Category: Living simply

Bring to Light the Mystery: That Patch of Sunlight

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It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight
~W.S. Merwin, “Still Morning” from The Shadow of Sirius

photo by Barbara Hoelle

Our memories can play tricks.

Just a whiff of a fragrance can trigger an experience of another time and place, a song can transport us to a decade long ago, a momentary sensation will remind us of a past experience long forgotten.

We dwell inside a different age as the years go by, in a body that no longer looks or feels exactly the same, yet our memories take us powerfully back to a special moment that happened before.

For those who struggle with post-trauma recollections, this is a curse to be overcome. For those whose memories bring joy and comfort, they seek to nurture and cherish what has been as if it is still here and now.

Let us remember the Light, just as the poet W.S. Merwin in this poem “Still Morning” remembers the moment of his baptism in a church long gone and whose voices are long since stilled. The Light of that day remains, as fresh today as it was when it moved toward him.

Our memories aren’t tricks, and neither is the Light that shone on us. They sustain us in the here and now.

Our Savior: an ever-moving patch of Light in our lives –
forever radiant.

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…

TEXT
O nata lux de lumine,
Jesu redemptor saeculi,
Dignare clemens supplicum
Laudes precesque sumere.

Qui carne quondam contegi
Dignatus es pro perditis,
Nos membra confer effici
Tui beati corporis.

TRANSLATION
O Light born of Light,
Jesus, redeemer of the world,
Mercifully deign to accept
The praises and prayers of your suppliants.

O you who once deigned to be hidden in flesh
For the sake of the lost,
Grant us to be made members
Of your blessed body.

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Finding a Lovely Thing

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Look for a lovely thing and you will find it,
It is not far —
It never will be far.
~Sara Teasdale from “Night”

Queen Anne’s lace

                a hardly

                    prized but

            all the same it isn’t

                     idle look

                                    how it

                    stands straight on its

            thin stems how it 

                    scrubs its white faces

                        with the

            rays of the sun how it

                                makes all the

                                        loveliness

                                                it can.
~Mary Oliver “Passing the Unworked Field“

Until I opened my eyes to see,

I passed by lovely things all the time,
my thoughts grousing in the grayness of the day.
Oblivious and self-absorbed,
blinded to the gifts around me.

It only takes a heart open
to unexpected beauty,
not far,
really never far–
right there in our own back yard.

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And With Ah! Bright Wings

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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”

Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. 
~John Donne from “Annunciation”

I know this sound, first birds of morning.
As a child, I waited for hours for the drape
of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first
hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant
light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song,
able at last to close my eyes.
I know this sound, some kind of redemption,
waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment
even as the work of the previous day marks my bones
in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn
pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls
like a promise you hoped someone would keep.
~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light

Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.

Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.

It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.

When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:

“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…

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A Marshy Cacophony

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Cold, wet leaves
Floating on moss-coloured water   
And the croaking of frogs—
Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.
~Amy Lowell “The Pond”

Poets who know no better
rhapsodize about the peace of nature,
but a well-populated marsh is a cacophony.
~Bern Keating

O, I love to hear the frogs
When they first begin to sing;
How they vocalize the bogs,
And vociferate the Spring.
How they carol as they croak,
How they mingle jest and joke
With their solemn chant and dirge
On the river’s slimy verge.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their monotone uncouth
Is the music of the cogs
Of the mill wheel of my youth.
And I listen half asleep,
And the eyes of mem’ry peep
Through the bars that hold me fast,
From the pleasures of the past.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their melody is health
To the heart that worry flogs
With the lash of want or wealth.
And the cares of life take wing,
And its pleasures lose their sting,
And love’s channel way unclogs
In the croaking of the frogs.
~Harry Edward Mills “The Early Frogs”

I wanted to speak at length about
The happiness of my body and the
Delight of my mind …

But something in myself for maybe
From somewhere other said: not too
Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the
Frogs are singing.
~Mary Oliver, from “April”

About two weeks ago, music from the wetlands became faintly detectable in the distance. We were only a little over a month into winter, yet due to unduly mild temperatures, the chorus had begun.

The sleigh-bell jingle song of the Pacific Chorus Frogs now fills the air each evening, rising from the ponds and standing water that surround our farm. I stand still for a moment to soak up that song that heralds spring–a certainty that the muddy marshes are thawed enough to invite the frogs out of their sleep and start their courting rituals.

Now winter won’t return anytime soon with any seriousness.

This marsh music is disorienting this early, along with daffodils budding in late January and lawns needing mowing in February. With voices so numerous, strong and insistent, it feels as though a New York City of frogs has moved in next door; we are seated in the balcony of Carnegie Hall. 

They seem to be directed by an unseen conductor, as their voices rise and fall together and then cut off suddenly with a slice of the baton, plunging the landscape into uncomfortable silence at the slightest provocation, as if they hold an extended fermata for minutes on end.

The frogs’ repertoire is limited but their wind power, stamina and ability to project their voices impressive. They are most tenacious at making their presence known to any other peeper within a mile radius. Their mystical, twilight symphony of love and territory has begun, soft and surging, welcome and reassuring.

There’s a spring a-comin’, the peepers proclaim. 
Nothing can be sweeter.

I know all the behaviorist theories about frog chorus being about territoriality –the “I’m here and you’re not” view of the animal kingdom’s staking their claims. Knowing that theory somehow distorts the cheer I feel when I hear these songs. I want the frogs (and birds) to be singing out of the sheer joy of living. Instead, they are singing to defend their piece of mud or branch.

Then I remember, that’s not so different from people. Our voices tend to be loudest when we are being insistently territorial: we own this and you do not, and we are irresistibly better than you.

I’m not sure anyone enjoys human cacophony in the same way I enjoy listening to the chorus of frogs at night or birdsong in the morning. We humans are most harmonic when we choose to listen. Instead of sounding off, we should soak up. Instead of shouting “this is mine,” we should sit expectant and grateful.

Perhaps that is why the most beloved human choruses are derived from prayers and praise – singing out in joy and gratitude rather than in warning.

I’ll try to remember this when I get into my own righteous and “territorial” mode. I don’t bring joy to the listener nor to myself. When it comes right down to it, all that noise I make is nothing more than a croaking cacophony in a smelly mucky swamp.

Here’s what it sounds like all around us: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Ab4EBKYx9

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An Imaginary Mushroom Waiting

barnstormingblog3 Comments

Whenever the question comes up,
the poets all say the same thing:
the only poem we’re interested in is the next poem,
the one not written, the poem of tomorrow.

It’s a perfect answer,
which conjures up a bit of hope
and manages to place on the higher tray
of the scale of pride a gram of modesty.

But the problem is
as soon as you start to write it,
the next poem no longer is the next poem,
rather just another poem you are writing,
and the next poem has become
an imaginary mushroom waiting
in the future in a dark forest of pine needles.

And that is probably why I have lost interest
in this poem, in where it is going
or how it will manage to find a way to end.

It could droop into a reverie,
maybe shift to the doctor’s waiting room
where I am entering it into a notebook,
or circle back to that mushroom for all I care.

All I care about is the next poem,
not this current one,
which might even turn out to be my last—

the last orange on my miniature tree,
a shroud pulled over my baby grand,
the ultimate chirp of my canary,
or, how about this?
the final striped umbrella on the vacant beach of my soul?
~Billy Collins “The Next Poem”

It has been awhile since I posted my various local mushroom photos, so sharing Billy Collins’ poem about searching for the next poem to write gives me a good excuse.

After seventeen years of writing nearly daily, I sometimes run dry. Like Billy, I tend to be thinking about what comes next, rather than focusing on what is right in front of me.

I tend to forget about living in the “now” in my effort to reconcile yesterday with what I hope will happen tomorrow.

I forget that tomorrow isn’t a given and yesterday is old news already.

So I search for what otherwise might remain hidden and mysterious, hoping to find something worthy to share today.

I hope these not-so-imaginary mushrooms fill the bill, because I can’t help myself — I’m already thinking about what to write tomorrow.

instead of silly mushroom songs (and there are plenty!), here are two recent recordings I enjoyed listening to…

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A Thousand Thoughts

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Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee
doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting
better at chasing my mind back to the moment

so I can see the spiderwebs making hammocks
the color of the moon. My son tries to photograph
a rainbow outside the car window. It’s impossible,

of course, this wonder, the trying to hold it.
But I do what I can. I’ve stopped waiting to enjoy
the cinnamon tea. I take deeper breaths and listen

to the flutter of strings floating down from café
speakers. I don’t want to be a pilgrim of memory
anymore. I want to pop the champagne and salute

this now, and this one with soft brie, dried apricots,
and the sunset celebration another anniversary
of light while I eat fists of grapes the same shade

and sweetness of night. Congratulations, Time. Look
at you and your gorgeous minutes full of everything.
Three cheers for the temp agency that hired this

particular day, these particular clouds, this set
of honking geese migrating through it. I want to be
better at being alive, so I’ve been picturing my heart

as a fox—which means wild and nocturnal, not
terrorizing the neighbor’s chickens. My love says
most equations in quantum field theory give infinity

as an answer, which is not meaningful because all
infinities are the same. In that case, let’s stop reaching
so hard for it. I’ll take this infinity’s morning where

my son and I confused falling leaves for monarchs.
Every time we thought we saw a butterfly, it was
just a leaf with the gentlest falling. We laughed at

every mistake, and he said, That was a beautiful
confusion. Sometimes when the moment doesn’t offer
a praying mantis on the porch or a charismatic sky,

I imagine my heart is my son’s face, and I am back
in love with the day, its astonishments like hot-air
balloons, and the daily present of power lines strung

with starlings like dozens of music notes. Let me
be more bound to my living in each moment, be held
by this hum, that cloud, this breath, that shroud.
~Traci Brimhall “This Beautiful Confusion” from Love Prodigal

Some Monday mornings, my mind is going in a thousand different directions. So I follow, knowing there will never be another Monday morning quite like this one. I hope there will be a few hundred more Monday mornings to come.

I want to be better at being alive,
noticing, remembering, connecting,
and grateful to be breathing.

Perhaps you are here because — you do too…

our sons – 1990
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A Dishwater Sky of Sadness

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A dishwater sky mutes
sun’s rays to gray, the hills
leading to the pass forested
in haze, drained of green.

Though a steady bluster, the wind
musters nothing but silence.
The plodding sound of melt
drip, drip, drips
from the askew rusted rain gutter
outside my purview.
Perhaps, I have all my life been
too much in love with sadness.
~Lana Hectman Ayers from “Window in Late January” from Autobiography of Rain

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold,
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”

I am astonished by my thirst
for clinging to sadness
when a gray day asks so little of me.

Good thing I’m shaken from my melancholy
by such simple moments
as a twilight shimmering gold,
a burst of unexpected evening birdsong,
a steadfast fir standing unyielding on our hilltop,
where it glimpses the edge of tomorrow
as today’s dusky horizon fades away.

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Something of a Mess

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Don’t worry, spider,
I keep house casually.
~Kobayashi Issa (translation by Robert Hass)

There’s a web like a spider’s web,
Made of silk and light and shadows,
Spun by the moon in my room at night.
It’s a web made to catch a dream,
Hold it tight ’til I awaken,
As if to tell me, my dream is all right.
~Lyrics of Spider’s Web Folk Song (see below)

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
I wove my webs for you because I liked you.
After all, what’s a life, anyway?
We’re born, we live a little while, we die.
A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess,
with all this trapping and eating flies.
By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.
Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
~E. B. White, from Charlotte’s Web

In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.

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

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

…humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling…

As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.

Our lives are linked together. No man is an island.
~Frederick Buechner from The Hungering Dark

I’ve had a new friend for several months now, beginning in late fall and into winter. She lives in our bathroom, in a terraced silken network between the cabinet and the back of the toilet.

This is someone with only one request: we leave her home undisturbed during our brief visits.

And so I have. Normally I would be brushing visible cobwebs down in my quick cleans, but when I noticed this co-habiter back in November as the weather got chilly, I couldn’t help but think “Charlotte” and the ordinary miracles of creatures like her.

So there she stays as I await a profound web message from her.

Instead of messages, she is extending her network in the hope of catching what little insect life there is in a winter house. Her web does get some misting when we shower or bathe, so she has the moisture she needs to thrive. She goes on reconnaissance missions of her little tiled kingdom — there are small webs laced into most of the corners, above the tub and behind the door.

I really can’t see that she eats often; my research says she doesn’t need much. So we will co-exist as long as she wants to stay, although when spring comes, I know a front porch bench that will be a far better source of regular meals. And then I can do a little deeper clean of the crevices in the bathroom.

I hope she might agree to move on at that point. That is, unless she writes me a web message asking to stay “linked in.”

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Breathed Me to See Who I Was

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alleye
noblesseeye1

…and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being–a neighbor was keeping her there–
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was,
a long quiet minute–minutes–
then she stamped her feet and whisked tail
and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back.
She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough.
~Mary Oliver from “The Poet Goes to Indiana”

224746_1024776858833_3119_n
photo by Lea Gibson
77_9143910461_1224_n
photo by Emily Vander Haak
nose4
wally617

Our farm has had many nuzzling muzzles here over the years–

Pink noses,
gray noses,
nondescript not-sure-what-color noses,
noses that have white stripes, diamonds, hearts, triangles,
or absolutely no marks at all.

Hot breath that exudes warm grassy fragrance
better than any pricey perfume,
lips softer than the most elegant velvet.

Noses that reach out in greeting to:
blow,
sniff,
caress,
push,
search,
breathe me in
and breathe for me,
to see who I am,
or who I will become,

smudge my face and
shower snot.

I guess I’m just good enough
to be blessed by a nuzzling
baptism of grace.

tonynose
wetmuzzle
sashaeye

Somewhere Only I Know

barnstormingblog1 Comment

I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds
that I had when I was ten.
And it has been forever since I pushed my head
under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.

The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king
whose name we could almost remember.
Under the rooty bank you could dimly see
the bunk beds of the turtles.

Nobody I know mentions these things anymore.
It’s as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated
among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.

Now I want to turn and run back the other way,
barefoot into the underbrush,
getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.

Down to the muddy bed of the little stream
where my cupped hands make a house, and

I tilt up the roof
to look at the face of the frog.
~Tony Hoagland, from “Nature” from  Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

I grew up on a small farm with several acres of woodland. It was my retreat until I left for college; I walked among twittering birds, skittering wild bunnies, squirrels and chipmunks, busy ant hills and trails, blowing leaves, swimming tadpoles, falling nuts, waving wildflowers, large firs, pines, cottonwoods, maples and alder trees.

I had a favorite “secret” spot sitting perched on a stump where a large rock provided a favorite sunning spot for salamanders. They and I would make eye contact, pondering our common Creator.

At college I longed for a place as private, as serene, but nothing could match the woods and creatures of my childhood home. After living a decade in the city, I nearly forgot what a familiar woods felt like.

On this farm we’ve stewarded for nearly forty years, I’ve longed for a similar sanctuary, yet my distractions are so much greater than when I was a child. Filled with greater worries, I can’t empty my head and heart as completely to receive the varied gifts to be found around me.

In my ever-shortening timeline to accomplish what I’ve been placed here to do, I need to study the faces of creation, knowing those eyes reflect the face of God.

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