Category: spirit

Where His Happiness Has Been

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Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim
Of twilight stares along the quiet weald,
And the kind, simple country shines revealed
In solitudes of peace, no longer dim.
The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light,
Then stretches down his head to crop the green.
All things that he has loved are in his sight;
The places where his happiness has been
Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good.
~Siegfried Sassoon from “Break of Day”

My husband and I grow old along with our horses – we are now past 70, just as a couple of our horses in “horse” years.

None of us, horses or humans, need to climb in the harness or put on the saddle to pull or carry the heavy loads of our former work lives.

It is a good life – each day treasured for its ordinariness.

Our retired horses feel the morning sun on their withers and the green blades under their feet, they scan the pasture for the sweetest tender patch to munch in the fields they know and love so well. They nap more now than in their younger years, taking breaks to let their heads hang relaxed and nodding, their tails slowly swishing at flies.

This morning was not so ordinary.

Waldheer van de Wortel (Wally), imported from Holland as a foal 27 years ago to be our herd stallion, let me know he wasn’t feeling well. He repeatedly pawed at the ground and the pasture gates, biting at his flank, trying to lie down and then get back up, not eating – clearly experiencing colicky belly pain that was getting worse.

I wondered if Wally’s time had come to bid him farewell. I had made a promise to my geriatric horses that I would not allow them to live in pain just because I didn’t want to let them go.

The vet came quickly and we talked about Wally’s options. She remarked about how he didn’t look his age, was holding weight well, his coat so sleek and shiny, his long-lashed eyes still bright and curious. But she said an older horse could often have repeated bouts of colic before the end, even if they temporarily improve with medical treatment.

I decided it was the right time to let him go to Haflinger heaven on a sunny summer morning, nibbling a mouthful of clover I offered him.

He was laid to sleep where he had lived nearly three decades.

He leaves behind two sons who were his pasture buddies, a couple dozen offspring scattered around the country, and people who loved his ambassadorship for the Haflinger breed. In his younger days, he was an enthusiastic eventer in the northwest region, ridden by his trainer Jessica Heidemann. They both had an enthusiastic fan-following.

In his later years, Wally was patient and loving with our grandchildren and with us. He lived a good life in his place of happiness. I wanted him to die peacefully at home, without a worry.

It just doesn’t get much better than that.

Waldheer van de Wortel, 1998 foal in Holland
27 year old Wally
Art work made by a fan of Waldheer
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Like Right Now

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It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake 
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
~ William Stafford “Yes” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

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.

It was all easy.
~William Stafford – Lines written the morning before he died at age 79

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.

Consider the Lilies…

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Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse
of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there
in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language
some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?
~Mary Oliver “The Lily”

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Matthew 6:28b-29

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the edge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as the old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When Van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone–

most of all himself.
He wasn’t a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river–

where the vanishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues–
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.
~Mary Oliver “Lilies”

photo by Josh Scholten

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention… pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

Literature, painting, music—
the most basic lesson that all art teaches us
is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet,
including our own lives, as a vastly richer,
deeper, more mysterious business
as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot.
In a world that for the most part steers clear
of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left
where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen
is also the most basic lesson
that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us?
Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel.
Listen to social injustice, says Amos;
to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah;
to international treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah;
because it is precisely through them
that God speaks his word of judgment and command.

In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that
“Consider the lilies of the field”
was the only commandment she never broke.
She could have done a lot worse.
Consider the lilies.
It is the sine qua non of art and religion both.
~Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark

I have failed to “consider the lilies” way too many times.

In my daily life, I am considering my own worries and concerns as I walk past beauty and purpose and holiness. My mind turns inward, often blind and deaf to what is outside me.

It is necessary to be reminded every day that I need to pay attention beyond myself, to love my neighbor, to remember what history has to teach us, to search for the sacred in all things.

Stop, Look, Listen, Consider:
all is grace,
all is gift,
all is holiness
brought to life – so stunning, so amazing, so wondrous.

Thank you to David and Lynne Nelson, David Vos of VanderGiessen Nursery, Arlene Van Ry, Tennant Lake Park and Western Washington University for making their lovely lilies available to me to photograph.

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A Century From Now

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I’m sorry I won’t be around a hundred years from now.
I’d like to see how it all turns out.
What language most of you are speaking.
What country is swaggering across the globe.
I’m curious to know if your medicines cure what ails us now.
And how intelligent your children are
as they parachute down through the womb.
Have you invented new vegetables?
Have you trained spiders to do your bidding?
Have baseball and opera merged into one melodic sport?
A hundred years….
My grandfather lived almost that long.
The doctor who came to the farmhouse to deliver him arrived in a
horse-drawn carriage.
Do you still have horses?
~David Shumate “A Hundred Years from Now” from Kimonos in the Closet

When the local obituary notices lists someone who had lived nearly a century, I stop to think what societal changes have taken place over those 100 years.

Over the past century, our melting pot country has absorbed a panoply of languages and nationalities, in addition to being the source of plenty of political swagger.

There have been many new medical discoveries and public health measures resulting in longer life expectancy and lower child mortality rates, despite what our swaggering politicos currently say.

Although neither of my parents lived past 90 years of age, when they were born in the early 1920s, rural transportation was primarily horse and buggy, most babies were born at home, antibiotics had not been developed and only smallpox vaccination was routinely administered to children.

Everyone wrote postcards or letters to one another to stay in touch, and photographs were done by professionals.

The moon had not been visited, the web was something your face ran into on a foggy morning, and nuclear referred to a center of a cell.

Oh, and yes, we still have horses.

Not many horses still labor on behalf of humans as they did on a daily basis 100 years ago. Ours have a pretty sweet life here on our farm, living well into their thirties – a century in horse years.

Thinking ahead to a century from now?
So much more will happen that we can’t begin to imagine.

But I hope there will always be horses…

Aunt Lois, nearly 100
Aunt Betty, age 99
Great Grandma Elna, age 88
Great Grandpa Harry holding baby Emerson, photo by mama Abby Mobley
Great Grandma Emma, granddaughter Andrea, great-grandson Zealand
my paternal grandparents in the early 1910s
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While the World Tilts Toward Sleep

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The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.
~Dorianne Laux “On the Back Porch” from Awake

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
~Wendell Berry “They Sit Together on the Porch” from A Timbered Choir

If just for a moment,
when the world feels like it is tilting so far
I just might fall off,
there is a need to pause
to look at where I’ve been
and get my feet back under me.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to observe “out there”
without completely leaving the safety of “in here.”

I am outside looking squarely at uncertainty
yet still hear and smell and taste
the love that dwells just inside these walls.

What do any of us want more
than to be missed if we were to step away
or be taken from this life?

Our voice, our words, our heart, our touch
never to be replaced,
its absence a hole impossible to fill?

When we are called back inside to the Love
that made us who we are,
may we leave behind the outside world
more beautiful because we were part of it.

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Holding a Memory of Cherries

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We used to pick cherries over the hill
where we paid to climb wooden ladders
into the bright haven above our heads, the fruit
dangling earthward. Dark, twinned bells
ringing in some good fortune just beyond
our sight. I have lived on earth long enough
to know good luck arrives only on its way
to someone else, for it must leave you to the miracle
of your own misfortune, lest you grow weary
of harvest, of cherries falling from the crown of sky
in mid-summer, of hours of idle. Let there be
a stone of suffering. Let the fruit taste of sweetness
and dust. Let grief split your heart so precisely
you must hold, somehow, a memory of cherries—
tart talismans of pleasure—in the rucksack
of your soul. Taut skin, sharp blessing.

Luminous, ordinary and acute.
~Danusha Laméris “U-Pick Orchards”

Life is not a bowl of cherries,
unless you count the ones
that aren’t yet ripe, or are over-ripe,
or have a squirrel- or bird-bite taken,
or have shriveled to raisins on the tree.

Yes, there are perfect cherries
that shine in the dark, glistening with promise,
tempting us to climb high to pick them.

Those we really want usually are out of reach.

How can we know what perfection is
unless we experience where life falls short?

The lingering taste of grief,
the agony of waiting for word in a tragedy,
the gnawing emptiness of indescribable loss.

Only the memory of what was nearly perfect,
remembering what could have been
knowing what will someday be our reality
can ease the bitter pit of suffering now.

May the families of those swept away in flooding,
those who live in the path of war and violence,
those who hunger for justice, or starving for food,
those who struggle with life-threatening and chronic illness
somehow know the comfort of God’s perfection awaits them.
The Light and Goodness is there for us to taste,
yet just beyond our reach.

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A Sight Unsought

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I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night,
in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe
of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit,
lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool,
drew back from the barrow,
of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him,
a fluke yet fanged him,
entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight,
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me,
eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Moonrise” June 19, 1876

how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try,
walking as fast as you can, but getting nowhere,
arms and legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks and aches, less breath.
Ah, but these soft nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and you’d think the road
goes on forever. Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love
is so much wasted,” and I wonder what I haven’t given yet.
A thin comma moon rises orange, a skinny slice of melon,
so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole
thing, down to the rind. Always, this hunger for more.
~Barbara Crooker “How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River,” from More

The secret of seeing is,
then the pearl of great price. 
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever 
I would stagger barefoot
across a hundred deserts
after any lunatic at all. 
But although the pearl may be found,
it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all: 
although it comes to those who wait for it, 
it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, 
a gift and a total surprise.

I return from one walk 
knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek
and the hour the laurel blooms. 
I return from the same walk a day later
scarcely knowing my own name.

Litanies hum in my ears; 
my tongue flaps in my mouth. 
Ailinon, alleluia!
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

photo by Josh Scholten

The greatest gift is the one I stumble upon
rather than having desired, sought out, fought for.
Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m missing,
so oblivious to being surrounded by hidden treasures.

Surprise me, dear Lord. 

Though I regularly lament in the shadows,
though I try to hide under the blankets each morning,
slumbering through the tragic, the painful, the sorrow,
you send your gentle crescent light to awaken me.

So I lift my voice in praise and gratitude for your unexpected gift
that I didn’t know I needed, would never had thought to seek, 
the pearl of great price held out for me to take each day.

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Something Is Calling…

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Something is calling to me
from the corners of fields,
where the leftover fence wire
suns its loose coils, and stones
thrown out of the furrow
sleep in warm litters;
where the gray faces
of old No Hunting signs
mutter into the wind,
and dry horse tanks
spout fountains of sunflowers;
where a moth
flutters in from the pasture,
harried by sparrows,
and alights on a post,
so sure of its life
that it peacefully opens its wings.
~Ted Kooser “In the Corners of Fields” from Flying at Night.


I am a visitor here,
even though we’ve lived here
for more than 30 years.

There is something to be discovered in the field
each day if I make an effort to look and listen.

My Merlin app on my phone tells me
the birds I hear around me.
A photo of a wildflower or weed
is identified by Google.
The jet flight tracks overhead
are pinpointed by another app
saying who is flying where.

Yet I’m placed right here by my Maker.
He knows where I am at all times,
the words I write,
the thoughts I pray.

I try to be at peace in these turbulent times:
to be sure of this life I’m given,
to be sure to Whom I belong,
to simply open my wings to the light,
to be ready to fly when my time comes.

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Written as with a Sunbeam

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The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for,
among old parchments, or musty records.
They are written, as with a sun beam,
in the whole volume of human nature,
by the hand of the divinity itself;
and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
~Alexander Hamilton, from  “The Farmer Refuted”

What sparkling flashes of God’s wit and brilliance—
His coruscations—
have caused your mind today to
run back up the sunbeam to the sun and given you cause
to give thanks and to worship the Lord?
~C.S. Lewis from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

photo by Nate Gibson

God illuminates through His Word,
not once but twice. 

In the beginning, He created
the sun and the moon to shine
upon bodies, hearts, and souls. 

Then, He came to light the world
from below as well as from above
so we could be saved from darkness.

By His descent to us,
because He leaves heaven’s light
to be in our arms and by our sides-
He illuminates us
so we reflect the light He brings:
loved
saved
despite all our efforts
to remain in the dark.

photo by Nate Gibson
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Stronger Than Seems Possible

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Light comes softly through the morning mist,
splinters as it settles on dewdrops that dangle

from the web. Pulled taut and lovely, the web
stretches above a mass of leaves-

green, amethyst, and pale rose.
silken lines hold fast to spindly branches,

all anchored to the center, geometric
rings of connection, so delicate, so strong

like this catch-all we call life,
how we gather what we think we need

for sustenance, how prisms of light flash
and fade on the fragile structures we create,

how we tremble through storms
holding on, stronger than seems possible.
~Lois Edstrom “A Fragile Light” from MoonPath Press 2025

I too am feeling stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I move between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is a hard and heavy work of strength and aspiration, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or an oblivious creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is both beautifully delicate and strong.

Sometimes it is easily shredded, full of holes, and ultimately useless.

The center doesn’t always hold. 
The tethers loosen. 
The periphery sags, frays and tears.

It is a matrix of fragile light, yet holding on…

…something created with purpose and intention.
Simply that effort makes it all worthwhile.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

(Lois Edstrom is my poet friend who lives on nearby Whidbey Island; my web photo at the top of this post is the cover for her new book of poems: A Fragile Light)

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