You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing you are worth profound care, even when you are dirty and rattled. Who knew? ~Anne Lamott from Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
As a farmer, I spend at least a part of every day muddy and up to my knees and elbows in muck, especially now that the fall rains have arrived, turning beast and barnyard to mush.
I call my barn life “the real stuff” as the rest of the hours of the day are spent dealing with “virtual stuff ” which nonetheless leaves me dirty and rattled. Frankly, I prefer the real over virtual muck even though it smells worse, leaves my fingernails hopelessly grimy and is obvious to everyone where I’ve been.
The stains of the rest of my day are largely invisible to all but me and far harder to scrub away. But even virtual grime can become overwhelming.
It is so much easier for me to deal with what is produced in the barnyard over the mess of political lack of integrity and moral standing. What soils me can be washed off and I’m restored for another day of wallowing in my muck boots. There is true grace in drawing up clean warm water, soaping with the suds that truly cleanse by sinking down into a deep tub of renewal.
God knows how badly we all could use a good scrubbing right now.
AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. ~Frederich Buechner
…the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.
No, those things all lie with… people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving. ~Billy Coffey from “The Heart of this Land”
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. ~Martin Luther
…as the land around turns rocky and hollow… I’d never suspected: every day, Although the nation is done for, I find new flowers. ~Donald Revell from “Election Year”
This morning I search for any hint of beauty trying its best to thrive in the rocky hollowed-out cracks of our foundation.
I look for something (anything) kind and gentle and hopeful to share here.
But we, the people, have chosen a vengeful meanness to rule us, to crush, bloody and fracture us apart.
I fear beauty and goodness have gone into hiding.
Even so, we are reminded of Words spoken again and again and again to a troubled world:
if only we can hear them for ourselves if only we can reassure one another to keep planting, growing, feeding and caring for one another
The Son came to be with us when we needed saving from ourselves, and will not abandon us:
do not be afraid do not be afraid do not be afraid
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain — They are with us like a disease: They worry the heart, they work the brain, As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane, And savage the helpless trees. What does it profit a man to know These tattered and tumbling skies A million stately stars will show, And the ruining grace of the after-glow And the rush of the wild sunrise? ~William Ernest Henley from “The Rain and the Wind”
The rain to the wind said, ‘You push and I’ll pelt.’ They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged – though not dead. I know how the flowers felt. ~Robert Frost “Lodged”
A heavy rain darkened a sodden gray dawn when suddenly unbidden, gusts ripped loose remaining leaves and sent them spinning, swirling earthbound in yellow clouds.
The battering of rain and wind leaves no doubt this is a day of decision – we are resigned to our fate.
I hunker down in the turbulence, tattered and tumbling, and wait for a clear night to empty itself into a fragile crystalline dawn.
AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice – – – though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. ‘Mend my life!’ each voice cried. But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations – – – though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do – – – determined to save the only life you could save. ~Mary Oliver “The Journey”
None of us can “mend” another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it.
Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.
What we can do is walk alongside the people we care about, offering simple companionship and compassion. And if we want to do that, we must save the only life we can save, our own.
Only when I’m in possession of my own heart can I be present for another in a healing, encouraging, empowering way. Then I have a gift to offer, the best gift I possess—the gift of a self that is whole, that stands in the world on its own two feet. ~Parker Palmer writing about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. ~Eugene O’Neill
We are born hollering, suddenly set apart, already aware of our emptiness from the first breath, each tiny air sac bursting with the air of a fallen world~
The rest of our days are spent filling up our empty spaces whether alveoli or stomach or synapses starving for understanding, still hollering our loneliness and heart break.
So we are mended through our walk with others who are also broken – we patch up our gaps by knitting the scraggly fragments of lives lived together. We become the crucial glue boiled from gifted Grace, all our holes somehow made holy.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock… a universe. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. ~Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
There is a yawning separation threatening us all right now as we peer over the frightening edge of another tight election.
Once again there is a fissuring gap between us.
People who have eaten at our tables, who were good friends, who we have worshiped alongside – became estranged. This separation was buoyed by blowing of the chill wind of politics where once there had been warmth and nurture and caring.
We disagreed then and continue to disagree. We no longer understand one another’s points of view.
How did we allow these gaps between us to develop? How do we close these fissures so something new and vital can grow? How can we stalk the gaps together?
Not one of us has the corner on the Truth; if we are honest with ourselves and each other, we cower together for safety in the cracks of this world, watching helplessly as the backside of God passes by, His face too holy for us to gaze upon.
He places us there together for our own good. I see you there alongside me.
We are weaker together when one side wins and the other loses. We are dependent together. We need to hold each other up as we look over the edge of the upcoming cliff.
Only His Word – nothing else – can fill the open gaping hollow before us. His Grace is great enough to fill every hole bridge every gap bring hope to the hopeless plant seeds for the future and restore us wholly to each other.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, oneby one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine andtwenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofsin the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on thetree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free fromyour hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Longbefore you hit the grass you will have forgotten there everwas a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below, You will fall in darkness… ~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine
But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. ~Robert Frost from “After Apple-Picking”
I pick up windfall apples to haul down to the barn for a special treat each night for the Haflingers. These are apples that we humans wouldn’t take a second glance at in all our satiety and fussiness, but the Haflingers certainly don’t mind a bruise, or a worm hole or slug trails over apple skin.
I’ve found over the years that our horses must be taught to eat apples–if they have no experience with them, they will bypass them lying in the field and not give them a second look. There simply is not enough odor to make them interesting or appealing–until they are cut in slices that is. Then they become irresistible and no apple is left alone from that point forward.
When I offer a whole apple to a young Haflinger who has never tasted one before, they will sniff it, perhaps roll it on my hand a bit with their lips, but I’ve yet to have one simply bite in and try. If I take the time to cut the apple up, they’ll pick up a section very gingerly, kind of hold it on their tongue and nod their head up and down trying to decide as they taste and test it if they should drop it or chew it, and finally, as they really bite in and the sweetness pours over their tongue, they get this look in their eye that is at once surprised and supremely pleased. The only parallel experience I’ve seen in humans is when you offer a five month old baby his first taste of ice cream on a spoon and at first he tightens his lips against its coldness, but once you slip a little into his mouth, his face screws up a bit and then his eyes get big and sparkly and his mouth rolls the taste around his tongue, savoring that sweet cold creaminess. His mouth immediately pops open for more.
It is the same with apples and horses. Once they have that first taste, they are our slaves forever in search of the next apple.
The Haflinger veteran apple eaters can see me coming with my sweat shirt front pocket stuffed with apples, a “pregnant” belly of fruit, as it were. They offer low nickers when I come up to their stalls and each horse has a different approach to their apple offering.
There is the “bite a little bit at a time” approach, which makes the apple last longer, and tends to be less messy in the long run. There is the “bite it in half” technique which leaves half the apple in your hand as they navigate the other half around their teeth, dripping and frothing sweet apple slobber. Lastly there is the greedy “take the whole thing at once” horse, which is the most challenging way to eat an apple, as it has to be moved back to the molars, and crunched, and then moved around the mouth to chew up the large pieces, and usually half the apple ends up falling to the ground, with all the foam that the juice and saliva create. No matter the technique used, the smell of an apple as it is being chewed by a horse is one of the best smells in the world. I can almost taste the sweetness too when I smell that smell.
What do we do when offered such a sublime gift from Someone’s hand? If it is something we have never experienced before, we possibly walk right by, not recognizing that it is a gift at all, missing the whole point and joy of experiencing what is being offered. How many wonderful opportunities are right under our noses, but we fail to notice, and bypass them because they are unfamiliar?
Perhaps if the Giver really cares enough to “teach” us to accept this gift of sweetness, by preparing it and making it irresistible to us, then we are overwhelmed with the magnitude of the generosity and are transformed by the simple act of receiving.
We must learn to take little bites, savoring each piece one at a time, making it last rather than greedily grab hold of the whole thing, struggling to control it, thereby losing some in the process. Either way, it is a gracious gift, and how we receive it makes all the difference.
AI image created for this post
The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green; The trees of nature fruitless be, Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.
His beauty doth all things excel, By faith I know but ne’er can tell The glory which I now can see, In Jesus Christ the Appletree.
For happiness I long have sought, And pleasure dearly I have bought; I missed of all but now I see ‘Tis found in Christ the Appletree.
I’m weary with my former toil – Here I will sit and rest awhile, Under the shadow I will be, Of Jesus Christ the Appletree.
With great delight I’ll make my stay, There’s none shall fright my soul away; Among the sons of men I see There’s none like Christ the Appletree.
I’ll sit and eat this fruit divine, It cheers my heart like spirit’al wine; And now this fruit is sweet to me, That grows on Christ the Appletree.
This fruit doth make my soul to thrive, It keeps my dying faith alive; Which makes my soul in haste to be With Jesus Christ the Appletree.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
…the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells, the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker down. Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time. No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope of silk. At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky. ~Barbara Crooker “And Now it’s October” from Small Rain.
I do try to stopper time.
I try every day on this page, not to suspend time or render it frozen, but like flowers and fruit that wither, I want to preserve these moments – a few harvested words and pictures to sample some chilly day.
I offer it up to you now, a bit of fragrance, to sip of its sweetness as it glows, luminous in the bottle.
Let’s share. Leave it unstoppered. The passage of time is meant to be preserved this way.
At the alder-darkened brink Where the stream slows to a lucid jet I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat, And see, before I can drink,
A startled inchling trout Of spotted near-transparency, Trawling a shadow solider than he. He swerves now, darting out
To where, in a flicked slew Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves, And butts then out of view
Beneath a sliding glass Crazed by the skimming of a brace Of burnished dragon-flies across its face, In which deep cloudlets pass
And a white precipice Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down Toward where the azures of the zenith drown. How shall I drink all this?
Joy’s trick is to supply Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache Nothing can satisfy. ~Richard Wilbur “Hamlen Brook”
Like so many others right now, I’m thirsty for honest, respectful discussion and debate about the state of the world. Instead, I’m left dry and wanting, ready to blow away with the next gust.
So I ache to witness fading colors, fallen leaves, swift winds and pouring rain, as all creatures great and small prepare for winter’s chill. There is stark honesty among all soon to fall asleep.
I yearn to hear God’s Truth spoken out loud. How amazing it would be — to be dumbstruck with joy.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The maple leaves abscond with summer’s green rain on such little stems connecting to spring’s essence, summer twigs’ foliage, the company of the living.
But now they shrug off their red-gold existence as if they’d never inhabited the verdure of the undead, drifting to a ground hardened by sudden frost. ~Donna Pucciani “One Minute”
I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key…Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.
And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from outer space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes, I will think two maple keys. If I am maple key falling, at least I can twirl. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
If only there were living words as plentiful as the maple keys that twirl from each branch, words that release us from our dry roots, ready to unlock life’s secrets, unlatch and push ajar the doors to heavy hearts.
Who can ever be ready to go from vibrant and alive, colorful and mobile, to dropped and still?
The reality of another spent season is a slug to the gut. Time is passing. I’m wasting time. There is no stopping it without stopping me.
Let’s dwell in the company of the living until we fall away together.
Live well, fellow leaves and we’ll let go together: swaying to a fitful wind, giving a gentle shrug and drifting, easing into settling down when the time comes.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day. ~Emily Brontë “Fall, Leaves, Fall”
It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. ~Emily Brontë from Wuthering Heights
The loudest crows cawing over the tops of the oaks call me to autumn already, and though my back is to the window,
I know the sky must be a gray wuthering, and the curlews are crying. The wind must be moaning as it goes sweeping across heath and moors and the spikes of purple heather thousands of miles away from where my body sits; yet
I avoid watching sad movies and will close a book that is clearly heading for a weepy ending.
I don’t need to wrap myself around things that hurt when there is enough sadness and pain in the world already. Deep emotion sticks to me like velcro, even when I know the tragedy is not my own. I take it on as if it is.
As a result, the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights is not my cup of tea. I suffered through the book as well as the movie versions. It is grim with wild, destructive passions that only lead to more sorrow. I become immersed in those desperately gray “wuthering” scenes feeling the sharp thorns of the words I read that end up drawing blood from me.
But most suffering is not at all fictional. When I become aware of tragedy happening far away, when the hurricane leaves behind terrible devastation or bombs and bullets rip communities to shreds, even though there is little I can physically do to help, I can’t turn away and not look. I can’t close the book that makes me sad and uncomfortable.
I too must feel the hurt, embracing the thorns rather than avoiding them.
Jesus did just that, taking it all upon Himself. He never turned away and still, now, today, He is pierced, bloodied for our sake.
AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Barnstorming 