There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end. ~St. Augustine: ‘The City of God,’ Bk. XXII, Chap. 30.
The cows know. Standing still in the pasture, chewing cud and steadily swishing flies. With those enormous eyes, they look for all the world as if they know.
The wind knows. It whispers to the grass. The grass tells the trees who pass it on to the birds. The crickets discover it all on their own.
But you and I, we don’t. Though on a day like today when the sun is bright and the cattails let loose a flurry of tiny parachutes, we sense there’s something the world knows.
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dream deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with one another.
The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling. ~Naomi Shihab Nye “Shoulder” from Red Suitcase
And just what is it that we should know? What are we missing that the cows, the wind, the trees, the grass, the birds, the crickets, the cattails, and certainly dogs know that we struggle to understand?
Simply this: be content, live aware of each moment as it comes, be grateful for it and say so, then have hope for the next moment, no matter how hard it may be.
Cherish whatever and whoever depends on us, love them with all we’ve got. Provide the shoulder that someone else needs. Give ourselves away without expecting something in return. Write it down so it is not lost.
We can see it deep in our dogs’ eyes. They know.
photo by Nate Gibson
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To rest before the sheaves are bound, toss the scythes aside, bare the feet and sink into the nearest haystack, release the undone task and consent to sleep while the brightest hour burns an arc across its stretch of sky: this is the body’s prayer, mid-day angelus whispered in mingled breath while the limbs stretch in thanksgiving and the body turns toward the beloved.
This is the prayer of trust: what’s left undone will wait. The unattended child, the uncut acre, cracked wheel, broken fence that are occupations of the waking mind soften into shadow in the semi-darkness of dream. All shall be well. Little depends on us. The turning world is held and borne in love. We give good measure in our toil and, meet and right, obey the body when it calls us to rest. ~Marilyn Chandler McEntyre “Noon Rest (after Millet: 1890)” from “The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings”
When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. Proverbs 3:24
Thanks to retirement, I have learned to love mid-day naps.
After forty-plus years of 10 hour work days, then awakened with calls at night, I managed to semi-thrive on minimal sleep.
Not any more.
In my new reality, I have discovered that it is possible to leave things undone, something that was never possible during doctoring and patient care. Now it is okay to set a task aside and think about it later. All this hasn’t come naturally to me, but I’m learning.
So it is time to kick off my shoes, pull a quilt up to my chin and close my eyes, just for a little while.
All will be well. The world keeps turning, even when I’m not the one pedaling to keep it going.
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In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, God takes the worse we can do to Him and turns it into the very best He can do for us. ~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness
Samwise, one of our two Cardigan Corgis who recently passed away in his sleep at a ripe old corgi age, always did twice daily barn chores with me.
He would run up and down the aisles as I fill buckets, throw hay, and he’d explore the manure pile out back and the compost pile and check out the dove house and have stand offs with the barn cats (which he always lost).
We had our routine. When I got done with chores, I whistled for him and we headed to the house.
We always returned home together.
Except this particular morning. I whistled when I was done and his furry little fox face didn’t appear as usual. I walked back through both barns calling his name, whistling, no signs of Sam. I walked to the fields, I walked back to the dog yard, I walked the road (where he never ever goes), I scanned the pond where he once fell in as a pup (yikes), I went back to the barn and glanced inside every stall, I went in the hay barn where he likes to jump up and down on stacked bales, looking for a bale avalanche he might be trapped under, or a hole he couldn’t climb out of. Nothing.
I’m really anxious about him at this point, fearing the worst. He was nowhere to be found, utterly lost.
Passing through the barn again, I heard a little faint scratching inside one Haflinger’s stall, which I had just glanced in 10 minutes before. The mare was peacefully eating hay. Sure enough, there was Sam standing with his feet up against the door as if asking what took me so long. He must have scooted in when I filled up her water bucket, and I closed the door not knowing he was inside, and it was dark enough that I didn’t see him when I checked. He and his good horse friend kept it their secret.
Making not a whimper or a bark when I called out his name, passing that stall at least 10 times looking for him, he just patiently waited for me to open the door and set him free.
It’s a Good Friday.
The lost was found even when he never felt lost to begin with.
Yet he was lost to me. And that is all that matters. We have no idea how lost we are until someone comes looking for us, doing whatever it takes to bring us home.
Sam was just waiting for a closed door to be opened. And today, of all days, that door is thrown wide open.
photo by Nate Gibson
Though you are homeless Though you’re alone I will be your home Whatever’s the matter Whatever’s been done I will be your home I will be your home I will be your home In this fearful fallen place I will be your home When time reaches fullness When I move my hand I will bring you home Home to your own place In a beautiful land I will bring you home I will bring you home I will bring you home From this fearful fallen place I will bring you home I will bring you home ~Michael Card
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I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their same- ness. The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people, out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy at some existence that does not need me.
It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the earth, carefully, royalty in their own country. ~Tom Hennen “Looking for the Differences” from Darkness Sticks to Everything.
We dwell so much on our differences rather than our similarities, especially during intense political times.
There is nothing wrong with “otherness” if each “other” is seen as God sees us.
We each are one of His precious and specially-made creations, worthy of existence even in our muddy, rocky, fragile state.
These days, although a “snowflake” is disparaged in the political banter of the day as weak and overly sensitive, there is nothing more uniquely “other” than an individual crystalline creation falling from heaven to the exact spot where it is intended to land. Something so unique becomes part of something far greater than it could be on its own, blending in, infinitely stronger, but never lost.
I am placed here, weak as I am, in the exact right spot, for reasons I continue to uncover and discover. I try every day, as best as I can, to not get lost and, of course, to manage to stay out of the mud.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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No one has ever regarded the First of January with indifference. ~Charles Lamb from “New Year’s Eve”
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse… ~T.S. Eliot from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
This New Year’s Day, like so many that have come before, arrived with the ordinary and annoying hour-long revelry of gunshots and fireworks across our rural neighborhood.
Yet this time a new year enters under a cloud: a lingering odor remains from the mess our nation made of 2025.
Like a dog rolling in something stinky simply because it is there, 2026 may look squeaky clean but reeks of what has come before. It can’t be ignored and, even brand spanking new, this year is already badly in need of a bath.
Like a dog, we like what is familiar and comfortable, even if that means we roll about where we shouldn’t, still smelling like yesterday, if not last year.
Time leads irrevocably forward, with us in tow. There is no turning back or staying stubbornly with how things used to be. Perhaps this new year we shower off the mud, stay clear of the stinky stuff in the headlines, and take time to look at all things with new eyes.
Do we dare disturb the universe?
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Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land. ~Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not, are starting to move inside. The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind. The pup comes in from the yard for a nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture. And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink. I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me in the morning, well fed and quite dead. He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse.
From nibbling to nibbled. It is a tough world, inside and out.
Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year. Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.
I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests. The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity. I admit I’m much too large, inept, and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s abode through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.
After all, I am just another creature in the same boat. There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this frayed and beautiful, complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am. I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life, not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.
So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture. Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.
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My grandfather stands on the front porch watching the dogs come back, reassembled
from hair and grit and eyeteeth. Now the twin mares browse by the fence
in their coats of dust. Nobody asks what they mean, appearing so suddenly
when nobody needed them, or called. In the back yard, the buried people —
great-grandmothers in spectator pumps, the great-grandfather who died of sneezing,
the first baby, never named — stay buried. It’s not their overshoes
lost in the grass behind the smokehouse, not their faces alive in anyone’s
memory. But my mother waits in the pecan tree’s fingered shadow,
holding a broken milk jug full of daylilies, waiting as if
she wanted someone to tell her again it’s all right to be born now,
now is as good a time as any. In a month we’ll find my grandfather’s glasses
in their case under the front seat of his car. “Oh goodness,” my aunt will say,
as if it were a matter of his forgetting them. As if we could
give them back. We’re all convinced we’ve missed the moment. We forget
that pause while a soul undoes its buttons, the world falls away,
and one by one we step out into this death, to be remembered. ~Sally Thomas “Reunion”
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did… I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. ~Mary Oliver from “When Death Comes”
God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. ~Meister Eckhart
And He awaits for our return. He keeps the light on, so we can find our way back, when we are weary, or fearful or hungry or simply longing for reunion, to be remembered.
I think of those who wait for me on the other side, including our baby lost before birth over 42 years ago.
I know God watches over all these reunions; He knows the moment when our fractured hearts heal whole once again.
I will see you soon enough, sweet ones. Soon enough.
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In the quiet misty morning When the moon has gone to bed When the sparrows stop their singing And the sky is clear and red When the summer ceased it’s gleaming When the corn is past its prime When adventures lost its meaning I’ll be homeward-bound in time ~Marta Keen from “Homeward Bound”
On Halloween day in 1985, I packed up a roll-up mattress pad, grabbed one lonely pumpkin from our small garden, locked our rental house door for the last time, then climbed in my car to head two hours north out of Seattle.
I don’t recall looking back in the rear view mirror at the skyline after nine years living in the city. My husband had moved to Whatcom County two months earlier to start his new job. I had stayed behind to wrap up my Group Health family practice in the Rainier Valley of central Seattle.
I was leaving the city for our new rural home and a very uncertain professional future.
I knew two things for sure: I was finally several months pregnant after a miscarriage and two years of trying to conceive, so our family was on its way, and we were going to live in our own house with a few acres and a barn.
A real (sort of) starter farm and starter family, a dream we both shared. Our home sits in the midst of woods and corn fields, with deer strolling through the fields at dawn, coyotes howling at night, Canadian geese and trumpeter swans calling from overhead and salmon thriving in nearby streams. The snowy Cascades greet us in the morning to the east, the Canadian Coastal range majestic to the north and not far to the west, the Salish Sea/Puget Sound.
Since it wouldn’t be a farm without animals, I stopped at the first pet store I drove past and found two tortoise shell calico kitten sisters peering up at me, just waiting for new adventures in farmland. Their box was packed into the one spot left beside me in my little Mazda.
With that simple commitment to raise and nurture those kittens alongside the life growing inside me, life seemed very complete.
I will never forget the freedom I felt on that drive north. The highway seemed more open, the fall colors more vibrant, the wind more energizing, our baby kicking my belly, the kittens mewing from their box. There seemed so much potential even though I had just left behind the greatest family practice found in any urban setting (at the time, it was the most ethnically diverse zip code in the United States) with patients from all over the world: alongside the multi-racial inner city population living in subsidized housing developments, my patients included Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Indonesia, Orthodox Jews, Italian Catholics, and refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
I will never know so much variety of ethnic background and perspective again. If I could have packed them all into my little car and driven them north with me, I would have.
Despite what I was leaving behind, there was certainly a feeling of freedom that rainy Halloween day as the big city disappeared in the rear view mirror.
No longer would I sit captive in freeway rush-hour bumper to bumper traffic jams. I traded that for a new rural commute winding through farm fields while watching eagles fly overhead. I could become part of a community in a way I never could manage in the city, visiting with friends at the grocery store, playing piano and teaching Sunday School at church and serving on various community boards.
After the new kittens, dubbed Nutmeg and Oregano, arrived on our farm, we added even more diversity: a Belgian Tervuren dog Tango, a Haflinger horse Greta, Toggenburg goats Tamsin and her kids, a few Toulouse geese, Araucana chickens, Fiona the Scottish Highland cow, then another Haflinger Hans and another, Tamara. I worked as a fill-in doctor in four different clinics before our first baby was born, then settled into part-time practice in several different clinics for most of my career.
With those new commitments, life was fulfilling and busy – we soon added a little brother and seven years later, a sister. Then it felt like our family was complete.
Forty years later, our children have grown and gone to homes of their own, all married to wonderful spouses, raising six delightful children for us to lavish love on.
Somehow life now feels even more complete.
A few cats, a Cardigan Corgi, and three ponies still live at the farm with us. Now retired from our professional lives “in town”, we enjoy the freedom of slower and quieter days, nurtured and nurturing.
It all started October 31, 1985 with two orange and black kittens and a pumpkin sitting beside me in a little Mazda, my husband awaiting my homecoming 100 miles north. Now, forty years later, we celebrate this Halloween anniversary of farm and family, still pregnant with the possibility that life is never truly complete when there is always a new day just around the corner.
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Two old dogs out doing chores. One on two legs, one on four. Side by side, they water and feed. Caring for others daily need.
Two old dogs make their rounds Well worn paths on familiar ground. To greet the day or say goodnight Side by side, their friendship tight.
Two old dogs with dish and pail. Singing songs and wagging tail. Slower now, than in the past But that just makes the good time last.
Two old dogs, both muzzles grey. Aging joints sometimes curb play. Companionship a simple joy. His old dad; Dad’s old boy.
Two old dogs, and then one day One old dog has gone away. The other left to carry on Two legs to barn and field and pond.
One old dog, eyes full of tears Can still feel his old friend walking near A reminder in the morning dew. Just one path, instead of two.
When one old dog has no more chores And walks through heaven’s golden doors He’ll see that face he can’t forget. A kindred spirit, not just a pet.
So many old dogs, made whole; anew Reunion of a loyal crew. Never again to be apart. Many souls. But just one heart. ~Jeff Pillars “Two Old Dogs”
I knew this day was coming. Samwise Gamgee, approaching age 14, had been hinting that he was getting ready to leave for the past couple weeks. He was much slower following me for chores, his appetite wasn’t quite as robust as usual, and his hearing was fading.
Life had become an effort when it had been a lark for 13+ years.
But yesterday morning, he perked up enough to do his usual rounds on the farm, poke around the stalls in the barn, check the cat dishes for morsels, and bark when a strange car drove in the driveway. Then last night he ignored his supper, laid down and closed his eyes, having used up all his reserves.
This morning, he was gone, leaving only a furry shell with big ears behind.
He had joined us on the farm as company for our aged Cardigan Corgi Dylan Thomas, who died two years after Samwise arrived. Then Sam himself needed company, so another Cardigan corgi, Homer, arrived. They became a happy Corgi team on the farm.
Sam had a great dog life, with the exception of getting lost once and one overnight visit to the emergency vet hospital for treatment from poisoning from ivermectin, the horse worming medicine he somehow managed to lap up quickly off the barn floor when a horse dripped the paste from her mouth. After that he promised to never need a vet again.
His peaceful passing is a reminder of our temporary stay on his soil. He’s smelling the flowers and watching the sunrises and sunsets from the other side now.
I honor Samwise’s long life with the photos I have compiled over the years.
Till we meet again, old friend.
photo by Nate Gibson
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Teach me to walk with tender feet, as the wild ones do. Let me be the cinder-glow of the fox in her burrow, wreathed around the honey-spark fur of her sleeping kits.
Let me be the shaded pools of the doe’s eyes in winter, when the snow falls, when the stars lean down to listen, when the world is darker and softer than rain.
Let me be the swallow after flight, when she is perched upon the branch where the petals of the lilacs used to be, and she is just still, and quiet, her downy head inclined, as though she is praying for their return. ~Kimberly Beck “Tender Feet”
As the weather changes, softening in the mists of autumn, I walk each step with careful feet, my tender heart singing songs in the rain. I pray for peace in this troubled land, for protection from harm until spring comes again.
May God grant a gentle night’s sleep for all His creatures.
video by Harry Rodenberger
Lyrics for Aragorn’s Sleepsong: Lay down your head and I’ll sing you a lullaby Back to the years of loo-li lai-lay And I’ll sing you to sleep and I’ll sing you tomorrow
Bless you with love for the road that you go May you sail far to the far fields of fortune With diamonds and pearls at your head and your feet And may you need never to banish misfortune
May you find kindness in all that you meet May there always be angels to watch over you To guide you each step of the way To guard you and keep you safe from all harm Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay
May you bring love and may you bring happiness Be loved in return to the end of your days Now fall off to sleep, I’m not meaning to keep you I’ll just sit for a while and sing loo-li, lai-lay
May there always be angels to watch over you To guide you each step of the way To guard you and keep you safe from all harm Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay
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