Category: trees

We Are No Longer Alone: Acquainted with Grief

December 18, 2024December 18, 2024 barnstormingblog1 Comment

And now, as the night of this world folds you in
its brutal frost (the barnyard smell strong as sin),
and as Joseph, weary with unwelcome and relief, his hands
bloody from your birth, spreads his thin cloak
around you both, we doubly bless you, Baby,
as you are acquainted, for the first time, with our grief.
~Luci Shaw from “A Blessing for the New Baby”

Grief like a cross
she will bear to her own dying—
she pauses under its gravity
before turning the corner
where she will see his tomb
and now wonders
at this sudden intimation
of something about to be born.
~Franchot Ballinger “Advent” from Crossings

The winds were scornful,
Passing by;
And gathering Angels
Wondered why

A burdened Mother
Did not mind
That only animals
Were kind.

For who in all the world
Could guess
That God would search out
Loneliness.
~Sr. M. Chrysostom, O.S.B. “The Stable” from Mary Immaculate: God’s Mother and Mine

Shut out suffering, and you see only one side of this strange and fearful thing, the life of man. Christ saw both sides. He could be glad, he could rejoice with them that rejoice; and yet the settled tone of his disposition was a peculiar and subdued sadness. That gave the calm depth to the character of Christ; he had got the true view of life by acquainting himself with grief.
~Frederick Robertson from a 1846 sermon entitled Typified by the Man of Sorrows, the Human Race

The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.
— J. R. R. Tolkien from The Fellowship of the Ring

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief
Isaiah 53:3

Our sorrows fill a chasm so deep and dark that it is a fearsome thing to even peer from the edge. We join the helplessness of countless people in human history who have lived through times which appeared unendurable.

We don’t understand why inexplicable tragedy befalls good and gracious people, taking them when they are not yet finished with their work on earth.

From quakes that topple buildings burying people,
to waves that wipe out whole cities sweeping away thousands,
to a pathogen too swift and mean for modern medicine,
to unconscionable shootings of innocents,
we are reminded every day: we live on perilous ground and our time here has always been finite.

We don’t have control over the amount of time, but we do have control over how extensively our love for others is heard and spread.

There is assurance in knowing we do not weep alone;
our Lord is acquainted with grief.

Our grieving is so familiar to a suffering God who too wept at the death of a beloved friend, when He faced a city about to condemn Him to death and He was tasked with enduring the unendurable.

There is comfort in knowing
He too peered into the chasm of darkness;
He willingly entered its depths to come to our rescue.

His is an incomparable capacity for Light and Love that is heard and spread for an eternity.

This year’s Advent theme is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 1928:

God comes.

Angels, where you soar
Up to God’s own light
Take my own lost bird
On your hearts tonight;
And as grief once more
Mounts to heaven and sings
Let my love be heard
Whispering in your wings
~Alfred Noyes

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We Are No Longer Alone: Comforted

December 9, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”

“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.

Piglet was comforted by this.
~A.A. Milne from Winnie the Pooh

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

Once I saw a fire
across the water
reaching high into the night.
So I lit my fire.
My fire was small
but it was enough to signal to the other,
I see you, and I am here.

Now, whenever I light fires, I wonder who’s watching –
the trees, the grass, the flowers, the fireflies, the moths, the birds,
the ocean, the clouds, the moon, the stars,
the very ground I rest upon?
Testing for echo, I send my calls of light into darkness.
Even when all I receive is the gift of silence,
I am comforted because
I see and I am here.
~John Paul Caponigro “Test for Echo”

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
2 Corinthians 1:3-6

Those who know me well
know I can fret and worry
better than most.
Medical training only makes it worse.
It teaches one to think catastrophically.
That is what I did for a living for over 40 years,
to always be ready for the worse case scenario.

When I rise, sleepless,
to face a day of uncertainty
as we all must do at times~
after careful thought,
I reach for the certainty I am promised
over the uncertainty I can only imagine:

What is my only comfort in life and in death?
That I am not my own, but belong
—body and soul, in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins
with his precious blood,
and has set me free
from all the power of the devil.

He also preserves me in such a way
that with the will of my heavenly Father
not a hair can fall from my head;
indeed, all things must work together
for my salvation.

Therefore, by his Holy Spirit
he also assures me of
eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready
from now on to live for him.
Heidelberg Catechism Question and Answer 1

God says to me:”Supposing it didn’t.You belong to me, not to the tree.”
And I am comforted. I am not alone. I see you and I am here and so is He.

This year’s Advent theme is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 1928:

God comes.

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Some Sweeping Blast

November 20, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn.
~John Muir

Some sweeping blast may suddenly come o’er us,
Lose our place, and turn another leaf!
~Hannah Flagg Gould from “The Whirlwind”

Earth shuddered at my motion,
And my power in silence owns;
But the deep and troubled ocean
O’er my deeds of horror moans!
I have sunk the brightest treasure—
I’ve destroyed the fairest form—
I have sadly filled my measure,
And I am now a dying storm.
~Hannah Flagg Gould from “The Dying Storm”

Last night, the Pacific Northwest braced for a “historic” windstorm with unprecedented winds from the east, through the Cascade Mountain passes, rushing to a low pressure system forming in the ocean. The current term for such a storm is a “bomb cyclone,” followed by an “atmospheric river” – ominous descriptions and even more ominous when viewed on satellite images.

The eastern part of Seattle’s King County was hit full force with more than a half million homes left without power last night. It will be a miserable few days for so many in an urban setting as crews try to repair the damage. We live 100 miles to the north and experienced only mild winds, although there was heavy tree fall damage just 15 miles to the south of us in densely wooded Sudden Valley. Our county is usually the focal point for fall and winter windstorms, but we were largely spared this time around.

In anticipation of this storm, the weather services compared it to the historic windstorm on Columbus Day in 1962 which ravaged the region.

I remember that Columbus Day storm vividly as an eight year old living in Olympia, as the wind gusts clocked in at over 140 mph. Large fir trees toppled over like toothpicks in the woods all around our house. The root balls stood 15 feet tall, giant headstones over a mass of tree graves.

Back then, my family’s home, located outside city limits, remained without power for at least a week. We lost all our stored home-grown meat and produce in our freezer and ate only canned goods, boiling water outside on a camp stove under kerosene lights, roasting hot dogs in our fireplace. We slept in sleeping bags under piles of blankets.

This week, when the predictions poured in about a similar strength storm, we readied our farm’s generator and hunkered down, waiting for the monster to storm into our yards and woods.

But the lights only flickered a few times, the winds meager in comparison to our usual fall and winter storms. Our woods, filled with fallen trees from bygone storms, was left untouched this time around.

I’m among the many relieved this morning, having aged past the challenge of living days without power. Today, as so many will be dealing with the messy clean up, my cares have dropped away like the leaves forced to let go in the storm, settling silent to wait for what nature might bring next.

The Inner Tree Revealed

November 16, 2024 barnstormingblog2 Comments

I am out with lanterns looking for myself…
~Emily Dickinson from “Letters”

And is it not enough that every year
A richly laden autumn should unfold
And shimmer into being leaf by leaf,
Its scattered ochres mirrored everywhere
In hints and glints of hidden red and gold
Threaded like memory through loss and grief,

When dusk descends, when branches are unveiled,
When roots reach deeper than our minds can feel
And ready us for winter with strange calm,
That I should see the inner tree revealed
And know its beauty as the bright leaves fall
And feel its truth within me as I am?

And is it not enough that I should walk
Through low November mist along the bank,
When scents of woodsmoke summon, in some long
And melancholy undertone, the talk
Of those old poets from whose works I drank
The heady wine of an autumnal song?

It is not yet enough. So I must try,
In my poor turn, to help you see it too,
As though these leaves could be as rich as those,
That red and gold might glimmer in your eye,
That autumn might unfold again in you,
Feeling with me what falling leaves disclose.
~Malcolm Guite “And Is It Not Enough?”

For over 15 years now, I have bared my soul here at Barnstorming, looking for others’ words to help me sort through the events of my life. I particularly look for words that resonate: I can say “I’ve felt like that as well,” with the hope that others reading along with me will recognize that familiar “yes, that is the way it is for me.”

Every day, I am out looking for myself with the help of Light provided by our Creator God. I carry lanterns hither and yon, exploring paths and hidden spaces and wondering what is around the next corner.

So I want to help you see where this journey is going.

Maybe it is finding your own “inner tree” as the leaves fall,
revealing the strength of bare bones.
Maybe it is noticing beauty in the ordinary.
Maybe it is the warmth of knowing someone else feels as you do.
Maybe it is discovering a connection, mysterious and wondrous.

Often I hear from you that the Light you carry helped lead you here.
Welcome, my friend — let’s walk together…

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Feel Like a Leaf

November 15, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye from “The Art of Disappearing” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Valentine for Ernest Mann” from The Red Suitcase

Poems were hidden from me for decades.

I was oblivious a hundred times a day to their secrets: dripping right over me in the shower, rising over hills bright pink, tucked under a toadstool, breathing deeply as I auscultated a chest, unfolding with each blossom, folding with each piece of laundry, settling heavily on my eyelids at night.

The day I awoke to them was the day 23 years ago when thousands of innocents died in sudden cataclysm of airplanes and buildings and fire — people not knowing when they got up that day it would be their last.

And such tragic tumbling of life happens without cease – from wars, gun violence, suicide, pandemics and preventable diseases –
our world weeps and hearts continue to break.

Suddenly poems show themselves. I try to see, listen, touch, smell, taste as if each day would be my last. I try to feel like a leaf about to let go.

I have learned to live in a way that lets me see through the hiddenness and now it overwhelms me. Poems – sad, insightful, clever, funny, and mysterious – are everywhere I look.

And I don’t know if I have enough time left to write them all down.

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All Tattered and Tumbling

November 5, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart,
they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.
What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?
~William Ernest Henley from “The Rain and the Wind”

The rain to the wind said,
‘You push and I’ll pelt.’
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged – though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
~Robert Frost “Lodged”

A heavy rain darkened
a sodden gray dawn
when suddenly unbidden,
gusts ripped loose remaining leaves
and sent them spinning,
swirling earthbound
in yellow clouds.

The battering of rain and wind
leaves no doubt
this is a day of decision –
we are resigned to our fate.

I hunker down in the turbulence,
tattered and tumbling,
and wait for a clear night
to empty itself into
a fragile crystalline dawn.

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October 31, 2024October 31, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

I Kept My Word…

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
~Walter de la Mare “The Listeners”

At times it seems I knock on a door that remains closed.
My inquiries go unanswered. Is anybody there?
All is silence and darkness.

When I get spooked by the deep dark surrounding this world,
I want to turn around and flee,
the only sound are footsteps echoing away into the night.

Yet I know there are listeners who hear my words.
I know my long travels are not in vain.

We must not be discouraged.
I promised I would come, no matter what.
I have kept my word.

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October 30, 2024October 31, 2024 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The Way is Clear

The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”
~Wendell Berry “Grace”

If I’m unsure, as I often am,
about where I’ve been,
where I am, where I’m going,
I look to the cycles of the seasons
to be reminded all things must come round

what is barren will bud
what buds will grow lush and fruit
what flourishes will fade and fall,
and come to rest and stillness

All things come round,
making the way to Him clear.
Grace forges a path
my bones and I follow.

Shining as the smallest bud,
shining in fruitfulness,
shining when fallen,
shining in His glory.

I’ll be still. Will be still.

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Nor Spare a Sigh…

October 15, 2024 barnstormingblog2 Comments

~to a young child~

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall”

As the leaves tumble down, I think of Hopkins’ Márgarét
and her vanishing goldengrove path,
she who weeps for the loss of autumn leaves,
not knowing or remembering they will return.

And I, now older, know spring comes again,
even though wistful and sighing deeply
at the loss of beauty and innocence each autumn,
weeping for what was and may never be again.

In this blighted plight,
I tend to forget the promise made:
there is much more to come after the Fall.

My grief is not for nothing.
Christ comforts those who weep,
who mourn loss and wander lost.

I have hope and faith.
I will see beauty again.
I follow the goldengrove that leads to Him.

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