Category: truth

Only Here and Now

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When I work outdoors all day, every day,
as I do now, in the fall, getting ready for winter,
tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing
bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods,
doing the last of the fall mowing,
pruning apple trees, taking down the screens,
putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things,
as preparation for the coming cold…

when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees…

when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind…

when I am only here and now and nowhere else—
then, and only then, do I see the crippling power of mind,
the curse of thought, and I pause and wonder why
I so seldom find this shining moment in the now.
~David Budbill “This Shining Moment in the Now” from While We’ve Still Got Feet.

I spend only a small part of my day doing physical work compared to my husband’s faithful daily labor in the garden and elsewhere on the farm. We both celebrate the good and wonderful gifts from the Lord, His sun, rain and soil. Although these weeks are a busy harvest time preserving as much as we can from the orchard and the garden, too much of my own waking time is spent almost entirely within the confines of my skull.

I know that isn’t healthy. My body needs to lift and push and pull and dig and toss, so I head outside to do farm and garden chores. This physical activity gives me the opportunity to be “in the moment” and not crushed under “what was, what is, what needs to be and what possibly could be” — all the processing that happens mostly in my head.

I’m grateful for this tenuous balance in my life, knowing as I do that I was never cut out to be a good full time farmer. I sometimes feel that shining glow in the moments of “living it now” rather than dwelling endlessly in my mind about the past or the future.

Thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord. I am learning to let those harvest moments shine.

Original Barnstorming artwork note cards available as a gift to you with a $50 donation to support Barnstorming – information here

There Is Not One Blade of Grass…

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There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
~John Calvin – Sermon Number 10 on I Corinthians

We are given the option to notice
or not
We are given reason to rejoice
or not
We are given a rain-bowed promise to witness
or not.

So why ever not?

Original Barnstorming artwork note cards available as a gift to you with a $50 donation to support Barnstorming – information here

Life Goes Too Fast

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Sometimes you don’t get a chance
To pause and rest
Even to just take it all in
Sometimes life just goes too fast
And if you halt, even for a moment
You could get rolled over
By the momentum of existence
So, push yourself and keep going
Because once you stop
You may not get started again
And if you need a breather
Do it after the big stuff is done –
I guarantee you the view
Will be a whole lot better
~Eric Nixon “The Momentum of Existence” from Equidistant

The weather app on my phone tells me precisely when sunrise and sunset will happen every day, but I’m often too distracted to be present to witness them. I miss some great shows because I don’t get up early enough or don’t return home in time or simply don’t bother to look out the window or pay attention.

These are brilliant light and shadow shows that are free for the having if only I pause, take a breather, and watch.

The view from our hill keeps getting better the older I get. The momentum of daily life slows enough to allow me, breathless, to take in the best art show around.

No charge for admission and the Artist’s exhibit rotates daily.

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Like Dust in Sunlight

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The poem rises 
like dust in sunlight 
as I hold my breath
             and write
~Rick Maxson, “Ars Poetica” from  Molly and the Thieves

Words have breathed life into the dust from which we all were created.

I am still a mess of dust and words. Words suspended in light before my eyes are a reminder that God Himself breathed life and spirit into merest dust.

When I try to wrestle words down from the air to the page, I try to help them make sense, hoping then I might make sense.

I find myself holding my own breath as I write, as if that will keep my words orderly and safe, yet they have a tendency to come out jumbled and random, with no rhyme nor reason.

In my world, there is no such thing as mere dust or meaningless words. They wait for God’s holy breath to bring them to light and life.

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7

Now available: a gift from Barnstorming if you donate $50 to support daily Barnstorming posts – you will receive three blank notecards of original art from our farm.

art by Anja Lovegren
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The Ripening Fruit

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Now the bumbling bees that hover
Over loveliness in flower
Important with their store of pollen
Have had their hour;

Time has come for you to shed your
Silken petals and declare
Whether you are apple, cherry,
Plum or pear,

And all summer take your pleasure
Nourishing the ripening fruit
With the sun and rain you welcome
Through leaf, through root.
~Charles Pratt “Valediction” from From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New and Selected Poems

apple blossoms
pear blossoms


This is the time of year when so much budding potential has reached the peak of fruitfulness – plums, apples and pears are ready for the table, the oven, the dehydrator and freezer. The cherries had their season weeks ago.

My grandchildren wander the orchard with me, marveling at the bounty that has dropped from its branches, and looking up at what remains to be collected above our heads.

They pick up an apple and take a bite, trying to avoid worm holes and bruises. It seems we always are dodging the daily reality of worms and bruises.

It takes so much to yield bud to blossom to fruit to nourishment and the honeybee is our ticket to preserved winter fruit, making honey in the process. It is a marvelous way that nature is designed to replenish itself and nurture us, year after year.

And to think our fall from the Garden was over one piece of forbidden fruit, especially when there was so much, else available to us.

plum blossoms
cherry blossoms

Now available: a gift from Barnstorming if you donate $50 to support daily Barnstorming posts – three blank notecards of original art from our farm

art by Anja Lovegren
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The Need to Praise

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A blue horse turns into
a streak of lightning,
then the sun —
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful,
I can’t calculate
how the earth tips hungrily
toward the sun – then soaks up rain —
or the density
of this unbearable need
to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing —
this earth philosophy
and familiar in the dark
like your skin under my hand.
We are a small earth. It’s no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together;
can be used to make a house,
to stop a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember
who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become
the same song turning us
toward the nearest star —
a star constructed of eternity
and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses
of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made
when no promise was possible.
~Joy Harjo “Promise of Blue Horses” from How We Became Human

Birds embody the shapes of my heart
these days

holding the warmth of a hug
in their feathers

the gleam of a kiss in
their eyes

building a home for my love
in their beaks

and spreading, with their song,
the promise of blue horses.
 

“A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning,
then the sun—
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful.”
~Marjorie Moorhead, “That Which Makes Us Joyful” from Literary North

Even when my heart isn’t feeling it, especially when I’m blue (along with much of the rest of the world on this September 11 anniversary), I need to remember to whisper hymns of praise to the Creator of all that is blue as well as every other color.

I’m reminded of the goodness of a God who provides me with the words to sing and a voice to sing them out loud.

That reality alone makes me joyful. That alone is reason to worship Him. That alone is enough to turn blue days, blue horses and blue hearts gold again.

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An Arch of Colored Light

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Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
~Lord Byron

But mark! what arch of varied hue
  From heaven to earth is bowed?
Haste, ere it vanish, haste to view
  The Rainbow in the cloud.

How bright its glory! there behold
  The emerald’s verdant rays,
The topaz blends its hue of gold
  With the deep ruby’s blaze.

Yet not alone to charm thy sight
  Was given the vision fair;–
Gaze on that arch of colored light,
  And read God’s mercy there.
~Felicia Hemans from “The Rainbow”

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau

Painting the indescribable with words necessitates subtlety, sound and rhythm on a page.  The best word color portraits I know are by Gerard Manley Hopkins who created  through startling combinations:  “crimson-cresseted”, “couple-colour”, “rose-moles”, “fresh-firecoal”, “adazzle, dim”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, “blue-bleak embers”, “gash gold-vermillion”.

I understand, as Thoreau does,  how difficult it is to harvest a day using ordinary words.   Like grasping ephemeral star trails or the transient rainbow that moves away as I approach, what I bring to the page or screen is intangible yet so very real.

I will keep reaching for rainbows, searching for the best words to preserve my days and nights forever. It does feel like I’m clutching at a moment in time moving through my fingers.

I witnessed this Sabbath rainbow last night from our farm, standing with two of our very young grandchildren, hoping they would remember it enough to describe it to our someday great-grandchildren. Perhaps they will even read my words and know how much it mattered to me that they experience such beauty and promise.

I want them to always remember: in the beginning was the Word, and we are created by the same Author who writes incredible rainbows across the sky.

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A Silken Connection

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Someone said my name in the garden,

while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,

grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient

under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.

When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,

while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.

Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
~Li-Young Lee “Out of Hiding”

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White “Natural History”

I seek out the hidden web artist
who rebuilds this remarkable funnel
in an open pipe attached to a gate
I open and close daily without a thought.

As I approach, I see the weaver’s legs
scurrying hurriedly down into the safety of
its chosen darkness.

This spider needs temerity, not timidity,
to find its meal.

How else might it issue a dinner invitation,
luring me down into a sticky funnel vortex,
as a cherished guest meant never to return?

If I go astray and wander into temptation,
lose my way and plunge into the hole,
a silken thread remains:
hearing Him call out
my name from the garden,
urging me to return
to Whom I belong.

Indeed my soul hangs
by this single gossamer thread~
this silken connection calls me
back home, back to eternity.

There’s more that rises in the morning
Than the sun
And more that shines in the night
Than just the moon
It’s more than just this fire here
That keeps me warm
In a shelter that is larger
Than this room

And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper
Than mere sentiments
And a music higher than the songs
That I can sing
The stuff of Earth competes
For the allegiance
I owe only to the Giver
Of all good things

So if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t, let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home

There’s more that dances on the prairies
Than the wind
More that pulses in the ocean
Than the tide
There’s a love that is fiercer
Than the love between friends
More gentle than a mother’s
When her baby’s at her side
~Rich Mullins

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A Rapturous Morning

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My father, when he was surprised
or suddenly impressed, would blurt
“Great day in the morning,” as though
a revelation had struck him.
The figure of his speech would seem
to claim some large event appeared
at hand, if not already here;
a mighty day or luminous age
was flinging wide its doors as world
on world revealed their wonders in
the rapturous morning, always new,
beginning as the now took hold.
~Robert Morgan “Great Day in the Morning” from Terroir.

All this he saw,
for one moment breathless and intense,
vivid on the morning sky;
and still, as he looked, he lived;
and still, as he lived, he wondered.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Every time I open my eyes
as dawn streams through the window,
listening for the voice of yet another morning –
I am reminded how precious is this moment
~this “great day in the morning” ~
how intensely grateful I am
for each breath and each heartbeat
gifted to me.

We are created to experience this realization:
we are, everyone of us, beloved.

We are meant to wonder breathless at this,
to keep watch each new dawn, waiting to see what will happen next.

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Summer’s Parting Sighs

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From hill and cloud and heaven,
The hues of evening died
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside

So here’s an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer’s parting sighs
~A. E. Housman from “When Summer’s End is Nighing”

Whatever season we’re in, I’m content only for a few weeks, then want to move on to the next.

Rather than swelter in stifling summer heat, I yearn for cool autumn breezes and bright colors.

Rather than watch trees stripped bare by those breezes, I dream of white landscapes and cozy evenings spent indoors.

Rather than my fingers aching with cold during chores, my heart aches for fragrant swelling buds and the growing grasses of spring when I no longer need to carry hay bales to the horses.

Then, as spring becomes too fulsome to the point of overwhelm (and my allergies kick in), I circle back to longing for lingering summer sunrises and sunsets with days that seem to last forever.

I’m hopeless, it is true – never quite content with where I am in the here and now, always itching for whatever is coming on the horizon.

Maybe by the time I reach such happily-ever-aftering, I will realize every day, every month, every season was all gift, all grace, all grand and all so very generous. Good things don’t have to end for another to begin; they are to be cherished year round.

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