The partly open hay barn door, white frame around the darkness, the broken board, small enough for a child to slip through.
Walking in the cornfields in late July, green tassels overhead, the slap of flat leaves as we pass, silent and invisible from any road.
Hollyhocks leaning against the stucco house, peonies heavy as fruit, drooping their deep heads on the dog house roof.
Lilac bushes between the lawn and the woods, a tractor shifting from one gear into the next, the throttle opened,
the smell of cut hay, rain coming across the river, the drone of the hammer mill, milk machines at dawn. ~Joyce Sutphen “The Last Things I’ll Remember” from First Words
I turn this seasonal corner, facing deep into autumn, summer fading in the rear view mirror.
Even as the air bares chill, and the clouds sopping soak, the riches of summer remain vivid.
Let me remember: even if I too fade away, readying for the next turn.
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Within the ongoing havoc the woods this morning is almost unnaturally still. Through stalled air, unshadowed light, a few leaves fall of their own weight.
The sky is gray. It begins in mist almost at the ground and rises forever. The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite.
What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased. ~Wendell Berry “VII” from This Day
What more did I think I wanted?
What always has been and always will be:
Until I’m not able to hold on in the wind and rain, may I be a spot of unshadowed light in this dark and bleak world.
I’ll let go like a yellow leaf in autumn, when the time comes, if it pleases my Maker.
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Begin the song exactly where you are, Remain within the world of which you’re made. Call nothing common in the earth or air, Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now, This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood And listen to it, ringing soft and low. Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow. Become an open singing-bowl, whose chime Is richness rising out of emptiness, And timelessness resounding into time.
In the center of my chest, a kindling there in the hollow, as if a match had just been struck, or the blinds snapped up on a sealed room, gold suffusing the air, and through the wide windows, a solstice unfolding, mine for the lengthening days. ~Andrea Potts “On Reading John Donne for the First Time” from Her Joy Becomes
I will not forget, dear harvest moon, to keep you as my singing bowl where I can find your song months from now, even when your reflected light leaks out to tangle up in the weary trees of autumn.
Once the leaves fall, you illuminate even the most humble branches in their embarrassed nakedness.
Call nothing common in the earth or air, Accept it all and let it be for good.
When I too need your warm light in the center of my hollowed chest, I’ll know exactly where to find you, as you sing lullabies, waiting for me to empty.
I’ll not forget you, because you never forget to keep looking for me.
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A scent of ripeness from over a wall. And come to leave the routine road And look for what had made me stall, There sure enough was an apple tree That had eased itself of its summer load, And of all but its trivial foliage free, Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan. For there had been an apple fall As complete as the apple had given man. The ground was one circle of solid red.
May something go always unharvested! May much stay out of our stated plan, Apples or something forgotten and left, So smelling their sweetness would be no theft. ~Robert Frost “Unharvested” from The Collected Poems
Our trees are heavy-laden until the wind comes — the dropping fruit thuds to the ground with such finality, it wakes me in the night and reminds me how far I too have fallen.
“Fall” is just that: nothing remains as it was.
Autumn replays our desire for an apple which smells so sweet, tempts with shiny sheen lures with such color – we fell hard and fast for just one taste.
We ignored the worm hole.
And ended up in a hole ourselves, unharvested, hoping one day for sweetness to return.
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Every morning I walk through folds of fields searching.
Slants of sun sink through triangled bones of leaves: bold cold refuted.
Sparrows flutter warm in given nests, ungriefed, caught, sustained by common grace.
Faith is the tenderness of banked coals in a grate, Braeburn apples on a windowsill, winding crisp with possibility. The steadiness of conversations embered over decades; a fire that has never left off crackling – on this my soul has warmed her hands. Divine ardor: too strong and sweet for the many years I’ve walked on earth.
Love without hesitation has swept my floorboards for seasons. Deep and longing in and out of time the soul reaches out – and He, grasps entire. Hold – and tender. Incandescent. ~Claire Hellar “A Search in Autumn”
The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats’ wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. ~Leila Chatti “I Went Out to Hear” from Wildness Before Something Sublime
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars
of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders
of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is
nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ~Mary Oliver “In Blackwater Woods” from Devotions
(thinking today of God’s gift to the world of Jane Goodall, whose life was about keeping promises)
When the earth and all that is in it glows indigo in the angled light of October; opening my eyes as witness to beauty takes my breath away.
I can’t imagine letting go this life, yet the other side of ashes and loss is salvation.
My God. I am so finite. I hold this close to my bones with miles to go before I sleep.
My life depends on realizing I’m living a life I would die for.
Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.
What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time, If a star at any time may tell us: Now. ~Howard Nemerov “The Consent”from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
So many reasons these days to awake in the night, eyes wide open, searching the dark seas of trouble for some sign of hope, for calm and peace in this stormy world.
When asleep again, I float among abundant golden gingko leaves, each waving like a sail in the breeze, before they tumble, swirling, to the ground, forming deeply cushioned and comforting pools of yellow.
Navigating these brutal times, I am meant to be anchored within some safer harbor – I treasure the old ginkgo as it reaches over each cherished child with its golden cloak of love and protection.
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photo of Jane Goodall in 2018, smiling as I came up to give her a hug, courtesy of WWU University Communications
I wasn’t prepared to hear yesterday that my professor, mentor, and friend Dr. Jane Goodall had passed away at age 91, while in the midst of her lecture tour in the United States.
I nearly believed Jane would be immortal; she lived as if she were. She had a message to deliver and as long as she could, she would. She truly “died in the harness” after decades and decades of traveling the world, recruiting people to her cause to save the world for the next generation of plants, animals and humans, and the next and the next…
She was a born observer and storyteller, able to reach and move us with her verbal and writing ability to help place us in her shoes in the wild as she witnessed what no one else had. This was, of course, aided by Hugo van Lawick’s compelling wildlife photography and video every child of the 1950s and 60s grew up watching.
As a college student taking her class on non-human primate behavior, I was riveted by the content of her course lectures about the work she was doing at Gombe. I hoped I could somehow help in the long-term study there, and was ready to commit to a year of training preparation: recording captive chimpanzee behavior at Stanford, while learning Swahili.
On a spring day in May 1974:
Standing outside a non-descript door in a long dark windowless hallway of offices at the Stanford Medical Center, I took a deep breath and swallowed several times to clear my dry throat. I hoped I had found the correct office, as there was only a number– no nameplate to confirm who was inside.
I was about to meet my childhood hero, someone whose every book I’d read and every TV documentary I had watched. I knocked with what I hoped was the right combination of assertiveness (“I want to be here to talk with you and prove my interest”) and humility (“I hope this is a convenient time for you as I don’t want to intrude”).
I heard a soft voice on the other side say “Come in” so I slowly opened the door.
It was a bit like going through the wardrobe to enter Narnia.
Bright sunlight streamed into the dark hallway as I stepped over the threshold. Squinting, I stepped inside and quickly shut the door behind me as I realized there were at least four birds flying about the room. They were taking off and landing, hopping about feeding on bird seed on the office floor and on the window sill. The windows were flung wide open with a spring breeze rustling papers on the desk. The birds were very happy occupying the sparsely furnished room, which contained only one desk, two chairs and Dr. Jane Goodall.
She stood up and extended her hand to me, saying, quite unnecessarily, “Hello, I’m Jane” and offered me the other chair when I told her my name. She was slighter than she appeared when speaking up at a lectern, or on film. Sitting back down at her desk, she busied herself reading and marking her papers, seemingly occupied for a bit and not to be disturbed.
It was as if I was not there at all.
It was disorienting. In the middle of a bustling urban office complex containing nothing resembling plants or a natural environment, I had unexpectedly stepped into a bird sanctuary instead of sitting down for a job interview. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say. Jane didn’t really ever look directly at me, yet I was clearly being observed.
So I waited, watching the birds making themselves at home in her office, and slowly feeling more at home myself. I felt my tight muscles start to relax and I loosened my grip on the arms of the chair.
There was silence except for the twittering of the finches as they flew about our heads.
Then she spoke, her eyes still perusing papers: “It really is the only way I can tolerate being here for any length of time. They keep me company. But don’t tell anyone; the people here at the medical center would think this is rather unsanitary.”
I said the only thing I could think of: “I think it is magical. It reminds me of home.”
Only then did she look at me. “Now tell me why you’d like to come work at Gombe…”
The next day I received a note from her letting me know I was accepted for the research assistant-ship to begin a year later, once I had completed all aspects of the training.
I had proven I could sit silently and expectantly, waiting for something, or perhaps nothing at all, to happen. For a farm girl who had never before traveled outside the United States, I had stepped through the wardrobe into Jane’s amazing world, about to embark on an adventure far beyond the barnyard.
(This essay was published in The Jane Effect in 2015 in honor of Jane’s 80th birthday)
giving Jane a hug, courtesy of WWU Communications45 years since we met in her Stanford office full of wild birds
True to Jane’s tradition of impeccable graciousness, she sent me a hand-written note after her last visit in 2018 when she came to speak at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
I recommend the documentary “Jane” as the best review of Jane’s Gombe work. The Jane Goodall Institute will continue her legacy for decades to come.
I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring walnut and may leaves the color of shoulders at the end of summer a month that has been to the mountain and become light there the long grass lies pointing uphill even in death for a reason that none of us knows and the wren laughs in the early shade now come again shining glance in your good time naked air late morning my love is for lightness of touch foot feather the day is yet one more yellow leaf and without turning I kiss the light by an old well on the last of the month gathering wild rose hips in the sun ~W.S. Merwin from “The Love of October”from Migration: New & Selected Poems, 2005
Each leaf is beautifully unique, one of a kind, each shaped and hued differently — except those more tattered than others, bespeaking the harshness of their short existence when all life surrounding them seems at risk of being destroyed.
At the end of their allotted life span they return to the earth from which they came. And the Creator-God is pleased. His creations have served the purpose for which He created them. Now, they will enrich the soil, each leaving its own special contribution toward the next generation where differences no longer matter. The unseen birthing and dying mystery continues…. ~Alice La Chapelle, in a comment
The wind gusts through shedding branches stripping them bare, carrying the leaves far away, piling up a diverse gathering they have never known before – chestnut, cherry, birch, walnut, apple, katsura, maple, parrotia, pear, oak, poplar, dogwood – suddenly all sharing the same fate and grave, each wearing a color of its own, soon to blend with the others as all slowly melt to brown.
There is lightness in the letting go, for reasons none of us knows.
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For this you may see no need, You may think my aim Dead set on something
Devoid of conceivable value: An Anthology of Rain, A collection of voices
Telling someone somewhere What it means to follow a drop Traveling to its final place of rest. By opening anywhere, a drop And its story reappear As air turns to water, water to air. ~Phyllis Levin – excerpt from “An Anthology of Rain”
A drop fell on the apple tree, Another on the roof; A half a dozen kissed the eaves, And made the gables laugh.
A few went out to help the brook, That went to help the sea. Myself conjectured, Were they pearls, What necklaces could be– ~Emily Dickinson
At first glance, this soppiness is melancholic.
Yet, when studied up close, rain droplets glisten like jewels.
The onset of rainy season isn’t all sadness~ there is solace in knowing the landscape and I share an inner world of change: though sodden, these are the promises of renewal within our tears.
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