On the tidal mud, just before sunset, dozens of starfishes were creeping. It was as though the mud were a sky and enormous, imperfect stars moved across it as slowly as the actual stars cross heaven. All at once they stopped, and, as if they had simply increased their receptivity to gravity, they sank down into the mud, faded down into it and lay still, and by the time pink of sunset broke across them they were as invisible as the true stars at daybreak. ~Galway Kinnell “Daybreak”
photo by Nate Gibson
We know the stars, heavenly or terrestrial, still shine, though made invisible by a brighter light – hidden in plain sight at daybreak yet always throwing sparks, ever eternally lit, immersed but never overwhelmed within the muddy dark.
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Mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne… (You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore…) ~Irish saying translated by poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama
I’ve been foot sore the last few days, most likely from trying in vain to pull my feet out of some boot-sucking mud in the barnyard while pushing a heavy wheelbarrow. With each painful step I now take, I am reminded how dependent I am on strong legs and feet to carry me through the pathways of life.
I have stumbled into holes, picked my way carefully over sharp rocks, scrambled up steep climbs and pulled my way through the muddiest mire.
Yes, of course I’ve had sore feet before: blisters and callouses, tendonitis and fasciitis, bruised toes and stressed arches. When every step I take points out my failures and frailty, I begin to beg for a soft landing with each stride.
But more than comfort, I seek a stable place of trust to put my feet, to stand firm even when standing feels impossible.
Lord, be my landing place when I hurt and pull me out when I get stuck up to my ankles. May your gentle road rise to meet my sore feet.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
Take this fainted heart Take these tainted hands Wash me in Your love Come like grace again
Even when my strength is lost I’ll praise You Even when I have no song I’ll praise You Even when it’s hard to find the words Louder then I’ll sing Your praise I will only sing Your praise
Take this mountain weight Take these ocean tears Hold me through the trial Come like hope again
Even when the fight seems lost I’ll praise You Even when it hurts like hell I’ll praise You Even when it makes no sense to sing Louder then I’ll sing Your praise, oh-ooh I will only sing Your praise, oh-ooh
I will only sing Your praise, oh, God I will only sing Your praise I will only sing Your praise
And my heart burns only for You You are all, You are all I want And my soul waits only for You And I will sing ’til the morning has come
Lord my heart burns only for You You are all, You are all I want And my soul waits only for You And I will sing ’til the miracle comes, yeah
I will only sing Your praise I will only sing Your praise, ooh-oh, oh I will only sing Your praise
Even when the morning comes I’ll praise You Even when the fight is won I’ll praise You Even when my time on earth is done Louder then I’ll sing your praise I will only sing Your praise ~Joel Houston
Here in purgatory bare ground is visible, except in shady places where snow prevails.
Still, each day sees the restoration of another animal: a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp; and, at twilight, the skunk pokes out of the den, anxious for mates and meals. . . .
On the floor of the woodshed the coldest imaginable ooze, and soon the first shoots of asparagus will rise, the fingers of Lazarus. . . .
Earth’s open wounds — where the plow gouged the ground last November — must be smoothed; some sown with seed, and all forgotten.
Now the nuthatch spurns the suet, resuming its diet of flies, and the mesh bag limp and greasy, might be taken down.
Beside the porch step the crocus prepares an exaltation of purple, but for the moment holds its tongue. . . . ~Jane Kenyon, “Mud Season” from Collected Poems.
Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy bloom of a spray of purple; I stripped away my fingers, stained purple; put it to my nose,
the minty honey, a perfume so aggressively pleasant—I gave it to you to smell, my daughter, and you pulled away as if
I was giving you a palm full of wasps, deceptions: “Smell the way the air changes because of purple and green.”
This is the promise I make to you: I will never give you a fist full of wasps, just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain. ~Kwame Dawes “Purple”
I have always identified more with the bland plainness of mud season as squishy brown ground is underfoot. I tend to dress myself in browns and never in elegant purples. It’s not that I don’t like purple – I do. I just have never felt worthy to be adorned in it like the sky and flowers and fruit.
Perhaps my reluctance to wear purple is that it represents the those who are regal and royal … yet also those who are bruised and battered … all at once.
I know One who was both, who took a beating for me in my place.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
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.
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.
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I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Psalm 130: 5-6 from a Song of Ascents
Waiting is essential to the spiritual life. But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting. It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for.
We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory.
It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come. I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here than before. Genes and molecules have no more power to call him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail as my words do. What resources have I other than the emptiness without him of my whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor? ~R.S. Thomas “The Absence”
To wait is hard when we know the value of the gift that awaits us. We know exactly what is in the package since we have watched it being carefully chosen, wrapped and presented to us to open.
We have seen His footprints on our landscape: in the hottest dessert, in the deepest snow, in the meadows and in the forests, in the mud and muck and mire of our lives; we know He has been here and wait for His return.
Not yet though, not quite yet. So we wait, and continue to wait.
Even more so, we wait and hope for what we do not see but know is coming, like a groaning in the labor of childbirth.
The waiting is never easy; it is painful to be patient, staying alert to possibility and hope when we are exhausted, barely able to function. Others won’t understand why we wait, nor do they comprehend what we could possibly be waiting for when it remains unseen, with only the footprints left behind to remind us.
Yet we persevere together, with patience, watching and hoping, like Mary and Joseph, like Elizabeth and Zechariah, like the shepherds, like the Magi of the east, like Simeon and Anna in the temple.
This is the meaning of Advent: we are a community groaning together in sweet anticipation and expectation of the gift of Morning to come.
photo by Josh Scholten
I pray my soul waits for the Lord My hope is in His word More than the watchman waits for dawn My soul waits for the Lord
1) Out of the depths I cry to You; From darkest places I will call. Incline Your ear to me anew, And hear my cry for mercy, Lord. Were You to count my sinful ways How could I come before Your throne? Yet full forgiveness meets my gaze – I stand redeemed by grace alone.
CHORUS I will wait for You, I will wait for You, On Your word I will rely. I will wait for You, surely wait for You Till my soul is satisfied.
2) So put Your hope in God alone, Take courage in His power to save; Completely and forever won By Christ emerging from the grave.
3) His steadfast love has made a way, And God Himself has paid the price, That all who trust in Him today Find healing in his sacrifice.
I will wait for You, I will wait for You Through the storm and through the night. I will wait for You, surely wait for You, For Your love is my delight.
Wait for the Lord, his day is near Wait for the Lord, be strong take heart Prepare the way for the Lord Make a straight path for Him The Glory of the Lord shall be revealed All the Earth will see the Lord Rejoice in the Lord always He is at Hand Joy and gladness for all who seek the Lord
This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
Everything in the garden is dead, killed by a sudden hard freeze, the beans, the tomatoes, fruit still clinging to the branches. It’s all heaped up ready to go to the compost pile: rhubarb leaves, nasturtiums, pea vines, even the geraniums. It’s too bad. The garden was so beautiful, green and fresh, but then we were all beautiful once. Everything dies, we understand. But the mind of the observer, which cannot imagine not imagining, goes on. The dynasties are cut down like the generations of grass, the bodies blacken and turn into coal. The waters rise and cover the earth and the mind broods on the face of the deep, and learns nothing. ~Louis Jenkins, “Freeze” from Where Your House is Near: New and Selected Poems
This week was our first hard freeze of autumn, following on the heels of the worst flooding in a half century in our county. The land and all that grows here experienced a one-two punch – when the waters pulled back into the streams and rivers, what was left behind looked frozen, soaked and miserable. The people whose homes were devastated are so much more than miserable; they are mudding out by removing everything down to the studs to try to begin again. With hundreds of volunteers and disaster teams helping, there are piles of kitchen appliances, dry wall, carpet and every household item along the main streets of nearby towns, waiting to be hauled off.
Surveying our dying garden is small potatoes in comparison to a flooded town only a few miles away. The memories of how beautiful our garden was a 2-3 months ago is nothing in contrast to the families who lost their stored heirlooms and cherished memories to the muck and mire of deep waters.
But we are a resilient community. We are people of persistence and creativity and there will eventually be beauty again here. Driving on a newly opened road beside the still-surging river where a few days ago several feet of water covered a cornfield, I spotted a trumpeter swan, standing in glorious spotless white, picking her way through the mud-stained cornstalks, hoping to find something of value left behind in the devastation.
There is still hope; it did not wash away. We only need to use our imagination to find it.
The crow’s voice filtered through the walls of the farmhouse makes sounds of a rusty car engine turning over. Clouds on a north wind that whistles softly and cold. Spruce trees planted in a line on the south side of the house weave and scrape at the air. I’ve walked to a far field to a fence line of rocks where I am surprised to see soft mud this raw day. No new tracks in the mud, only desiccated grass among the rocks, a bare grove of trees in the distance, a blue sky thin as an eggshell with a crack of dark geese running through it, their voices faint and almost troubled as they disappear in a wedge that has opened at last the cold heart of winter. ~Tom Hennen, “Early Spring in the Field” from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems.
I shouldn’t be turning on the heat in the house on a late May morning but there is still an undeniable chill, even at this point in spring. The flowers outside are lush, but we’re still two or three weeks behind our usual bloom schedule.
We’re all impatient to be done with the coldness of a winter that has driven a wedge between people and politics, families and friends, well and ill.
We seek warmth and renewal and hugs and handshakes.
Instead we are asked for patience, to continue to practice the art of waiting for a safe reentry to spring and summer. No one wants to be tossed brutally back to the winter we just crawled away from.
May we emerge together, muddied but whole, ready to face whatever comes next.
…I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors bright and pure if possible, for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty. ~Czeslaw Milosz from “My Faithful Mother Tongue”
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. ~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory
Each day brings new social media headlines that tear away at each of us, pulling us away one from another amid differing opinions, resulting in everyone getting down and dirty in the mud of disgreement.
We become grimy in our frustration and anger with one another, sullied and smeared.
Yet in our state of disgrace, Beauty is offered up to us.
In His last act with those He loved, Jesus shared Himself through a communal meal, then washed and toweled their dirty feet clean, immersing them, despite their protests, in all that is beautiful and clean. He took on and wore another’s grime and disgrace.
It is now our turn to dip into those bowls of beauty and color, to wash away the dirt from whomever is in need. He showed us how. We know how. It’s time we do what He taught us.
I don’t wanna hear anymore, teach me to listen I don’t wanna see anymore, give me a vision That you could move this heart, to be set apart I don’t need to recognize, the man in the mirror And I don’t wanna trade Your plan, for something familiar I can’t waste a day, I can’t stay the same I wanna be different I wanna be changed ‘Til all of me is gone And all that remains Is a fire so bright The whole world can see That there’s something different So come and be different In me And I don’t wanna spend my life, stuck in a pattern And I don’t wanna gain this world but lose what matters And so I’m giving up, everything becauseI wanna be different I wanna be changed ‘Til all of me is gone And all that remains Is a fire so bright The whole world can see That there’s something different So come and be different; oh-oh I know, that I am far, from perfect But through You, the cross still says, I’m worth it So take this beating in my heart and Come and finish what You started When they see me, let them see You ‘Cause I just wanna be different, ye-ey I wanna be different I wanna be changed ‘Til all of me is gone And all that remains Oh is a fire so bright The whole world can see That there’s something different So come and be different I just wanna be different So could You be different In me Songwriters: Micah Tyler Begnaud / Kyle Lee
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”
Open the window, and let the air Freshly blow upon face and hair, And fill the room, as it fills the night, With the breath of the rain’s sweet might.
Nought will I have, not a window-pane, ‘Twixt me and the air and the great good rain, Which ever shall sing me sharp lullabies; And God’s own darkness shall close mine eyes; And I will sleep, with all things blest, In the pure earth-shadow of natural rest. ~James Henry Leigh Hunt from “A Night-Rain in Summer”
Sweet and sour extends far beyond a Chinese menu; it is the daily air I breathe.
I am but a cheery beggar in this summer world, hanging tight to the sweetness of each glorious moment yet knowing it cannot last:
the startling twilight gold of a July rain, the intense green of thirsty fields, a rainbow suspended in misty haze, the clouds racing to win the day’s finish line.
But as beggars aren’t choosers, sweet rain ruins hay harvest and berries turn to mold on the vine.
The sky stooping to kiss the earth may bring mud and flood.
I breathe deeply now of petrichor: the scent of raindrops falling on dry land as if I could wear it like perfume on those sour days of drought.
It’s easy to love a deer But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees Love the puddle of lukewarm water From last week’s rain. Leave the mountains alone for now. Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines. People are lined up to admire them. Get close to the things that slide away in the dark. Be grateful even for the boredom That sometimes seems to involve the whole world. Think of the frost That will crack our bones eventually. ~Tom Hennen “Love for Other Things”
O it is easy to love the beautiful things of God’s creation~
we drive long hours to stand in awe,
gaping at mountains and valleys and waterfalls
and kaleidoscopes of color
but if God needs a slug or snail or bug enough to create those
and allows drought and mud and frost and ice storms and hurricanes
then I guess, if He chooses,
He could look at me and say I need one of you too.
