In Western lands beneath the Sun the flowers may rise in Spring the trees may bud the waters run the merry Finches sing.
Or there maybe ’tis cloudless night and swaying beeches bear the Elven stars as jewels white amid their branching hair
Though here at journey’s end I lie in darkness buried deep, beyond all towers strong and high, beyond all mountains steep, above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell. ~J.R.R. Tolkien “Sam’s Song”
Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children’s faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit’s still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be. ~Sara Teasdale “Barter”
Some days I wish to keep hold forever:
when the light is just right in the trees,
the breezes filled with blossom fragrance,
the mountains glow with evening sun,
a smiling child climbs up on my lap just because,
a meal is enjoyed by all who join together.
I know I will not say day is done.
I know I barter for these moments
by giving up some piece of me,
knowing the sowing of self
will reap rich harvest in an overflowing heart.
whose farm-hardened hands
wielded not only heavy hammers
but cradled a trembling wee bird.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
raised many a calf and chick
and a plethora of pups and piglets
and enough canaries to fill a thousand homes with song.
This good man ~who left us behind~
whose gentle smile
and generous heart
volunteered thousands of hours of selfless service.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
who raised no children himself
yet loved and nurtured a slew of nieces and nephews,
keeping track of every single one.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
who plowed and planted,
harvested and gathered
and saved and gave and gave and gave.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
who dressed for the farm every day
yet changed his jeans and tee shirt and muck boots
each week to Sunday’s best button-down shirt and sweater.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
is the only man to ever have owned both
a church organ in his front room
and a gold FireBird Trans Am in his back shed.
This good man ~who has left us behind~
has shown us the way to follow Him:
by his faithful service
by his love for the land
by his love for the garden
by his love for his animals
by his love for his family and friends
by his love for his church
by his love for the Lord.
This good man~ This good and humble man~ This good and humble and gentle man~
has gone down the lane ahead of us a bit
and will be waiting for us around the bend,
watching and waiting, waiting and watching,
keeping vigil until he can
someday see us coming on the horizon
and beckon us in and welcome us home.
In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others. ~Brennan Manning from Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
Jesus is God’s wounded healer: through his wounds we are healed. Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love. As followers of Jesus we can also allow our wounds to bring healing to others.
Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others….We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole being. That is healing. — Henri Nouwen from Bread for the Journey
There are unconcealed and transparent wounds all around me today. Our yard is frozen in time with glaze ice entrapping newly budded twigs alongside glass-like showcases of old dead weeds. Some forty foot trees are bent over in half, their tops brushing the ground, burdened with such a heavy load. During the northeast wind last night we heard crack after crack as branches gave way, unable to sustain in such conditions.
This morning, in the illumination of day light, it looks like a tornado hit the yard — broken branches and wounded trees everywhere. The wind continues and the temperatures stay sub-freezing. Winter is not done messing with us yet.
It is conditions like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, firestorms and silver thaws that remind us how little control we have over our environment and how much control it has over us. Being unable to walk anywhere outdoors that isn’t coated with ice is a humbling, helpless feeling. Yet I’m grateful for the reminder of our helplessness and woundedness. We dwell in this often hostile world and try to steward it, but we adapt to it, not the world adapting to us. We cannot stop the frozen rain from falling, but must wait patiently for the southerly winds to blow.
In fact, the warming and healing will come. Soon will I listen out our back door to the south, and hear the frozen trees in our woods knocking their branches together in a noisy cacophony as the south wind warms the ice, causing chunks to drop from the branches, clattering and clacking their way to the ground.
…from stony frozen silence of the wounded to animated noisemakers with a steady puff of warm wind.
…from bleeding to bandaged thanks to the warmth of family, a friend, a neighbor.
At times when I’m iced over –
rigid in my opinions, frozen in emotion, silent and cocooned –
the approach of a warm touch, an empathetic word, or heartfelt outreach breaks me free.
Perhaps I remain frostbitten around the edges, but I am whole again, grateful for the healing of the warm wind.
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business. ~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
same abandoned Montana schoolhouse as above a few years later (this photo by Joel DeWaard)
I have the privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaits me behind each exam room door.
In a typical busy clinic day, I open that door 36 times, close it behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes I’m allocated per patient. I need to peel through the layers of a person quickly to find the core of truth about who they are and why they’ve come to me.
Sometimes what I’m looking for is right on the surface: in their tears, in their pain, in their fear. Most of the time, it is buried deep and I need to wade through the rashes and sore throats and coughs and headaches to find it.
Once in awhile, I can actually do something tangible to help right then and there — sew up a cut, lance an abscess, splint a fracture, restore hearing by removing a plug of wax from an ear canal.
Often I find myself giving permission to a patient to be sick — to take time to renew, rest and trust their bodies to know what is best for a time.
Sometimes, I am the coach pushing them to stop living sick — to stop hiding from life’s challenges, to stretch even when it hurts, to get out of bed even when not rested, to quit giving in to symptoms that can be overcome rather than overwhelming.
Always I’m looking for an opening to say something a patient may think about after they leave my clinic — how they can make better choices, how they can be bolder and braver in their self care, how they can intervene in their own lives to prevent illness, how every day is a thread in the larger tapestry of their lifespan.
Each morning I rise early to get work done before I actually arrive at work, trying to avoid feeling unprepared and inadequate to the volume of tasks heaped upon the day. I know I may be stretched beyond my capacity, challenged by the unfamiliar and stressed by obstacles thrown in my way. It is always tempting to go back to bed and hide.
Instead, I go to work as those doors need to be opened and the layers peeled away. I understand the worry, the fear and the pain because I have lived it too. I am learning how to let it be, even if it feels miserable. It is a gift perhaps I can share.
No matter what waits behind the exam room door, it will be astonishing to me.
I’m grateful to be open for business. The Doctor is In.
All thy waves and billows
Have gone over me.
~Psalm 42:7
…Into the deep where ocean spray Is recollected in the great Salt, billow-making womb.
Effortless elegance! Holy wildness!
We walked nine miles of ocean beach Yesterday and let the ocean Rhythms–pulse-setting waves and tide-making Moon–get inside us. Slowed By this ancient pacemaker Our hearts thirsted. We drank God. ~Eugene Peterson from “Assateague Island”
photo by Nate Gibson
…when he looked at the ocean,
he caught a glimpse of the One he was praying to. Maybe what made him weep was
how vast and overwhelming it was and yet at the same time as near
as the breath of it in his nostrils,
as salty as his own tears. ~Frederick Buechner writing about Paul Tillich in Beyond Words
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble. ~Blaise Pascal
Most days I’m rocked by the most minute ripples and tiniest pebbles. The building waves created by forces beyond my control feel tsunami-like though they started out infinitesimally small. I can do nothing but let them flow over, around and beneath me, riding them up and down, trying not to get submerged for long and not get sea-sick.
Lately it feels like a barrage: instead of letting up, the billows roll larger and mightier, at times relentlessly powerful, changing everything in their path, including me.
Instead of being overcome by ripples, I hope some time to become the thrown pebble in a way that can move oceans or mountains or most amazing of all, another soul, just once. In some tiny way, I hope I can say or do or write something that makes a positive difference in someone’s life, and that person forwards the ripple, spreading the wave a little further, a little broader, a little deeper to affect others. Traveling far beyond the original thrown pebble, it can never to be pulled back once it is let loose.
I know what it is like for a blog post to go viral, becoming an ocean in churning turmoil, not a mere pebble starting with a least movement. Instead, I hope to be the most insignificant of change agents, serene and barely there, just moving enough of another heart and soul to start something that will grow and spread by itself, wild and wonderful.
I don’t know what it might be or how I might do it. Perhaps it is as simple as skipping rocks, choosing the best flattest pebble, rubbing the smooth sides between my fingers, and with a momentary regret at giving it up to the ocean, I’ll haul back and just let it go. It will skip once, twice, three four five even six times and then disappear below. The surface of the water will never be the same again.
For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. ~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
Though I’ve worked with many homeless people as a physician, I’ve never known homelessness myself. However, I have been room-less and those experiences were enough to acquaint me with the dilemma for Joseph and Mary searching for a place to sleep in Bethlehem.
It was my ninth birthday, July 26, 1963, and my family was driving to Washington D.C. for a few days of sightseeing. We had planned to spend the night in a motel somewhere in eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania but my father, ever the determined traveler, felt we should push on closer to our destination. By the time 11 PM rolled around, we were all tired and not just a little cranky so we started looking for vacancy signs at road-side motels. Most were posted no vacancy by that time of night, and many simply had shut off their lights. We stopped at a few with vacancy still lit, but all they had available would never accommodate a family of five.
We kept driving east, and though I was hungry for sleep, I became ever more anxious that we really would never find a place to lay our heads. My eyes grew wider and I was more awake than ever, having never stayed up beyond 1 AM before and certainly, I’d never had the experience of being awake all night long. It still goes down in my annals as my longest birthday on record.
By 2 AM we arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and my dad had reached his driving limit and my mom had declared we were not traveling another mile. We headed downtown where the brick Harrisburg Hotel stood some 10 stories high, an old structure in a questionable area of town, but the lights were on and there were signs of life inside.
They did have a room that gave us two saggy double beds to share for eight dollars, with sheets and blankets with dubious laundering history, a bare light bulb that turned on with a chain and a bathroom down the hall. I’m surprised my mother even considered laying down on that bed, but she did. I don’t remember getting much sleep that night, but it was a place to rest, and the sirens and shouts out on the street did make for interesting background noise.
Some 12 years later, I had another experience of finding no room to lay my head after arriving late at night in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, with supposed reservations at the local YMCA for myself and my three student friends traveling together on our way to Gombe to study wild chimpanzees. We landed at the airport after midnight after a day long flight from Brussels, managed to make it through customs intact and find a taxi, only to arrive at the Y to find it dark and locked. It took some loud knocking to rouse anyone and with our poor Swahili, we were able to explain our dilemma–we were supposed to have two rooms reserved for the four of us. He said clearly “no room, all rooms taken”.
The host was plainly perplexed at what to do with four Americans in the middle of the night. He decided to parse us out one each to occupied rooms and hope that the occupants were willing to share. He looked at me, a skinny white girl with short hair and decided I was some kind of strange looking guy, and tried to stick me in a room with a rather intoxicated French man and I said absolutely not. Instead my female traveling partner and I ended up sharing a cot (sort of) in a room with a German couple who allowed us into their room, which I thought was an amazing act of generosity at 2 AM in the morning. I didn’t sleep a wink, amazed at the magical sounds and smells of my first dawn in Africa, hearing the morning prayers coming from the mosque across the street, only a few hours later.
So I can relate in a small way to what it must have felt like over 2000 years ago to have traveled over hard roads to arrive in a dirty little town temporarily crammed with too many people, and find there were no rooms anywhere to be had. And to have doors shut abruptly on a young woman in obvious full term pregnancy is another matter altogether. They must have felt a growing sense of panic that there would be no safe and clean place to rest and possibly deliver this Child.
Then there came the offer of an animals’ dwelling, with fodder for bedding and some minimal shelter. This stable and its manger became sanctuary for the weary and burdened, remarkable in how unremarkable it was. We are all invited in to rest there, and I never enter a barn without somehow acknowledging that fact.
There are so many ways we continue to refuse access and shut the doors in the faces of those two (plus one) weary travelers, forcing them to look elsewhere to stay. We say “no room” dozens of times every day, not realizing who and what we are shutting out.
There is no room in our busy and “important” lives–from the moment we rise through the frenetic pace of work and home activities, there is no room for the solitude of quiet prayer and reflection, and for shared gratitude and grace.
There is no room in our schools, where all mention of religious practices outside of academic study is unwelcome and eagerly litigated.
There is no room in our city squares or buildings, where nativity scenes are banished and replaced with winter festival scenes of snowflakes and snowmen, or any symbol of religious significance is matched with a statement from the “Freedom from Religion” organizations declaring atheism as valid a faith.
There is no room in our homes where TV, computer, and social media become the altars of worship and occupy more of our time than anything else.
There is no room in our hearts and minds as we crave entertainment, sex, and drugs more than the freely offered gift of life.
Small wonder we pay no attention to who is waiting patiently outside the back door of our lives, where it is inhospitable and cold and dank. Few of us would invite our special company into the barn first and foremost. Yet these travelers don’t seek an invitation to come in the front door, with fancy meals and feather beds and fresh flowers on the cupboard. It is the dark and manure strewn parts of our lives where they are needed most. That is where He was born to dwell, and that is where He remains, in the humblest parts of our beings, the parts we do not want to show off, and indeed, most often want to hide.
There will always be plenty of room there.
Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.
~Thomas Merton
There was an entire aspect to my life that I had been blind to — the small, good things that came in abundance. ~Mary Karr from The Art of Memoir
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
~Thornton Wilder, quotes from “Our Town”
I once was lost but now am found Was blind but now I see… ~John Newton from “Amazing Grace”
~~And so I continue to work in the soil of this life, this work, this farm, this faith
to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit and be harvested to share with others.
With deep gratitude to those of you who visit here and let me know it makes a difference in your day — here is the small and the good from my harvest of words and pictures for you.
Sometimes, hard-trying, it seems I cannot pray– For doubt, and pain, and anger, and all strife. Yet some poor half-fledged prayer-bird from the nest May fall, flit, fly, perch–crouch in the bowery breast Of the large, nation-healing tree of life;– Moveless there sit through all the burning day, And on my heart at night a fresh leaf cooling lay. ~George MacDonald from Diary of an Old Soul
There can be no response today but to bow in earnest prayer, waiting for the hatch of a healing peace among the diverse peoples and opinions of our nation.
Our lives are half-fledged, not yet fully delivered nor understood, doubt burning into our flesh like thorns on fire. We are an angry and hurting nation — today becoming those who won and those who lost. The gloating bloats who we are, beyond recognition.
May our prayers rise like a dove from hearts in turmoil, once again to soar on the wings of eagles.
Peace, come quickly.
Be no longer moveless.
Move us to higher ground.
Plow deep our hearts.
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. ~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 and suddenly alone,
already aware of our emptiness
from the first breath,
each tiny air sac bursting
with the air of our fallen world~
air that is never enough.
The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether alveoli
or stomach
or synapses starving for understanding,
still hollering in our loneliness
and heart
broken.
So we mend ourselves
through our walk with others
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.
First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf.
~Martin Luther
Any election cycle in a free country is indeed a free-for-all, with the loudest and brashest citizens shouting their personal opinions far and wide. This election season has been particularly noxious, with the presidential candidates and their followers talking over and above each other until no one bothers to listen.
Since this time around I have no candidate, my voice is meager in comparison. Some would say I have no say since I refuse to partake of rotten apples.
Yet on election day, each citizen, even the smallest and meekest, has the opportunity to express themselves, quietly and alone in a pas-de-deux between them and their personal ballot. Their vote, whether checking a box next to a candidate name, or writing in an alternative, is just as significant.
With each news cycle, each debate, each Tweet, we just want to see this election over and done with. We have shaken the electoral apple tree so hard that all the ripe and bitter and rotten fruit has fallen to the ground. We then must cope with whatever harvest we reap with our votes.
Rarely do we find near-perfect fruit; this year it is already rotted on the branch, tainted from the start.
Some citizens vote along party lines only; the quality of the candidate is immaterial as long as they have the right party affiliation. Other citizens turn over every leaf in detailed scrutiny of each candidate’s history and qualifications and vote character over platform. This year there are citizens like myself who see nothing in the current candidates for president but worm holes leading to a fermented core of character rot.
Rotten to the core doesn’t even make edible applesauce. It is good for nothing but the compost pile in the hope that the fertilizer of today it will somehow yield better fruit tomorrow.
In my opinion, this time around there is no candidate worthy to lead a country founded on the principles of equality for all individuals as well as preventing the tyranny of government in the personal lives of citizens. The candidates have fostered a confused and too-angry citizenry, divided and divisive, shaking our shared tree for all its worth to see what’s in it for us, thus threatening the life of the tree itself.
The moral foundation of our country is mocked by these deeply flawed individuals who believe they deserve to be in the Oval Office despite their dark personal histories, statements and actions. This election has become all about them and what they want, not about the integrity our country desperately needs in its leaders.
So I pray for a day when we can set differences aside and raise up leaders who can as well. We must work together to care for the tree that bears the fruit needed for our children’s future. Let’s bury this year’s rot around the roots, water it generously and prune the old dead useless stuff away. The branches will be stronger, the blossoms hearty and ready for pollination (if there are any bees left), and the resulting fruit more palatable.
Perhaps next time around the worms won’t win.
That’ll be the day.
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
Barnstorming 