Category: Manure

It Won’t Matter a Hill of Beans

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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 twenty years 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 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. After going without sleep and making personal sacrifices over many months planning and preparing for the benefit of our group, 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. 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 emotionally relapse and forget.

A few years after that day in the barn, Jenny herself spent six years slowly dying, while still vigorously living her life every day 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 over twenty years ago 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 inwardly focus on my own hurt feelings.

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.

I know we’ll catch up later.

For some of the wit and wisdom of Jenny’s writings about her horses and life – go here

Jenny R –photo by Ginger Kathleen Coombs

Sweet and Sour

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In Summer, in a burst of summertime
Following falls and falls of rain,
When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime…
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Cheery Beggar”

What I wanted
wasn’t to let in the wetness.
That can be mopped.

Nor the cold.
There are blankets.

What I wanted was
the siren, the thunder, the neighbor,
the fireworks, the dog’s bark.

Which of them didn’t matter?

Yes, this world is perfect,
all things as they are.

But I wanted
not to be
the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow,
clean sheets untroubled,
dreaming there still might be time,

while this everywhere crying
~Jane Hirshfield “I Open the Window” from The Asking

Sweet and sour extends far beyond a Chinese menu; it is the air we breathe.  Dichotomy is in our life and times – the bittersweet of simple pleasures laced with twinges and tears.

I am but a cheery beggar in this world, desiring to hang tight to the overwhelming sweetness of each glorious moment:

the startling late summer sunrise,
the renewed green coming through the dead of spent fields,
the warm hug of a compassionate word,
a house filled with love and laughter.

But as beggars aren’t choosers, I can’t only have sweet alone;
I must endure the sour that comes as part of the package —

the deepening dark of a sleepless and restless night,
the muddy muck that comes after endless rain,
the sting of a biting critique,
the emptiness when younger ones head home.

So I slog through sour to revel some day in sweet. 

Months of manure-permeated air is overcome one miraculous morning by the unexpected and undeserved fragrance of apple blossoms, so sweet, so pure, so full of promise of the wholesome fruit to come.

The manure makes the sweet sweeter months later, long after the stench is gone.

And I breathe in deeply now, content and grateful for this moment of grace and bliss, wanting to hold it in the depths of my lungs forever, its mercy overwhelming the power of sour.

Our Foot in the Door

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Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam
Acquire the air

Nobody sees us
Stops us, betrays us
The small grains make room

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles
The leafy bedding

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth. 
Our foot’s in the door.
~Sylvia Plath from “Mushroom”

This overnight overture into the light,
the birthing of toadstools after a shower.
As if seed had been sprinkled on the compost pile,
they sprout three inch stalks
as they stretch up at dawn,
topped by dew-catching caps and umbrellas.

Some translucent as glass,
already curling at the edges in the morning light,
by noon melting into ooze
by evening, a complete deliquescence,
withered and curling back
into the humus
which birthed them hours before.

It shall be repeated
again and again,
this birth from unworthy soil,
this brief and shining life in the sun,
this folding, curling and collapse
to die back to dust and dung.

Most inedible and dangerous,
yet they rise beautiful
and worthy,
as is the way of things
that never give up
once a foot’s in the door.

To Clean Up Our Messes

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It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work.
Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall,
driving horses, sweeping, scouring,
everything gives God some glory if being in his grace
you do it as your duty.

To go to communion worthily gives God great glory,
but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too.
To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory,
but a man with a dung fork in his hand,
a woman with a slop pail,
give him glory too.

He is so great that all things give him glory
if you mean they should.
So then, my brethren, live.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from Seeking Peace

On Earth Day, I am reminded that thanks in large part to how messily we humans live, this world is grimy.  

So it is an act of worship as well as respect for our nest to work at cleaning up after ourselves.  Hands that clean toilets, scrub floors, carry bedpans, pick up garbage might as well be clasped in prayer – within such everyday necessary tasks, God is glorified.

I spend time every day carrying buckets and wielding a pitchfork because it is my way of restoring order to the disorder inherent in my little corner of the planet.  It is with gratitude that I’m able to put things to rights, making stall beds tidier for our farm animals by mucking up their messes and in so doing, I’m cleaning up a piece of me at the same time.

I never want to forget the mess I’m in and the mess I am.  I never want to forget to clean up after myself.  I never want to feel it is a mere and mundane chore to worship with dungfork and slop pail.

It is my privilege in winter, spring, summer or fall, not just on Earth Day.  This is His gift to me. It is His Grace that comes alongside me, to help pitch the muck and carry the slop when I think I am too weary to do it myself.

In so doing, I live and breathe in a place made a little cleaner.

photo from Emily Vander Haak

A Muck Shoveling Singalong

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He (the professor) asked what I made of the other students (at Oxford) so I told him.
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. 

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls of manure and wet spots morning and evening.  We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia. This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.  But standard issue American melting pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 50+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”.  Oldies used to refer to music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, not the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and (heavens to Betsy) the 80’s and 90’s!   I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens.  I can remember faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, recall special summer days picking berries and hear long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.   There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 55 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed. 

Or has it? One  (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has, and I have.

Yesterday – I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend.  There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and of course Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now,  You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand.  Come Saturday Morning, Here Comes the Sun as we’re Born to Be Wild

Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To?  Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples to grow in a Moonshadow.  Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You so just Let It Be.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence — If— Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.  Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to. I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well in the 60’s and 70’s. Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants.  Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And every day there will always be manure that needs shoveling.

Dawn on our Darkness: Be Not a Stranger

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photo by Brandon Dieleman
photo by Brandon Dieleman

After all pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tir’d, bodie and minde,
With full crie of affections, quite astray,
I took up in the next inne I could finde,

There when I came, whom found I but my deare,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to him, readie there
To be all passengers most sweet relief?

O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in night’s mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,
To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger:

Furnish & deck my soul, that thou mayst have
A better lodging than a rack or grave.
~George Herbert “Christmas (1)” (written in 1633)

Man altered by sin from man to beast;
Beast’s food is hay, hay is all mortal flesh.
Now God is flesh and lies in manger pressed
As hay, the brutish sinner to refresh.
O happy field wherein this fodder grew,
Whose taste doth us from beasts to men renew.
~Robert Southwell from The Nativity of the Christ, Jesuit poet (1561-1595)

photo by Emily Vander Haak

We, who are weary from long days of wandering and just trying to get by, seek the refuge of a quiet and calm place to lay our heads. When that is denied, we settle for the resting place of beasts and forage, understanding it will simply have to do and we deserve no better.

It was enough for our Lord to take His first breath on earth in a barn for beasts; it is we who belong there, not Him, our messy smelly lives fitting right in with grime and cobwebs and manure piles.

He seeks a more hospitable place to dwell, so invites Himself, no stranger to messes, right into our unsettled hearts and souls. We are invited to rest from our wanderings, to climb down from the saddle, and dwell alongside so He can nourish and nurture us.

This Baby settled in with us, in our bed of prickly straw and ornery hearts. We rest in His Light which illumines our dark places, until we are ready to take up our journey again, this time walking beside Him.

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”

Dawn on our Darkness: When All Things Fall Apart

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It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss-
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight-
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
~Madeleine L’Engle “Into the Darkest Hour” in Wintersong

Into this world, this demented inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it –
because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it –
his place is with those others who do not belong,
who are rejected because they are regarded as weak…
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.
He is mysteriously present in those for whom
there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
~Thomas Merton from Watch for the Light

The Nativity, stained glass in the Epiphany Chapel of Winchester Cathedral, UK
The Nativity by Le Nain, Antoine and Louis (d.1648) & Mathieu (1607-77)

A stable and its stone manger is sanctuary for the weary and burdened – especially when everything seems to be falling apart.

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 for refuge. We say “no room” dozens of times every day, not realizing who we are shutting out.

With all the material distractions of our age, it is 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 have no access to our front door, with fancy meals and feather beds and fresh flowers on the cupboard. They are relegated to the dark and manure strewn parts of our lives. That is where He was born to dwell amid our messiness, and that is where He remains, in the humblest parts of our being, the parts we do not want to show off, and indeed, most often want to hide.

And that is, of course, a place where there is always plenty of room.

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”

A stable lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky
The stars shall bend their voices
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
And straw like gold will shine
A barn shall harbour heaven
A stall become a shrine

This child through David’s city
Will ride in triumph by
The palm shall strew its branches
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
Though heavy, dull and dumb
And lie within the roadway
To pave the Kingdom come

Yet He shall be forsaken
And yielded up to die
The sky shall groan and darken
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
For thorny hearts of men
God’s blood upon the spearhead
God’s love refused again
 
But now as at the ending
The low is lifted high
The stars will bend their voices
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled
~Richard Wilbur “A Christmas Hymn”

No presents, no candy, no treat
No stockings hung by the fire
No parties, no family to greet
No angel’s heavenly choirs

Bells are ringing all over the world
Bells are ringing calling the light
Bells are ringing all over the world
All over the world tonight

No doorways, no windows, no walls
No shelter here on the ground
No standing and no safe place to fall
Just the promise of this distant sound

Wherever you’re walking tonight
Whoever you’re waiting for
Somehow by the stable’s faint light
Peace in your heart is restored

Bells are ringing all over the world
Bells are ringing calling the light
Bells are ringing all over the world
All over the world tonight
~Mary Chapin Carpenter

A Crumb of Thanks

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Aren’t you glad at least that the earthworms
Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth,
Of the good they confer on us, that their silence
Isn’t a silent reproof for our bad manners,
Our never casting earthward a crumb of thanks
For their keeping the soil from packing so tight
That no root, however determined, could pierce it?

Imagine if they suspected how much we owe them,
How the weight of our debt would crush us
Even if they enjoyed keeping the grass alive,
The garden flowers and vegetables, the clover,
And wanted nothing that we could give them,
Not even the merest nod of acknowledgment.

A debt to angels would be easy in comparison,
Bright, weightless creatures of cloud, who serve
An even brighter and lighter master.

Lucky for us they don’t know what they’re doing,
These puny anonymous creatures of dark and damp
Who eat simply to live, with no more sense of mission
Than nature feels in providing for our survival.
…the tunneling earthworms, tireless, silent,
As they persist, oblivious, in their service.
~Carl Dennis from “Worms”

We’ve been carefully composting horse manure for years behind the barn, and we dig in to the 10 foot tall pile to spread on our garden plots. As Dan pushed the tractor’s front loader into the pile, steam rose from its compost innards. As the rich soil was scooped, thousands of newly exposed red wiggler worms immediately dove for cover. Within seconds, thousands of naked little creatures had, well, …wormed their way back into the security of warm dirt, rudely interrupted from their routine. I can’t say I blamed them.

Hundreds of thousands of wigglers ended up being forced to adapt to new quarters, leaving the security of the manure mountain behind. As I smoothed the topping of compost over the garden plot, the worms–gracious creatures that they are–tolerated being rolled and raked and lifted and turned over, waving their little bodies expectantly in the cool air before slipping back down into the dark. There they will begin their work of digesting and aerating the tired soil of the garden, reproducing in their unique hermaphroditic way, leaving voluminous castings behind to further feed future seedlings to be planted.

Worms are unjustly denigrated by humans primarily because we don’t like to be surprised by them. We don’t like to see one in our food, especially only part of one, and are particularly distressed to see them after we’ve digested our food. Once we get past that bit of squeamishness, we can greatly appreciate their role as the ultimate recyclers, leaving the earth a lot better off once they are finished with their work. We humans actually suffer by comparison; to be called “a worm” is really not as bad as it sounds at first. However, the worm may be offended by the association.

I hope to prove a worthy innkeeper for these new tenants.
May they live long and prosper.
May the worm forgive the disruption of my rake and shovel.
May I smile appreciatively the next time someone calls me a mere worm.

Soaked and Muddy

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Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
~Jane Kenyon “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the
smells of the world, but you know, watching her,
that you know almost nothing.
~Mary Oliver, Dog Songs

As I’ve written elsewhere, I spend over an hour a day dealing with the excrement of my farm critters. This is therapeutic time for me as I have deep respect for the necessity to clean up and compost what is smelly/stinky/yucky and biblically objectionable. (Deuteronomy 23:12-14) None of us, including God, want to take a walk having to pick our way around poop.

As I’m busy picking up manure, I watch our dogs seek out the smelliest, most vile things they can find in the barn or field (preferably dead) and roll themselves around in it one after another until they are just as stinky as the stuff they found. They are clearly joyous about it, especially when they do it together. It is curious throw-back behavior that I’ve assumed, wearing my animal behaviorist hat, was about a wild predator covering up their scent in order to stalk and capture prey more effectively without being detected – except they are really truly so smelly that any prey could sense them coming from a mile away and would learn quickly that a moving creature that smells like poop or a dead carcass is bad news and to be avoided.

This is the main reason our farm dogs live full time outdoors. We prefer to avoid stinky dirty creatures too. So I’ve tried to understand this behavior for what adaptive purpose it may have.

Here are some interesting theories at this link.

What makes the most sense to me is the “pack mentality” that suggests that once one dog/wolf rolls in something objectionable, that the rest of the pack does too. This is a unifying theme for anxious individuals – they aren’t really on their own if they smell and blend in with the rest of the pack. So they spread the “wealth”, so to speak. Stink up one, stink up all. Like team spirit, it seems to improve morale – until it doesn’t anymore.

I’ve been feeling covered with stink myself. There are so many divisive opinions right now about a variety of current issues; vile nonsense has been flying right and left on social media as well as face to face. The theory is if all of us stink the same from rolling in piles of misinformation, we are then no longer alone.

Yet our destiny does not have to include believing, sharing and “flinging” the stuff that stinks to see who it will stick to.

Time for a bath.
Time for soap and cleansing and some serious self-examination.
Time to stop joyously rolling around in it.
Time to bury the excrement so we’re not picking our way around the piles and can actually hold our heads up to see where we’re heading.

That’s true freedom.

Pull Open the Barn Doors

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I like farming.
I like the work.
I like the livestock and the pastures and the woods. 
It’s not necessarily a good living, but it’s a good life. 
I now suspect that if we work with machines
the world will seem to us to be a machine,
but if we work with living creatures
the world will appear to us as a living creature. 
That’s what I’ve spent my life doing,
trying to create an authentic grounds for hope.
~Wendell Berry, horse farmer, essayist, poet, professor

The barn is old, and very old,
But not a place of spectral fear.
Cobwebs and dust and speckling sun
Come to old buildings every one.
Long since they made their dwelling here,
And here you may behold

Nothing but simple wane and change;
Your tread will wake no ghost, your voice
Will fall on silence undeterred.
No phantom wailing will be heard,
Only the farm’s blithe cheerful noise;
The barn is old, not strange.
~Edward Blunden from “The Barn”

When we pull open the barn doors,
every morning
and each evening,
as our grandfathers did
over a hundred years ago,
six rumbling voices
rise in greeting.
We exchange scents,
nuzzle each others’ ears.

We do our chores faithfully
as our grandfathers once did–
draw fresh water
into buckets,
wheel away
the pungent mess underfoot,
release an armful of summer
from the bale,
reach under heavy manes
to stroke silken necks.

We don’t depend
on our horses’ strength
and willingness to
don harness
to carry us to town
or move the logs
or till the soil
as our grandfathers did.

Instead,
these soft eyed souls,
some born on this farm
three long decades ago,
are simply grateful
for our constancy
morning and night
to serve their needs
until the day comes
they need no more.

And we depend on them
to depend on us
to be there
to open the doors;
their low whispering welcome
gives voice
to the blessings of
living on a farm
ripe with rhythms and seasons,
as if today and tomorrow are
just like one hundred years ago.

Click on this link for a typical barn moment: https://www.facebook.com/707166118/videos/10156035185231119/

Lyrics:

This is a barn and I know it’s haunted
The corn rattles and the shadows move
It’s just the way, it’s just the way I’m feeling
I want to lie down in a field of rain

This is a river and I pray for the bottom
Some kind of measure of the way things change
I’ve been stuck in the middle of a slow storm, counting the days, love

I know we’re in the dark, and the cold comes
Through the very cracks that let the light through
Bring me something back from that sunny coast, and keep us, moving on

These are the shadowlands, I’ve known them
And I think it’s going to be the long way down
But I’ll be the tiny flame, that you carry around, around, around

I know we’re in the dark, and the cold comes
Through the very cracks that let the light through
Bring me something back from that sunny coast, and keep us, moving on

This is a blessing and I don’t date doubt it
We built a boat out of willow trees
We caught the moonlight, like a mirror
Shine right through to the best of me
Shine right through to the best of me
We’ve been living in abandoned houses
Sometimes we’re tending to abandoned fields
It’s just the way it’s just the way I’m feeling
I want to wake up with the sun in my head
~Chris Pureka