to the heartbeat. Would our child live? Air tinted
gray, I moved closer, searched the screen
for the halo of bone,
touched glass
and stroked our bad luck,
my finger leaving its smudge
on the oval glow,
delicate as a grape. The head would
never form. Grace stared at the brightness
then closed her eyes, the light flickered
on our hands. This second child. Never.
The dark
washed in, heavy as water.
Did our baby know pain? Inside tiny feet
kicking, small hands
open, fingers reached out. Drift
of white static, this broken globe
we had made. ~Brian Komei Dempster “Glow” from Seize
The call came in the middle of a busy night as we worked on a floppy baby with high fever, a croupy toddler whose breathing squeezed and squeaked, a pale adolescent transfusing due to leukemia bleeding.
It was an anencephalic baby just born, unexpected, unwanted in a hospital across town, and she needed a place to die.
Our team of three puzzled how to manage a baby without a brain– simply put her in a room, swaddled, kept warm but alone? Hydrate her with a dropper of water to moisten her mouth? Offer her a taste of milk?
She arrived by ambulance, the somber attendants leaving quickly, unnerved by her mewing cries.
I took the wrapped bundle and peeled away the layers to find a plump full term baby, her hands gripping, arms waving once freed; just another newborn until I pulled off her stocking cap and looked into an empty crater — only a brainstem lumped at the base.
No textbook pictures had prepared me for the wholeness, the holiness of this living, breathing child.
Her forehead quit above the eyebrows with the entire skull missing, tufts of soft brown hair fringed her perfect ears, around the back of her neck. Her eyelids puffy, squinting tight, seemingly too big above a button nose and rosebud pink lips.
She squirmed under my fingers, her muscles strong, breaths coming steady despite no awareness of light or touch or noise.
Yet she cried in little whimpers, mouth working, seeking, lips tentatively gripping my fingertip. A bottle warmed, nipple offered, a tentative suck allowing tiny flow, then, amazing, a gurgling swallow.
Returning every two hours, more for me than for her, I picked her up to smell the salty sweet scent of amnion still on her skin as she grew dusky.
Her breathing weakened, her muscles loosened, giving up her grip on a world she would never see or hear or feel — to behold something far more glorious.
I gazed into her emptiness, waiting my turn to be filled.
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When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.
For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’ (Psalm 41:9)
I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he.
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” John 13: 12-20
Rembrandt Head of Christ
I, too, stood on the sacred image … on the face of the man who has been ever in my thoughts, … on the best and most beautiful face that any man can ever know, on the face of him whom I have always longed to love.
I understand your pain and your suffering. It is for that reason that I am here.
Lord, I resented your silence.
I was not silent. I suffered beside you. ~Shisaku Endo from Silence – an interchange at the end of the book between Father Sebastian Rodrigues and the voice of the Lord Jesus
Then Judas in his hot desire Said, “Give me what you will.” Christ spoke to him with words of fire, “Then, Judas, you must kill, One whom you love, One who loves you As only God’s son can: This is the work for you to do To save the creature man.“
“And men to come will curse your name, And hold you up to scorn; In all the world will be no shame Like yours; this is love’s thorn. It takes strong will of heart and soul, But man is under ban. Think, Judas, can you play this role In heaven’s mystic plan?”
So Judas took the sorry part, Went out and spoke the word, And gave the kiss that broke his heart, But no one knew or heard. And no one knew what poison ate Into his palm that day, Where, bright and damned, the monstrous weight Of thirty white coins lay.
It was not death that Judas found Upon a kindly tree; The man was dead long ere he bound His throat as final fee. And who can say if on that day When gates of pearl swung wide, Christ did not go His honored way With Judas by His side?
And then there is the love for the enemy– love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world. ~Frederick Buechnerfrom The Magnificent Defeat
Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me. Psalm 41:9
…he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. Genesis 3:15
Jesus knew Judas would “lift his heel against him” – Jesus chose him for that very reason, a close friend who had been a cherished part of the twelve.
The kick is hard, but not unexpected.
A heel crushes the image of Jesus and all that is good and beautiful.
Yet, this Lord is able to understand the pain of the betrayer and know suffering so much, He brings it onto Himself.
It was for this reason He came. It was for this reason He invites us to eat the bread of life alongside Him. We are filled and forgiven because He loves us enough to take our kicks and crushes.
What a gift to be known so well by God Himself.
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.
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He is a hard one to write a poem about. Like Napoleon. Hannibal. Genghis Khan. Already so large in history. To do it right, I have to sit down with him. At a place of his own choosing. Probably a steakhouse. We take a table in a corner. But people still recognize him, come up and slap him on the back, say how much they enjoyed studying about him in school and ask for his autograph. After he eats, he leans back and lights up a cigar and asks me what I want to know.
Notebook in hand, I suggest that we start with the Little Big Horn and work our way back. But I realize I have offended him. That he would rather take it the other way around. So he rants on about the Civil War, the way west, the loyalty of good soldiers and now and then twists his long yellow hair with his fingers. But when he gets to the part about Sitting Bull, about Crazy Horse, he develops a twitch above his right eye, raises his finger for the waiter, excuses himself and goes to the restroom while I sit there along the bluffs with the entire Sioux nation, awaiting his return. ~David Shumate “Custer” from High Water Mark
Bighorn Battlefield – National Park Service photo
When my family took two cross-country trips by car, once in 1963 and another in 1965, my father, a former officer and battalion leader in the Marines during WWII, was the primary driver and keeper of maps and deadlines. He could be convinced to stop at any number of state and national parks, points of interest and historical markers, but all four times we passed the sign indicating the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he would not stop despite our pleading.
“You’ve seen as much as there is up there,” he would say as we sped past, pointing at the marble monolith at the top of the hill where the battle took place. I would look around at the desolate countryside of brown grass with no trees, in the middle of nowhere, and wonder how this place could ever have warranted a battle to the death.
I was frustrated at my dad’s refusal to stop to learn more, but it was only a monument and stone gave markers. No interpretive center yet.
I had certainly learned about General George Custer’s Last Stand in my elementary school history lessons. But my interest was primarily driven by a 1958 Disney movie “Tonka Wakan” that I had seen in the theater and then later on Sunday nights on “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” I thought I understood the tragedy of that day from the standpoint of the U.S. Calvary and the only surviving horse Comanche, who in the Disney-imagined version of the battle, was raised and trained by a young Indian boy who turned the horse over to the calvary and then later was part of the Little Bighorn Battle in defense of Indian territory.
So I had a very skewed and Disney-fied version of history and my father was not helping me understand more deeply. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the likely reason he was so reluctant to stop and examine the history of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
My father was ashamed of it. He was a humble man who knew there could be no pride or sense of honor in that place.
He had likely been trained in his Marine Officer’s Training in 1942 to understand that the poor decision-making of a cocky, overly self-assured General led to the slaughter of five companies of the 7th Calvary Regiment as well as their Indian scouts in addition to dozens of Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors.
My father had lived through three South Pacific island battles where poor decision-making was a death sentence. He didn’t feel the need to rehash a sorry history in this desolate part of Montana.
As an adult, I’ve visited the Battlefield with my husband and children several times, have learned more about what led to the battle, what took place that day and how the indigenous people of the region have memorialized the spot from their own perspective. When we approach this spot on our cross-country drives, I’m filled with regret and remorse at the loss of life and the eventual loss of a Native American culture that could never again be as it was, despite the defeat they handed to the cavalry that day. I learned more when our son lived and taught high school math on the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Sioux people and we visited the site of Wounded Knee, another tear-drenched place in U.S. Cavalry and Native American history.
We the people, most of us descendants of immigrant Americans, comprise the U.S. government and military — which has proven recently it doesn’t always make the best or wisest decisions.
War, suffering, loss and death cannot and should not be Disney-fied. History is more complex than a paragraph in a textbook, or a tweet or AI meme on social media from the White House.
We have so much to learn about our shame and our need for greater humility. We need to understand who we have offended, not just how offended we feel. We can’t hide from reality in the bathroom or drive on past the sites of these bloody conflicts, hoping it will all be forgotten.
We must never forget.
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What is this unfolding, this slow- going unraveling of gift held in hands open to the wonder and enchantment of it all?
What is this growing, this rare showing, like blossoming of purple spotted forests by roadsides grown weary with winter months?
Seasons affected, routinely disordered by playful disturbance of divine glee weaving through limbs with sharpened shards of mirrored light, cutting dark spaces, interlacing creation, commanding life with whimsical delight.
Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking? ~Paul Hardingfrom Tinkers
God does not leave us to perish in the valley of dry bones.
We may think we are invincible, yet the truth is: we are mere dust, ready to blow away. The immense power of the breath of God fills newborn lungs and will someday restore the empty lungs of the resurrected dead.
He rebuilds our muscle and sinews, reconnects us bone to bone, person to person, living to rattle and sing as the body of Christ, mirrored reflections in His image.
This unfolding, this growing, this blossoming, this breaking: Lord, keep dizzying us with your blessings, now and always.
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All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats. All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze, one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond, and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear, and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you, where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost. ~Donald Hall “Name of Horses”
Today, we said goodbye to our last Haflinger mare after four decades of being a breeding farm. We have two geldings left on the farm, in their early 20’s.
I was dreading this day but knew it would eventually come.
Belinda, who I have written about here, flew from the Netherlands as a baby with her mother in 1998, bringing new bloodlines to North America from an East German Haflinger breeding program, at the time only recently accessible to breeders with the opening of the Berlin Wall.
She proved to be a great broodmare here on our farm and her foals all sold quickly to other breeders. However, her last twelve years of retirement were complicated by metabolic imbalance and a tendency toward laminitis. We finally had to make the hard choice to bring out the vet to gently help her pass with intravenous medication into eternal lush pastures she could tolerate. Then the local hauler picked her up for cremation. No bullets to the brain, no hole to be dug.
We have done our final parting with our horses in this way over our forty years of Haflinger ownership. It is certainly different from how it was done when I was a kid on a small cow and horse farm. Our family mare, Dolly, in 1965, was put down by a vet’s bullet to the head after an agonizing bout with colic. My dad sent me back to the house beforehand, not wanting me to watch. Still, I could not help but hear the gunshot as if it had gone right through me as well. It took Dad the rest of the day to dig a hole deep enough so she could be buried on our farm.
At first her grave was my place to cry where no one but the trees and wild flowers could see.
When my tears finally dried up, it was a place to sing loudly where no one but chipmunks and my dog could hear.
And before I left for college, it became the sanctuary where I retreated to talk to God when my church no longer was.
I suspect her bones lie there still, with tall trees now growing through her ribs. That dent in the ground will always betray the spot.
We’ll remember you fondly, Belinda. You traveled far to come here and gave us your best. We promised you would live here on this farm, in peace, until your last breath.
Belinda’s last evening out on pasture
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At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn.
A view of the horizon, the entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of the horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark.
As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me. ~Elizabeth Strout, from My Name is Lucy Barton
I have learned, from those much wiser than I am, to recognize moments meant for quieting.
The news of the world constantly rushes past; there is suffering beyond imagining in the lives of a few I know well and for millions I don’t know at all.
What little can I do to make a difference? So much need lies beyond my short reach.
Instead of feeling abandoned on the shores of overwhelm, I seek out the familiar, the routine, and the ordinary, lingering immersed in the recurring patterns of the day and night as the world keeps on spinning on its axis.
I too turn around to witness that which surrounds me, and in so doing, my soul is quieted. And amazed.
One year ago, my teacher and mentor Jane Goodall passed into eternity, leaving behind this message for us all…
Fifteen years ago today, family and friends lost Jenny Rausch to eternity. She is someone we will never forget and I want to share a bit about what she taught me, but also direct you to a page of her wit and wisdom — some wonderful horse stories she had written over the years.
I spent this morning adjusting to this change in season by occupying myself with the familiar task of moving manure. Cleaning barn is a comforting chore, allowing me to transform tangible benefit from something objectionable and just plain stinky to the nurturing fertilizer of the future. It feels like I’ve actually accomplished something.
As I scooped and pushed the wheelbarrow, I remembered another barn cleaning over two decades ago, when I was one of three or four friends left cleaning over ninety stalls after a Haflinger horse event that I had organized at our local fairgrounds. Some people had brought their horses from over 1000 miles away to participate for several days. Whenever horse people gather, there were inevitable personality clashes and harsh words among some participants along with criticism directed at me that I had taken very personally.
As I struggled with the umpteenth wheelbarrow load of manure, tears stung my eyes and my heart. I was miserable with regrets over people not getting along. My work did not feel worth the pain I was feeling.
My friend Jenny Rausch had stayed behind with her family to help clean up the large facility and she could see I was struggling to keep my composure. Jenny put herself right in front of my wheelbarrow and looked me in the eye, insisting I stop for a moment and listen.
“You know, none of these troubles and conflicts will amount to a hill of beans years from now. People will remember a fun event in a beautiful part of the country, a wonderful time with their horses, their friends and family, and they’ll be all nostalgic about it, not giving a thought to the infighting or the sour attitudes or who said what to whom.
So don’t make this about you and whether you did or didn’t make everyone happy. You loved us all enough to make it possible to meet here and the rest was up to us. So quit being upset about what you can’t change. There’s too much you can still do for us.”
And then she gave me a hug that I will always cherish.
During tough times which have come often in my professional life, including the difficult and controversial decisions I had to make during the COVID pandemic, Jenny’s advice replays in my mind, reminding me to stop seeking appreciation from others, or feeling hurt when harsh words come my way.
None of these things amount to a hill of beans now…
She was right about the balm found in the tincture of time. She was right about giving up being upset in order to die to myself and my self-absorption, to keep focusing outward rather than inward.
Jenny, I have remembered what you said even though at times I relapse and forget.
A few years after that day in the barn, Jenny herself spent six years vigorously living her life every day while treating a relentless cancer. The tumor spread was initially slowed in the face of her faith and intense drive to live. Over time though, she became a rusting leaf, fading imperceptibly, crumbling at the edges until she finally let go.
Her dying on this day twelve years ago did not flash brilliance, nor draw attention at the end. Her intense focus during the years of her illness had always been outward to others, to her family and friends, to the numerous healers she spent so much time with in medical offices, to her belief in the plan God had written for her and others.
Despite her intense love for her husband and young children, she let go her hold on life here. And we all had to let her go.
Brilliance cloaks you as your focus is now on things eternal.
You were so right, Jenny. Conflicts from twenty-five years ago surely haven’t amounted to a hill of beans; all is remembered fondly by those who were part of the gathering. I especially treasure the words you wisely spoke to me as they have helped me through other tough times when I tend to focus on nurturing my own hurt feelings.
Bathing in the hurt never helps…
And I’m no longer upset that I can’t change the fact that you have left us. There is still so much you continue to do for us by staying alive in our memories. We won’t forget what you have said and written.
And so it goes… I know we’ll catch up later.
Jenny R –photo by Ginger Kathleen Coombs
…to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. — Ellen Bass “The Thing Is…” from Mules of Love
In the high woods that crest our hills, Upon a steep, rough slope of forest ground, Where few flowers grow, sweet blooms today I found Of the Autumn Crocus, blowing pale and fair. Dim falls the sunlight there; And a mild fragrance the lone thicket fills.
Languidly curved, the long white stems Their purple flowers’ gold treasure scarce display: Lost were their leaves since in the distant spring,
Their February sisters showed so gay. Roses of June, ye too have followed fleet! Forsaken now, and shaded as by thought, As by the human shade of thought and dreams, They bloom ‘mid the dark wood, whose air has wrought With what soft nights and mornings of still dew! Into their slender petals that clear hue, Like paleness in fresh cheeks; a thing On earth, I vowed, ne’er grew More delicately pure, more shyly sweet.
Child of the pensive autumn woods! So lovely, though thou dwell obscure and lone, And though thy flush and gaiety be gone; Say, among flowers of the sad, human mind, Where shall I ever find So rare a grace? in what shy solitudes? ~Robert Laurence Binyon “Autumn Crocus”
The late September emergence of autumn crocus is always sudden, rising up near the equinox in the shade of spent peony bushes.
These rare blooms: tall, tender, bold, and frail, their incubation triggered by retreating light from above, unlike their springtime cousins emerging through melting snow.
The autumn crocus waits with thoughtful temerity, summoned forth from the soil to remind us the end of summer is not the end of them or us.
A luminous gift of hope and beauty borne from a humble bulb; plain and only soil-adorned.
Slowly unfurling on a pale leggy stem, the tender lavender petals peel back to reveal golden crowns of saffron, brazenly blooming when all else is dying back.
Vulnerable to blustery wind and heavy rains, they easily wilt, crushed, deeply bruised purple – under the Sun’s reflection made manifest; returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.
Yet we know – they remind us: they (and we) will rise again.
…we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. . . It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer. C.S. Lewis from God in the Dock
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Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! – These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”
This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. To-day I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavour to balance myself Upon a broken world. ~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”
There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.
Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience). ~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones
Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying today might be a day of healing between peoples, when the barbarous becomes beautiful and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?
A day of no drone missiles being launched, no threats of annihilation and winner takes all, no one gunned down in the street, no vehicles used as weapons, no harsh and angry words spoken, no child misused, no one sold into slavery, no one overdosing, abandoned, homeless and starving.
Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks to watch the clouds to praise the heavens to see the leaves turn color to take out this one day and taste it and find that it is good, then put it away for self-keeping to share when and if I find someone else as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,
so as to balance myself somehow in the beauty of this world while teetering on its brokenness?
God empties himself into the earth like a cloud. God takes the substance, contours of a man, and keeps them, dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion. Annie Dillard from “Feast Days” in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall… It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it. ~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood
What I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture. This is the way the world is, altar and cup, lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die. My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges.
“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend.
The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water. There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea. These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula — are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world….
That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy. ~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm
Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The shadow’s the thing. If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,”as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. They give the light distance;they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house. ~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life (1991 Life Magazine)
But time is one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees. … You don’t run down the present… You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off; we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling; our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do know. ~Annie Dillard from For the Time Being
The world is wilder in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?
Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?
What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?
Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love?
Annie Dillard passed into glory yesterday at age 81, finally witnessing firsthand the holy and sacred mysteries she pondered in her writings.
Since 1974,I have been indebted to her God-given gifts of observation and unique ability to share precisely perfect words to describe how she felt about what she saw. In 1976, she did a reading locally – I was amazed at herinsistence that we all have the power to open our eyes to this place we have been set down, to witness all that is secret, holy and fleet in our existence…
She indeed left her mark while living, teaching and writing here in Whatcom County for a time nearly fifty years ago…
All the photos on this page are from my collection of pictures I’ve taken here in Whatcom County, as I can imagine this scenery inspired Annie in her writing while she was here.
We are invited by Christ Himself to “come and see.” (John 1:39)
We weren’t conceived by random happenstance –
We are here because we were earnestly needed and wanted, by a power and divinity with a capacity for love and compassion beyond anything we are capable of.
We aren’t a cosmic joke, or random couplings of DNA. We aren’t pawns in the universe’s chess game.
We have the capacity to see the image of God in one another, as well as in the mirror, yet we ignore with our own eyes, His shimmering reflection.
…beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there… ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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