It’s the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; the gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. ~Wendell Berry “Goods”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
The plow has savaged this sweet field Misshapen clods of earth kicked up Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way Turned over a whole history Looking for the roots of what went wrong Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be Seedbed for the growing that’s to come. I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—
The farmer plows to plant a greening season. ~Parker Palmer “Harrowing”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
It’s not likely anyone would say I didn’t work hard enough.
After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses who knew it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.
Even so, all those years I know I could have plowed more deeply than I did.
I could have thrown myself more fully into the pull on the tugs, shared the load more effectively, shouldered the yoke with greater enthusiasm, bent my neck down low with unbroken determination.
You could say somewhere I lost the gayety in my stride, and you would be right — toward the end, I was trudging through the furrow, bruised from turning up too many submerged rocks, bumping into immoveable tree stumps, tripping on hidden roots, stuck in the deep mud of long and lonely post-midnight hours.
You might even say the knowledge of a job well-done lay at a depth my plow could ever reach.
I had seen others die in the harness, never able to rest easy.
A few years ago I knew the time had come to shrug off the yoke, shake off the bridle and bit, shudder free of the harness.
On this side of the ground, I find myself wondering and wandering, the blinkers no longer impeding my vision, feeling the morning sun on my unyoked withers.
Yet when I see an untilled field, something in me even now still tries to hold on to the plow —
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
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I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter’s house helping her expand their garden by at least ten times. We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.
I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I’d done enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.
All this made me remember my father forty years ago helping me with my garden. My father’s dead now, and has been dead for many years, which is how I’ll be one of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child, who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.
So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation, around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again. ~David Budbill “Seventy-Two Is Not Thirty-Five” from Tumbling toward the End
The wheel turns, we cycle around again, get on and eventually get off. This is a week of July birthdays in our family, for both old and young.
This hit me when we celebrated our grandson’s third birthday a few days ago in a suburban backyard where my daughter has continued the Gibson/Polis gardening tradition, using the compost we hauled in our truck from our farm several hours away.
Her peas were full and ripe and juicy, her greens lush and tasty – simple perfection thanks to her careful tending.
Meanwhile, our son gardens with his three boys in a very small urban backyard in Denver, teaching them what is weed and what will become a future meal.
I couldn’t help but get weepy, enjoying that special birthday feast.
…and knowing someday, our grandsons will plant and weed and harvest from the soil just as we and their parents did, over and over, again and again.
And this is why my eyes are closed It’s just as well for all I’ve seen And so it goes, and so it goes And you’re the only one who knows ~Billy Joel
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The wise old apple tree in spring, Though split and hollow, makes a crown Of such fantastic blossoming We cannot let them cut it down. It bears no fruit, but honey bees Prefer it to other trees.
The orchard man chalks his mark And says, “This empty shell must go.” We nod and rub it off the bark As soon as he goes down the row. Each spring he looks bewildered. “Queer, I thought I marked this thing las year.”
Ten orchard men have come and gone Since first I saw my grandfather Slyly erase it. I’m the one To do it now. As I defer The showy veteran’s removal My grandson nods his approval.
Like mine, my fellow ancient’s roots Are deep in the last century From which our memories send shoots For all our grandchildren to see How spring, inviting bloom and rhyme, Defeats the orchard men of time. ~Robert Hillyer “The Pastoral”
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou “When Great Trees Fall”
When our ancient Spitzenberg apple tree came down in a November windstorm years ago, there was no time to provide any sort of memorial service, or otherwise dispose of the remains.
My husband started in on the job Thanksgiving morning and I watched through the kitchen window as I cooked for the family members soon to arrive. As he made several chain saw cuts through the trunk to make pieces easily moveable, the extent of the astonishing hole in this old tree became visible. It was suffering from an extreme equivalent of human osteoporosis with a brittle skeleton that somehow had lasted through innumerable windstorms over the years, even while still bearing apples, still trying its best to be fruitful.
The brittleness extended right down into the roots, and they too gave way so easily in the wind that the tree literally broke off at ground level and leaned over, propped up by much healthier and resilient upper branches that had so recently held apples.
When it fell, the trunk oriented itself so it provided a view right through to the barnyard down the hill, telescoping what the tree had surveyed for so many years of its life. Clearly this had been a holey trunk for some years; within the cavity at the base were piles of different size rocks stashed there by the Lawrence children three generations ago, followed by our Gibson children thirty years ago.
There was also a large tarnished spoon, lost decades ago into the dark center of the apple tree and now retrieved at its death. At some point, a Gibson child playing a farm version of frisbee golf must have flung a plastic bucket lid at the hole in the tree, and it disappeared into the gap and settled at the bottom.
All this, like a treasure trove of history, was just waiting for the time when the tree would give up its secrets at its death. There were no gold or silver coins, no notes to the future like a glass bottle put out to sea. This well hidden time capsule held simply rocks and spoon and lid.
I realized as I stared into the gulf of empty trunk that I’m hollowing too, more hollow than I care to admit. Like so many of us, stuff is hidden deep inside that we’d just as soon not have discovered. Our outside scaffolding braces against the buffeting by the winds and storms of life, as we cling with mighty roots to this mortal soil.
It is clear we’d be much stronger if we were wholly solid throughout, filled with something stronger even than our outsides. Yet we tend to get filled up with a lot of nothing, or even worse than nothing, a lot of garbage. This is stuff that weakens us, furthers the rot, shortens our fruitful life, doing nothing to make us more whole and holy.
I’m looking more critically now at what fills my empty spots since staring down the barrel of that old apple tree trunk.
Even so, I realize my hollow shell has been saved and salvaged, year after year, by the grace and wisdom of our Divine Orchardist who loves us as we are, up to and after we finally topple over.
May our hollow be hallowed. Wholly hole-y holy…
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Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth And die away from all dry separation, Die to my sole self, and find new birth Within that very death, a dark fruition, Deep in this crowded underground, to learn The earthy otherness of every other, To know that nothing is achieved alone But only where these other fallen gather.
If I bear fruit and break through to bright air, Then fall upon me with your freeing flail To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall May be more fruitful and my autumn still A golden evening where your barns are full. ~Malcolm Guite “Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls Into the Ground and Dies”
…new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. ~Barbara Brown Taylor from Learning to Walk in the Dark
The ground is slowly coming to life again; snowdrops, crocus, and daffodils are surfacing from months of dormancy, buds are swelling, the spring chorus frogs have come from the mud to sing again and birds now greet the lazy dawn.
The seed shakes off the darkness surrounding it. Growth begins.
I too began a mere seed, plain and simple, lying dormant in the darkness of my mother’s body.
Just as the spring murmurs life to the seed in the ground, so the Word calls a human seed of life to stir and swell, becoming both an animate and intimate reflection of Himself.
I was awakened in the dark to sprout, bloom and fruit, to reach as far as my tethered roots allow, aiming beyond earthly bounds to touch the light.
Everything, everyone, so hidden; His touch calls us back to life. Love is come again to the fallow fields of our hearts.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Psalm 51:2-3
Sometimes I wish I could be drenched thoroughly when I’ve gotten myself completely covered with muck–muddy hands, dirty feet, smudged face, soiled soul. It takes work, but I can remove all the signs of griminess on the surface.
Yet when I look in the mirror, I can see everything that desperately needs spiritual soap–now. It is under the surface, harder to reach with soap, so I act helpless to do anything about it. Maybe tomorrow…
People can be pretty effective at hiding the problems in their lives, even from themselves. However, in the clinical work I did for decades, it wasn’t always so easy to conceal.
Patients came to inpatient detox because they had hit bottom in every way, so they are forced to confront the troubles that brought them there. I cared for people who had sold themselves, sold others, abandoned spouses as well as their own children, murdered others and tried to murder themselves. They come in so grimy, it is hard to even see their skin. They cry out for cleansing, for forgiveness, for healing.
Sometimes they willingly submit to that wash cycle, yet sometimes the scrubbing that is the detox process is just too physically hard and painful despite all my efforts to ease it. They can’t handle it and leave before they are truly clean. Maybe tomorrow.
I grieved for them when that happened.
Not once must I forget that their sin, ever so much more obvious, is no greater than mine–we are all tainted goods. Our only hope is the Lord holding onto us tightly over holy waters to make sure we’re scrubbed until we shine: a true cleansing baptism.
Not tomorrow.
Today.
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…
Lyrics by David Wilton
Wash me clean In the warm sun dry me Cleanse my heart From all iniquity Baptize me In the Holy Spirit sea Renew my mind That wickedness may flee
Barren fields will sprout trees Deaf and blind will hear and see Dead will raise and begin to breathe
Restore my soul Holy Spirit take hold Bathe me in Your peace and let it flow Grant me hope In the dark have Your light shown Sing Your love The sweetest song I’ve ever known
Earth groans in pain to see Sons of God declare to be The full and glorious family
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Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days.And because of his words many more became believers.
They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” John 4: 31-42
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn. His thought passes along the row ends like a mole. What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water descending in the dark? ~Wendell Berry “The Man Born to Farming” from Farming: A Handbook
My dad had a standard sign-off whenever I called my parents long-distance once a week from college.
He always said, “you know what you’re there for…”
At first I puzzled over that phrase. I knew I was in school to study and get a degree, but what was going to happen after that was still an unknown. Yet the weekly reminder was a good one. He was telling me that I was a seed sown in rich soil, and what I learned would help me grow and thrive as long as I remembered to put my roots down and drink deeply from that well of knowledge.
So it was with the Samaritan woman at the well – Jesus waited for her in the heat of the day for a reason. She was a seed sown, meant to bring others to share in the harvest of the good news she had heard.
So we too are here for a purpose. We truly need one another, to become interwoven and linked, both visibly and invisibly.
I am woven around you and you around me; together we grow and thrive when tended and — just as intended.
But more than anything, we need our Gardener. We are sown, nurtured, grown under His care. He knows what we are here for, and now, so do we.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.Past posts can be found by searching “Come and See” on this blog.
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My father always knew the secret name of everything— stove bolt and wing nut, set screw and rasp, ratchet wrench, band saw, and ball— peen hammer. He was my tour guide and translator through that foreign country with its short-tempered natives in their crewcuts and tattoos, who suffered my incompetence with gruffness and disgust. Pay attention, he would say, and you’ll learn a thing or two.
Now it’s forty years later, and I’m packing up his tools (If you know the proper names of things you’re never at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent, my hands and heart full of doohickeys and widgets, whatchamacallits, thingamabobs. ~Ronald Wallace “Hardware” from Time’s Fancy
“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him. The weather here’s so good, he took the chance To do a bit of weeding.”
So I saw him Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig, Touching, inspecting, separating one Stalk from the other, gently pulling up Everything not tapered, frail and leafless, Pleased to feel each little weed-root break, But rueful also . . .
Then found myself listening to The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks Where the phone lay unattended in a calm Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums . . .
And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays, This is how Death would summon Everyman.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. ~Seamus Heaney from “Digging” from Death of a Naturalist
My father was a complex man. As I’ve aged, I understand better where my own complicated nature comes from.
As inscrutable as he could be, there were things I absolutely understood about him:
he was a man of action – he never just sat, never took a nap, never wasted a day of his life without accomplishing something tangible.
he was a man of the soil – he plowed and harrowed and sowed and fertilized and weeded and cut brush and harvested
he was a man of inventiveness – he figured out a better way, he transformed tools and buildings, he started from scratch and built the impossible
he didn’t explain himself – and never felt the need to.
Time keeps ticking on without him here, now 30 years since he took his last breath as the clock pendulum swung back and forth in his bedroom. He was taken too young for all the projects he still had in mind.
He handed off a few to me. Some I have done. Some still wait, I’m not sure why.
My regret is not understanding how much he needed to hear how loved he was. He seemed fine without it being said.
But he wasn’t fine. And neither was I.
I wish I had said it when I had the chance. I guess I am digging it out from the soil of my heart now.
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Something about the relentless beauty of the dahlias this year makes me forget lists and calls and news and aches as I stand beside them in a splendor stupor, watching them bloom in real time, not wanting to miss a moment of the long stems rising, the red color deepening then fading from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening again, and now a hundred years pass, now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden bed is gone and the fence is gone and the trees and the ditch and the home are gone, and there’s no way to know this was once a place where dahlias grew. Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you to come stand here with me to watch the dahlias open themselves to the sun, each petal a hymn to the present, a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time we might put in a vase and marvel as all around it the whole world spins. ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “A Scrap in Time”
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon…
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.
Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Home is where one starts from.
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. ~T. S. Eliot, verses from “East Coker” in Four Quartets
What a pity flowers can utter no sound! —A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle… oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be! ~Henry Ward Beecher
A flower garden is a place for prayer and hymns of praise.
When I meet a truly great gardener, like my friend Jean who has grown and hybridized dahlias, what I see growing in the soil is a choral composition of petals, leaves and roots.
Jean has passionately cared for these plants for many of her nine decades of life. They reflect that love in every spiral and swirl, hue and gradient of color, showing stark symmetry and delightful variegation.
Arising from the plainest of homely and knobby look-alike tubers grow these luxurious beauties of infinite variety. I am stunned by each one, captivated, realizing that same Creator ensures we too bloom from mere dust, becoming a hymn of praise arising from every fiber of our being.
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What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and 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”
A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson from Fortune of the Republic
I’ve always identified with weeds and wildflowers more than cultivated blooms. Even those which are thorny, bristly, spreading willy-nilly.
I too have undiscovered virtues – I’m fluffy, I thrive where I’m not necessarily wanted or needed, I tend to be resilient through frost, drought or flood.
The wild persistence of weeds inspires me to just let most of them be, though stinging nettles, poison oak and ivy need to keep to themselves.
Just as a wild beauty lies just beneath their weedy surface, I try to keep flourishing in harsh surroundings, a witness to a world bereft of softness.
O let them be left. O let me be left.
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Who loves the rain And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow through the storm; And at his hearth-fire keep me warm; Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise, Who loves the rain, And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes. ~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace
Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day that comes, young, to disappear forever, and yet remain unaging in the mind. Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away. ~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”
What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank. ~Wendell Berry “VII” 2015 from Another Day
Love is a universe beyond The daylight spending zone: As one we more abound Than two alone. ~Wendell Berry “VIII” 2015 from Another Day
Thinking out loud on this day you were born, I thank God each day for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise three amazing children, now six wonderful grandchildren, and walk this journey together with pulse and breath and dreams.
The boy you were became the man you are: so blessed by God, so needed by your family, church and community.
You give yourself away every day with such grace.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have.
In this journey together, we inhabit each other, however long may be the road we travel; you have become the air I breathe, refreshing, renewing, restoring~~ you are that necessary to me, and that beloved.
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