Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”
The unconventional and unnoticed beauty, freckled, spare and strange– helps me feel beautiful too. The interplay of light and shadow within every moment of our existence, some moments darker than others, some brilliant and dazzling.
I try to find the sweet and sour, knowing I’m capturing my own dappled essence – a reflection of the Fathering that loves us even in our fickleness, who possibly could know how?
There is no perfection outside of Him; His reflected beauty, His transfigured face has no uniformity yet is past changing.
We give Him glory in our imperfection, through defects and blemishes which only He can make whole.
Who knows why He does this? Yet He does.
Glory be.
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With my arms raised in a vee, I gather the heavens and bring my hands down slow together, press palms and bow my head.
I try to forget the suffering, the wars, the ravage of land that threatens songbirds, butterflies, and pollinators.
The ghosts of their wings flutter past my closed eyes as I breathe the spirit of seasons, the stirrings in soil, trees moving with sap.
With my third eye, I conjure the red fox, its healthy tail, recount the good of this world, the farmer tending her tomatoes, the beans
dazzled green al dente in butter, salt and pepper, cows munching on grass. The orb of sun-gold from which all bounty flows. ~Twyla Hansen “Trying to Pray” from Rock. Tree. Bird.
the thorn that is heavier than lead— if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging—
there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted—
each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,
whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray. ~Mary Oliver from “Morning Poem”
A Sabbath sunrise becomes unspoken prayer – I open my hands and arms to it, closing my eyes, bowing my head, giving myself over to silent gratitude.
Gathering up the heavens, the sun moves from subtle simmer to blazing boil.
I trudge forward every day, each step in itself a prayer answered; thankful I can still take a next step, and a next, until I reach tomorrow and again after that, I celebrate there will be a next tomorrow.
Amen.
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And on those hot afternoons in July, when my father was out on the tractor cultivating rows of corn, my mother would send us out with a Mason jar filled with ice and water, a dish towel wrapped around it for insulation.
Like a rocket launched to an orbiting planet, we would cut across the fields in a trajectory calculated to intercept— or, perhaps, even—surprise him in his absorption with the row and the turning always over earth beneath the blade.
He would look up and see us, throttle down, stop, and step from the tractor with the grace of a cowboy dismounting his horse, and receive gratefully the jar of water, ice cubes now melted into tiny shards, drinking it down in a single gulp, while we watched, mission accomplished. ~Joyce Sutphen“Carrying Water to the Field”
It was my special responsibility to carry cold water out to my father when he was on the tractor doing field work. Yes, he could have carried a thermos-full along with him all day but then he would not have seen his young daughter walking carefully from the house over the fresh-turned dirt, he would not have an excuse for a short break to wipe the sweat from his face with his bright red kerchief, nor sit and survey the straightness of his furrows. He would not have lifted her up to sit beside him on the tractor, allowing her to “drive”, steering down the rows, curving around the killdeer nests so their young are spared.
Indeed, it was a special responsibility to nurture someone hard at work who doesn’t stop to refill themselves. It happens rarely any more – whether field or factory or family home or even a daily blog like this. What wondrous love to carry water to those who thirst. What wondrous grace then fills our furrowed lives.
Thank you, faithful readers and supporters, to you who have carried water to me when I am dry and thirsty. It convinces me my work here is not in vain; mission accomplished.
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I wait for you In the grassland Where small lilies bloom. On the corners of the field, The rainbow shows up. 小百合さく 小草がなかに 君まてば 野末にほいて 虹あらはれぬ ~Yosano Akiko Tanka Poem (1878-1942)
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
For Dan’s 70th birthday…
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.
Each year, as we grow older together: grayer, softer, gentler with ourselves, each other, and the world.
I pause, on this day you were born, to thank God yet again for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise our three amazing children, and now our grandchildren, walking life together with faith and hope and dreams.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have…
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It was dragging my hands along its belly, loosing the bit and wiping the spit from its mouth that made me a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw, a fly tasting its ear. It was touching my nose to his that made me know the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his that made me know the long field’s secrets. But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know the sorrow of horses. Made me forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves. And in this way drop my torches. And in this way drop my knives. Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch. And my face grow long. And these words cast off, at last, for the slow honest tongue of horses. ~Ross Gay “Becoming A Horse”
photo by Emily Vander Haak
Living the dream of nearly every young girl, I grew up with a horse in our back field. The first was a raw-boned old paint who allowed my older sister and toddler me to sit atop him, walk around the barnyard and on the driveway at no more than a walk. He was arthritic and sore, but patient and tolerant to the attention of little girls. When we moved away to another part of the state, he didn’t come with us and I was too young to fully understand where he had been sent.
The horse on our new farm was my sister’s 4H project who was a spiffy chestnut mare with a penchant for a choppy trot and speedy canter. My sister would go miles with friends on horseback down back-country roads. Sadly, my sister soon became allergic (hives and swelling) to any contact with horses. I was barely old enough to start riding by myself in our fields.The little mare missed her adventures with my sister but seemed to adapt to my inexperience and took care of me as best she could – I never fell off. One night, she broke through a fence and ate her fill in a field of growing oat grass. The next day she was euthanized due to terrible colic. I was inconsolable, crying for days when visiting her burial spot on our property.
These first two horses tolerated the inexperience of their handlers and tried to compensate for it. I’ve since owned a few horses who knew exactly how to take advantage of such inexperience. Horses size up people quickly as our feelings and fear can be so transparent; it takes much longer for us to understand the complexity of their equine mind. Many diverse training techniques are marketed as testimony to that mystery.
I have learned that horses appreciate a patient and quiet approach, reflecting their consistency and honesty. They like to be looked in the eye and appreciate a soft breath blown over their whiskers. They want us to find their itchy spots rather than act the part of a pseudo-predator with intent to harm.
That’s not asking too much of us.
In return, we learn how best to communicate what we need from them. They are remarkably willing to work when they understand the job and feel appreciated. In return, we are given a chance to experience the world through their eyes and ears, to comprehend the remarkable sensitivity of a skin able to shiver a fly away.
I’ve spent much of my life learning with horses and hope there are a few years still left to learn more. Whatever sorrow they feel in their hearts is when I’ve failed to be who they need me to be. Their gift to me is an honest willingness to forgive, again and yet again.
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The essence of America, that which really unites us, is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion. It is an idea, and what an idea it is—that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going. ~Condoleezza Rice
We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! ~Abraham Lincolnfrom Proclamation 97 – Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer (March 1863)
Perhaps Independence Day should actually become a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, as Lincoln proclaimed in March 1863. Goodness knows, after all we’ve been through as a nation, the U.S.A. still struggles with understanding who we are and how to live out the brilliant idea that began our government nearly 250 years ago.
Even for those coming from the most humble of backgrounds, it is possible for any person to do great things here. The key is to never forget the blessings bestowed upon us by the courage and perseverance of our forebears. So much blood has been shed to bring us the freedoms we take for granted.
Today is a day to be grateful and prayerful, not proud. Let us not forget amid the cacophony of fireworks, the overabundant picnic food and unending parades – we the people must vow together that our unity be strengthened by single-minded commitment to peace and harmony rather than be destroyed by division and conflict.
Our God does not abandon the humble in spirit. Let us not forget such a God.
photo by Joel DeWaard
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Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:— We are as they; Like them we fade away, As doth a leaf.
Consider The sparrows of the air of small account: Our God doth view Whether they fall or mount,— He guards us too.
Consider The lilies that do neither spin nor toil, Yet are most fair:— What profits all this care And all this coil?
Consider The birds that have no barn nor harvest-weeks; God gives them food:— Much more our Father seeks To do us good. ~Christina Rossetti from “Consider”
…if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. ~Mary Oliver from “Lilies”
Homer Smith: [the final English lesson] Oh, *I* built a chapel…
All of the sisters: *I* built a chapel.
Homer Smith: *You* built a chapel…
All of the sisters: *You* built a chapel.
Homer Smith: *We” built a chapel…
Mother Maria: [points to heaven] *He* built a chapel.
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention… pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.
Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks his word of judgment and command.
And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that “Consider the lilies of the field” was the only commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the sine qua non of art and religion both. ~Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark
I have broken the Biblical mandate to “consider the lilies” way too many times. In my daily life I am considering almost anything else – my own worries and concerns as I walk past so much beauty and meaning and holiness. My mind dwells within, blind and deaf to what is outside.
It is so necessary to be reminded that I need to pay attention beyond my own bubble, to be reminded to love and care for my neighbor, to remember what history has to teach us, to search for the sacred in all things.
Stop, Look, Listen, Consider: all is grace, all is gift, all is holiness brought to life – stunning, amazing, wondrous.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave, So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave, Our God is marching on.
(Chorus) Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on. ~Julia Ward Howe — final original verses of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
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Your voice, with clear location of June days, Called me- outside the window. You were there, Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare Of uncontested summer all things raise Plainly their seeming into seamless air.
Then your love looked as simple and entire As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace, Which promise always wine, by mottled fire More fatal flashed than ever human grace.
And your gay gift – Oh when I saw it fall Into my hands, through all that naive light, It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight As must have been the first great gift of all. ~Richard Wilbur “June Light”
June, so green, so prolific, can have the feel of the first Garden. Our trees are heavy with growing fruit and, thankfully, none are forbidden. I tread quietly through the sunlit orchard, not wanting to spoil this glad gift of a morning.
Later in the summer, when a ripe pear loosens its grip from the branch and settles into my hands, I will share of its pure grace and taste. With gratitude, I will offer it up, glistening with dew and truth, to you.
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I’ve learned that evenwhen I have pains, I don’t have to be one … I’ve learned that: people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ~Maya Angelouon her 70th birthday, citing a quote from Carl Buehner
I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch. ~Julie Kasdorf– “What I Learned from my Mother”
Moms often know best about these things — how to love others when and how they need it — the ways to ease pain, rather than become one. Despite years of practice, I don’t always get it right; others often do it better.
Showing up with food is always a good thing but it is the showing up part that is the real food; bringing a cake is simply the icing.
Working as a physician over four decades, my usefulness tended to depend on the severity of another’s worries and misery. If no illness, no symptoms, no fear, why bother seeing a doctor? Since retiring, the help I offer no longer means writing a prescription for a medication, or performing a minor surgery. I have to simply offer up me for what it’s worth, without the M.D.
To be useful without a stethoscope, I aim to be like any good mom or grandma. I press my hand into another’s, hug when needed, smile and listen and nod and sometimes weep when someone has something they need to say. No advanced degree needed.
Oh, and bring flowers. Cut up fruit. Bake a cake. Leave the ants at home.
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She sweeps with many-colored brooms … And leaves the shreds behind … Oh housewife in the evening west … Come back, and dust the pond! You dropped a purple ravelling in … You dropped an amber thread … And how you’ve littered all the east With duds of emerald!
And still, she plies her spotted brooms, And still the aprons fly, Till brooms fade softly into stars … And then I come away … ~Emily Dickinson
photo by Nate Gibson
Sweeping is a most satisfying daily task, whether I’m cleaning up in the house or barn. Although my domestic goal is to clear away dust and debris to leave a spotless walkway, I can also picture a cosmic housewife sweeping the skies and landscape of the colors of the early dawn and the late twilight, clearing the way for the stars of night.
Flying on brooms? No thank you! I’m challenged enough to test my grip on grounded broomsticks.
And if I leave a little colored dust behind, there is always opportunity to sweep it up tomorrow.
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