Category: Farm

The Intricate Texture of Things

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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

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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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Blooming into Glass

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All the love you will ever feel
you have always carried within you

The pellet you think love is

blooms into stone,
into flame, into glass

The tree knows
how to feed every part of itself

When you tap the tree
to drink it
it speaks to you

There is sweetness in you
All the self can do
is melt
~Hannah Stephenson from “Sap Season”

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:

trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping—
a plastic gold dropping

through seasons and centuries to the ground—
until now.

The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet

this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell

which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were

as though the past could be present and memory itself
a Baltic honey—

a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe

inside a flawed translucence.
~Eavan Boland, from “Amber” in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011)

The last remaining cherry tree on our farm,
a Royal Anne,
has stood between house and barn for over 100 years.
This year, its branch joints and bark defects are bleeding – oozing sculptures of amber sap.

The resin is hard and glass-like,
reflecting the tree’s slow internal circulation,
changing subtly day by day.

Though its cherries burst months ago
with juicy flavor,
now it bleeds crystalline flames from its wounds.

What a gift is this love bleeding out
as it moves deep inside an old trunk.
In its thirsty anguish, our dear cherry tree is weeping,
creating glass fruit reflecting Light.

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A Wordless Song

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Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless;
the singing will never be done. 
~Siegried Sassoon “Everyone Sang”

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
~Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers”

When it feels like the world is rent in two,
and the gulf into which we topple
too wide and dark to climb without help,
we can look to the sky
and see the birds’ stitching and hear their wordless singing,
the careful caring line of connection
pulling us out of a hopeless hole,
startled and grateful
to be made whole.
Hope borne on feathered wings:
may we fly threaded and knitted to one another, singing.

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As Your Days Are, So Shall Your Strength Be

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As your days are, so shall your strength be…
Deuteronomy 33:25

The glory of God is man fully alive.
~Irenaeus of St. Lyons

This morning was the live streaming of the Washington National Cathedral memorial service and life celebration for Dr. Jane Goodall.
I had received an invitation to attend along with others who had worked with Jane, but I decided this was not the best time to travel.

I encourage you to watch (linked below) when you have 90 minutes.
It was a beautifully planned service that fit Jane well.

It was very moving for me to hear her three grandchildren speak, as well as several others who were touched directly by her.

Jane reached millions during her long life – her strength shining over many days on earth. I am humbled as a student who learned from her teaching, who ate meals beside her, who sat in the dark with her and her young son during a life-changing event at Gombe.

I got to know her as “just Jane.”

She is no longer just Jane; she belongs to the ages and the angels.

To Be Remembered…

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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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The Shadow of Joy

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Today as the news from Selma and Saigon 
poisons the air like fallout, 
I come again to see 
the serene great picture that I love. 

Here space and time exist in light  the eye like the eye of faith believes. 
The seen, the known 
dissolve in iridescence, become 
illusive flesh of light 
that was not, was, forever is. 

O light beheld as through refracting tears. 
Here is the aura of that world 
each of us has lost. 
Here is the shadow of its joy. 
~Robert Hayden “Monet’s Waterlilies”

…The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language

Monet’s Waterlilies, Art Institute of Chicago

“Heaven pulls earth into its arms…”

We see things differently, don’t we?
What seems ordinary to one person is extraordinary to another.

How might I learn to adjust my focus to see things as you do?
How might I help others to see the world as I do?

The world is flux; my delight and dismay flows from moment to moment, from object to absence, from light to darkness, from color to gray. Perhaps the blur from the figurative (or real) cataract impeding my vision creates a deeper understanding, as I use my imagination to fill in what I can’t discern.

My heart and mind expands to claim this world and all that beauty has to offer, while heaven – all this while – is pulling me into its arms.

In heaven, my focus will be clear. It will all be extraordinarily holy.

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A Little Tired and Hungry

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For grace to be grace,
it must give us things we didn’t know we needed
and take us places where
we didn’t know we didn’t want to go.
~Kathleen Norris from Cloister Walk

Sap withdraws from the upper reaches
of maples; the squirrel digs deeper
and deeper in the moss
to bury the acorns that fall
all around, distracting him.

I’m out here in the dusk…
where the wild asters, last blossoms
of the season, straggle uphill.
Frost flowers, I’ve heard them called.
The white ones have yellow centers
at first: later they darken
to a rosy copper.  They’re mostly done.
Then the blue ones come on. It’s blue
all around me now, though the color
has gone with the sun.

There is no one home but me—
and I’m not at home; I’m up here on the hill,
looking at the dark windows below.
Let them be dark…

…The air is damp and cold
and by now I am a little hungry…
The squirrel is high in the oak,
gone to his nest , and night has silenced
the last loud rupture of the calm.
~Jane Kenyon from “Frost Flowers”

Even when the load grows too heavy,
when misery rolls in like a fog that
covers all that was once vibrant,

even then
even then

there awaits a nest of nurture,
a place of calm
where the tired and hungry
are fed.

We who are empty will be filled;
we who are weary will be restored.

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Another Year of Leaping Winds

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My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood – an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything.

What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.
~Mary Oliver from “The Black Walnut Tree” from Twelve Moons

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photo by Dan Gibson
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We bought this old farm thirty-five years ago:
the Lawrence family’s “Walnut Hill Farm” –
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a grandfather’s suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees thrived for nearly a century on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves
and prodigious in fruit.

The first year we were here,
a windstorm took one tree down.
A neighbor offered
to mill the twisted trunk for shares.
The fallen tree became planks
of fine grained chocolate-hued lumber.

This old tree is the back facing of our oak door cupboards,
a daily reminder of a legacy left behind~
sturdy even if imperfect,
still beautiful to the eye and the heart.

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The Wildness and Wet

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What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Inversnaid”

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In my anguish at the chaos in the world,
let me remember,
when I look closely,
through the rain,
even the weeds,
the unruly, unholy weeds
are connected
in this wilderness.

There is order here
even if I can’t feel it now.
Let us weeds be left.
We are meant to be.

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Time to Say Grace

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You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
~G.K. Chesterton

Norman Rockwell’s 1951 painting Saying Grace

Chesterton has it right.  No matter what I embark on, I should say grace first.  Even my breathing, my waking, and my sleeping. Even the brilliance right outside my back door.

Continual and constant thanks and praise to the Creator for all things bright and beautiful, and helping us through the dark times. 

Instead I am plagued with inconstancy and inconsistency, with a stubborn tendency to take it all for granted.

As I “dip pen in ink” this morning, join me in saying grace:

He is worthy. Amen and Amen.

Even more so.  Ever more now.

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