets back to the car, we felt some vindication that even if the trees were to be lost to the saws, these precious flowers would survive.
When we got home, Dad set to work creating a spot where he felt they could thrive in our own woods. He found a place with the ideal amount of shade and light, with the protection of towering trees and the right depth of undisturbed leaf mulch. We carefully placed the lady slippers in their new home, scattered in a pattern similar to how we found them. Then Dad built a four foot split rail fence in an octagon around them, as a protection from our cattle and a horse who wandered the woods, and as a way to demarcate that something special was contained inside.
The next spring, only six lady slippers bloomed from the original thirty. Dad was disappointed but hoped another year might bring a resurgence as the flowers established themselves in their new home. The following year there were only three. A decade later, my father left our farm and family, not looking back.
Sometime after the divorce, when my mother had to sell the farm, I visited our lady slipper sanctuary in the woods for the last time in the middle of May, seeking what I hoped might still be there, but I knew was no longer.
The split rail fence still stood, guarding nothing but old memories. No lady slippers bloomed. There was not a trace they had ever been there. They had given up and disappeared.
The new owners of the farm surely puzzled over the significance of the small fenced-in area in the middle of our woods. They probably thought it surrounded a graveyard of some sort.
And they would be right – it did.
An embroidery I made for my father after he replanted the lady slippers — on the back I wrote “The miracle of creation recurs each spring in the delicate beauty of the lady slipper – may we ourselves be recreated as well…”
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Trust that there is a tiger, muscular Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been seen and never will be seen by any human eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword- fish will never near a ship, that far from cameras or cars elephant herds live long elephant lives. Believe that bees by the billions find unidentified flowers on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe in caves of contentment, bears sleep. Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun. I must trust all this to be true, though the few birds at my feeder watch the window with small flutters of fear, so like my own. ~Susan Kinsolving “Trust”
It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address. ~Thomas Smith “Trust”
When I stand at the window watching the flickers, sparrows, finches, juncos, grosbeaks, chickadees, and red-winged blackbirds come and go from the feeders, I wonder who is watching who.
They remain wary of me, fluttering away quickly if I approach with lens in hand. They fear capture, even within a camera. They have a life to be lived without my witness or participation. So much happens that I never see or know about.
I understand: I fear being captured too. I prefer to remain an enigma.
Even if only for a moment as an image preserved forever, I know it doesn’t represent all I am, all I’ve done, all I feel, all my moments put together. The birds and bees and snakes and horses are, and I am, so much more than one moment.
Only God sees us fully in every moment, witness to our freedom and captivity, our loneliness and grief, our joy and tears, our sleeping and waking, knowing our best and our worst.
And because He knows us so well and knows the address to which we will be delivered – in Him we must trust.
photo by Tomomi Gibson
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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. ~Ada Limón“Instructions on Not Giving Up”
I thought I was emptied out – hollow and irretrievable – after a long drawn out winter of difficult news, and now these cold rainy spring days forecast even more bad news happening in the world.
Yet here I am ~ here we are ~ still among the living and breathing. I am swept away by what I see greening all around me.
The landscape begins to explode with layers of color and shadow. Standing close, I too am ignited. It is impossible to witness so much unfolding life and light and not be engulfed and heartened and singed around my edges.
It lures me outside where flames of green lap about my ankles as I stroll the fields and each fresh breeze fans the fires until I’ve nothing left of myself but ash and shadow.
Consumed and subsumed.
Combusted and busted.
What a way to go.
I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.
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