When night is almost done, And sunrise grows so near That we can touch the spaces, It ‘s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour. ~Emily Dickinson
In the moments before dawn
when glow gently tints
the inside of horizon’s eyelids,
the black of midnight
waxes to mere shadow,
the fear forgotten for but a few hours.
Gloaming dusk
fades into gleaming dawn,
its backlit silhouettes stark
as the darkening earth
slowly opens her eyes
to greet a new and glorious morn.
I return to the ground its original music. It will rise out of the horizon of the grass, and over the heads of weeds, and it will rise over the horizon of men’s heads. As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased with the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them. ~Wendell Berry from “Planting Trees”
A tree is a prayer that begins
like a small seed
falling from our lips,
tentative with need.
–a word of thanks
a moment of praise
a tear from grief
a plea for grace–
Unsure if it will land
on receptive soil
with sufficient light
or sprinkling
to quench its dryness.
An answered prayer, like a tree,
takes hold
roots burrowed deep
held fast
filling to fullness
to grow higher in
blooming profusion
that reaches the sky,
awaiting the wind’s touch.
Our prayer, like a tree,
planted on fertile soil,
will someday yield
its gifts and blessings
of fruit and shade,
to rise beyond the horizon
and reach past our last
Amen.
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.  ~Jane Kenyon from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer.  The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering, the occasional dog barking, with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.   The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.
But there is no birdsong arias, leaving me bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wake me at 4 AM in the spring.  No peeper orchestra from the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.
It is too too quiet.
The chilly silence of the darkened days is now interrupted by all percussion, no melody at all.  I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades returning.
It won’t be long.
“An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.”
–Â Denise Levertov, The Breathing
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
photo by Nate Gibson
“O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.”
~May Sarton from Nativity
photo by Nate Gibson
“I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.
‘We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,’
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.”
–Â Â Oliver Herford, I Heard a Bird Sing
photo by Nate Gibson
“Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.”
–Â Â Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, Fragment 3
“That’s no December sky!
Surely ’tis June
Holds now her state on high
Queen of the noon.
Only the tree-tops bare
Crowning the hill,
Clear-cut in perfect air,
Warn us that still
Winter, the aged chief,
Mighty in power,
Exiles the tender leaf,
Exiles the flower.”
–Â Â Robert Fuller Murray (1863-1894), A December Day
photo by Nate Gibsonphoto by Nate Gibson
“This is what I have heard
at last the wind in December
lashing the old trees with rain
unseen rain racing along the tiles
under the moon
wind rising and falling
wind with many clouds
trees in the night wind.”
–Â W. S. Merwin
photo by Nate Gibson
“The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.”
–Â D. H. Lawrence
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
“Give me the end of the year an’ its fun
When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An’ I’ll put soul in my thanksgivin’ prayers.”
–Â Â Edgar A. Guest
“Through bare trees
I can see all the rickety lean-tos
and sheds, and the outhouse
with the half-moon on the door,
once modestly covered in
summer’s greenery.
Through bare trees
I can watch the hawk
perched on a distant branch,
black silhouetted wings
shaking feathers and snow,
and so can its prey.
Through bare trees
I can be winter’s innocence,
unashamed needfulness,
the thin and reaching limbs
of a beggar, longing to touch
but the hem of the sun.”
–Â Lisa Lindsey, Bare Trees
“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ….. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”
–Â Ruth Stout
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth, artist
How endlessly beautiful is woodland in winter! Today there is a thin mist; just enough to make a background of tender blue mystery three hundred yards away, and to show any defect in the grouping of the near trees. ~ Gertrude Jekyll, British horticulturalist
There is a stumbling reluctance transitioning from a month of advent expectancy to three months of winter dormancy. Inevitably there is let-down: the watching and waiting is not over after all. There is profound loneliness knowing the story continues, hidden from view.
We have been stripped naked as the bare trees right now; our bones, like the trees of the landscape, raising up broken branches and healed fractures of previous winter windstorms. We no longer have anything to hide behind or among, our defects are plain to see, our whole story a mystery as yet untold but impossible to conceal.
Here I am, abundantly flawed with pocks and scars, yet renewed once again. There are hints of new growth to come when the frost abates and the sap thaws.  I am prepared to wait an eternity if necessary, for the rest of the story.
photo by Josh Scholten
“I heard a bird sing
Barnstorming 