Category: contentment

Now I Know…

barnstormingblog5 Comments

We don’t have time to look at one another.
I didn’t realize.
All that was going on in life and we never noticed.
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
– every, every minute? 
~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town

An awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.
People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up this hill. We all know how it is.
And then time…and rainy days…and sunny days..n’ snow…
We’re all glad they’re in a beautiful place
and we are coming up here ourselves when our fit’s over.
~Thornton Wilder from “Our Town”

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”   —  Mrs. Gibbs to Emily in Our Town
We are ages away
from our high school class
where first we walked
the streets of Grover’s Corners
and have lived decades and
decades of important days
writing our own scenes
along the way. In this theater
we meet again the lives of people
as ordinary and extraordinary
as we are and find ourselves
smiling and weeping watching
a play we first encountered as teens.
In our 70’s Our Town brings us joy
and also breaks our hearts.
Now we know.
~Edwin Romond “Seeing “Our Town” in Our 70’s”

Last night, we watched the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder acted out by high schoolers under our son Nate’s direction. As it always does, this play hits me in my core: my mother also directed Our Town as a speech and drama teacher in a small town high school in Eastern Washington during WWII, while my dad was fighting in the South Pacific. Mom loved the play so much, she named me after one of the main characters. Nate didn’t know about that family connection when he chose it for his American Literature class production.

Watching “Our Town” at the beginning of my eighth decade is different than when I was in high school reciting Emily’s monologue in the graveyard. It is especially poignant this week after the 80th anniversary of D-Day, with only a few surviving liberators in attendance.

When our time gets short, we must realize life while we live it, every every minute, ordinary as they seem.

Wilder’s Pulitizer Prize winning words from “Our Town” still ring as true now as in 1938:
then, our country was crushed under the Great Depression,
now, our country staggers under a Great Depression of the spirit.
Though more economically secure, we are emotionally and morally bankrupt.

Even living through the most routine and unimportant days, may we always be conscious of our many treasures and abundance, striving to care for others in need.

So I search the soil of my life, this farm, this faith
to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit, in order
to be harvested to share with others.

I my so grateful for the tie that binds me to each of you who visit here, hoping what I share makes a difference in your ordinary, but precious, day.

Now I know…

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Roads Go Ever Ever On

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on,
Under cloud and under star.
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen,
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green,
And trees and hills they long have known.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone.
Let others follow, if they can!
Let them a journey new begin.
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Still ’round the corner there may wait
A new road or secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
~J.R.R. Tolkien “Bilbo’s Walking Song”

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off too.
~J.R.R. Tolkien – Bilbo to Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings


I love these roads in June, at dawn or dusk,
the light and shadow playing over the path,
promising summer songs and simple joys.

When I walk these roads,
I try to avoid the deep ditches,
the potholes and speed bumps.

It’s a dangerous business,
walking out the front door,
not knowing where I may be swept off to.

Passing by secret gates and overgrown paths,
I take the familiar route that leads me home,
waiting for a Guide so I don’t lose my way.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Understanding Meekness

barnstormingblog3 Comments

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
              in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
              make the wheat fall in waves
they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
              nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
              To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
              in a meadow, who—
at his master’s voice—seizes up to a stunned
              but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
              in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
              and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.
~Mary Karr “Who the Meek Are Not” from Sinners Welcome

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Matthew 5:5

I’ve seen meekness like this.

Our stallion allowed his strength and passion to be under control. He wanted to listen. He wanted to see what we might ask of him. He wanted to be with us.

This makes no sense given the world’s demand now for “strongman” leadership – someone who submits to no one, apologizes to no one, feels compassion for no one.

Globally and individually, we have desperate need of meekness. True strength is when someone knows the extent of their power but resists the need to prove it to anyone else.

The meek are ready, waiting for what God will have them do next.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

A Lump in the Throat Feeling

barnstormingblog2 Comments

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
~Robert Frost in a letter to Louis Untermeyer

What is your malady?

Asks the form at the community acupuncture clinic.
My pen hovers—so many to choose from:
the thyroid, the gut, the face.
I find myself writing instead:

Homesickness.

I hand in my form. I wonder if the doctor
with the needles will laugh at me,
but he says instead:

I am homesick too.

And then he puts needles in my ears and my ankles
and I fall asleep.
Around me, strangers sleep
needled dreams, under warm blankets.

And I think:
at home in the world.
The endless desire to be
at home in the world.
~Sarah Ruhl “On Homesickness”

Spending time away from home has always been difficult for me. I was hopelessly homesick as a child whenever I stayed overnight with a friend or even with my grandma. Going to college two states away was a complete ordeal – it took me much longer than typical to let go of home and finally settle into a new life away from all that was familiar. I really did feel sick clinging too tightly to home base, unwilling to launch, barely able to wave good-bye.

Even now, as I travel away from the farm for a week for this or that, I sometimes get the lump-in-the-throat feeling that I remember keenly from my childhood years — knowing I am out of my element, stretching my comfort zone, not feeling at home away from home.

Will I ever grow out of this now that I’m nearly seventy or will it only get worse? Will I ever embrace a lovesickness for the rest of the world?

I keep trying – but the return trip is still the sweetest remedy for this sickness.

There’s no place like home…

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Despite the Mess

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
~Ada Limón “Instructions on Not Giving Up”

It wasn’t until I paused under the huge silver maple tree in front of our house that I began to notice not the blossoms, but the way the leaves were unfurling. How suddenly a tree transformed back into a tree, with all its good green leaves. It felt like a lesson in resilience. The tree wasn’t giving up. The tree was just going to keep doing its tree thing. Noticing those leaves felt like the first moment of breath I’d had all winter. Under that tree, the line “it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me” came to me.
~Ada Limón writing about how “Instructions on Not Giving Up” came to her

I watch daily as our farm’s trees reawaken in the spring. Some, like the maples and chestnuts turn green in April. The walnuts stay naked well into May, quite bohemian compared to their glossy green neighbors.

New growth is always an encouragement to me, especially after a brutally cold winter when branches have broken off in the snows or a tree has toppled over in exhaustion from resisting the winter wind.

As leaves swell and begin to unwrap in the spring sun, trees are feeling what I feel: the need for fresh air and renewal, absorbing the warmth of the sun while new nutrients surge in my sap.

Most trees find it is easy being green, as that is who they are and that is who I am. Some are colorful show-offs, putting me to shame for my plainness. They bloom their hearts out with the joy of living yet another spring, exuberant and wild, and oh so messy.

The trees’ resilience captures my heart. Dogwood and crabapple petals follow us inside the house stuck to our shoes, left scattered here and there on the floor. Perhaps they think they can remain bright and beautiful inside a different wooden home. I sweep them up to put them back outside on the ground where they, like I will someday, become part of the soil once again.

Exuberant in my messy plainness.

AI image created for this post

There is a tree beyond this world
In it’s ancient roots this song is curled
I am the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant
~Carrie Newcomer

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Light Out of Darkness

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Light burrows out of darkness.
Our skin is covered with silvery sheen
like cherries polished by spring rain.
The terribly hard days flood by—
gone to where they are not needed anymore.

Light finds us through layers of clothes,
woolen blankets, cool sheets
smelling of orange-sunshine. Light
always finds the hidden and exposes it.

Our hair reminds light of damp earth
when buds first break free
in rapture—they cannot wait
or cannot get enough of it.

God is no longer untouchable.
We are cleansed. Our bones
are transitory voices, flocking geese
practicing for that long journey
to an end they cannot imagine—
but there it is, the end in sight,
calling from the distance,
Come here, come here,
I am waiting for you.

We reach what we have been reaching for,
and it is more than we expected it to be.
~Martin Willitts Jr., “Light” from  Leave Nothing Behind

We reach through our darkness toward a Light we have been told about.

It seems untouchable and unknowable, like birds called together to fly away, without imagining where they might go.

Yet the Light is reachable, it is touchable and welcoming.
God is waiting for our approach.

Once again, always again – darkness is overwhelmed.

AI image created for this post
AI image created for this post

Through love to light! Oh, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day!
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.
Through love to light!
Through light, O God, to thee,
Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

What’s Left Undone Will Wait

barnstormingblog2 Comments

To rest before the sheaves are bound,
toss the scythes aside, bare the feet and sink
into the nearest haystack, release
the undone task and consent to sleep
while the brightest hour burns an arc
across its stretch of sky:
this is the body’s prayer, mid-day angelus
whispered in mingled breath while the limbs
stretch in thanksgiving and the body turns
toward the beloved.

This is the prayer of trust:
what’s left undone will wait. The unattended
child, the uncut acre, cracked wheel, broken
fence that are occupations of the waking mind
soften into shadow in the semi-darkness
of dream. All shall be well. Little depends on us.
The turning world is held and borne in love.
We give good measure in our toil and, meet and right,
obey the body when it calls us to rest.
~Marilyn Chandler McEntyre “Noon Rest (after Millet: 1890)” from “The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings”

Van Gogh: Noon Rest at Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Thanks to retirement, I have learned to love mid-day naps.

After forty-plus years of 10 hour work days, then awakened with calls at night, I managed to semi-thrive on minimal sleep.

Not any more.

I’ve discovered that it is possible to leave things undone, something that was never possible during doctoring and patient care. It is okay to set a task aside and think about it later. All this doesn’t come naturally to me but I’m learning.

So it is time to kick off my shoes, pull a quilt up to my chin and close my eyes, just for a little while.

All will be well. The world keeps turning, even when I’m not the one pedaling to keep it going.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

A Delicious Drizzle

barnstormingblog1 Comment

I was enjoying everything: the rain, the path
wherever it was taking me, the earth roots
beginning to stir.
I didn’t intend to start thinking about God,
it just happened.
How God, or the gods, are invisible,
quite understandable
But holiness is visible, entirely.
It’s wonderful to walk along like that,
thought not the usual intention to reach an
answer
but merely drifting.
Like clouds that only seem weightless.
but of course are not.
Are really important.
I mean, terribly important.
Not decoration by any means.
By next week the violets will be blooming.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain.
What was it actually about?

Think about what it is that music is trying to say.
It was something like that.
~Mary Oliver “Drifting” from Blue Horses

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
~Jane Kenyon “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”

This morning’s drizzly walk
and every surface is baptized
with gentle, loving sprinkles from God.
It reminds us how visible is our holiness;
His covering grace makes us free.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Page After Page

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open—that one
and that—and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read—these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.
~Linda Pastan “The Bookstall” from Carnival Evening

…for people who love books and need
To touch them, open them, browse for a while,
And find some common good––that’s why we read.
Readers and writers are two sides of the same gold coin.
You write and I read and in that moment I find
A union more perfect than any club I could join:
The simple intimacy of being one mind.
     Here in a book-filled sun-lit room below the street,
     Strangers––some living, some dead––are hoping to meet.
~Garrison Keillor 

You know who you are.

You are the person who stockpiles stacks of books
on the bedside table and next to your favorite chair.

The person who sacrifices sleep to read
just one more page.

The person who reads the cereal box when
nothing else is available near the breakfast table.

The girl who falls into an uncovered manhole
walking down a busy street while reading.

The objects of your affection may be
as precious as the Book of Kells.

or as sappy as an Archie and Jughead
comic book.

It’s the words, the words,
that keep zipping by, telegraphing

an urgent message: What’s next?
What’s next?
~Lois Edstrom “Bookworm” from Almanac of Quiet Days

Most of my life has been a reading rather than a writing life. For too many decades, I spent most of my time reading scientific and medical journals, to keep up with the changing knowledge in my profession. Even as a retired physician, I try to spend an hour a day reading medical articles but now have the time to dabble in books of memoir, biography, poetry and the occasional novel.

As a reader, I am no longer a stranger to the author or poet whose words I read. In a few instances, I’ve had the honor and privilege to meet my favorite authors in real life and to interact with them on line. Some are friends on the page as well as in my life.

I am no longer a stranger to many of you who read my words here on Barnstorming every day – I have been able to meet a number of you over the years. There is no greater privilege than to share our stories with one another.

No matter where I discover books – in an independent bookstore, in a little free library standing along the roadside, or inside the world’s treasured libraries filled with books of antiquity – I seek out the privileged sanctuary of turning page after page written by those who graciously give me a glimpse of their inner world.

If librarians were honest,
they would say, No one
spends time here without being
changed. Maybe you should
go home. While you still can.
~Joseph Mills from “If Librarians Were Honest”

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Write What You Wish

barnstormingblog4 Comments

I loved you before I was born.
It doesn’t make sense, I know.

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.
And I’ve lived longing 
for your ever look ever since.
That longing entered time as this body. 
And the longing grew as this body waxed.
And the longing grows as the body wanes.
The longing will outlive this body.

I loved you before I was born.
It doesn’t make sense, I know.

Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.
And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant.
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. 
And my share of time has been nothing 
but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. 
Your face fleeing my ever
kissing it firmly once on the mouth.

In longing, I am most myself, rapt,
my lamp mortal, my light 
hidden and singing. 

I give you my blank heart.
Please write on it
what you wish. 
~Li-Young Lee “I loved you before I was born”

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
~e.e cummings “[i carry your heart with me (i carry it in]”

if everything happens that can’t be done
(and anything’s righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there’s nothing as something as one

one hasn’t a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don’t grow)
one’s anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we come who)
one’s everyanything so

so world is a leaf so a tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now i love you and you love me
(and books are shuter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there’s somebody calling who’s we

we’re anything brighter than even the sun
(we’re everything greater
than books
might mean)
we’re everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we’re alive)
we’re wonderful one times one
~e.e.cummings “if everything happens that can’t be done”

My heart is no longer blank because I carry your heart in mine. Over 44 years ago I handed my heart to you, trusting you to write whatever you wished.

And you handed me yours.

Over the decades, our story has poured forth. There is still more to come.

Even before we were born, it was clear: we’re wonderful one times one…

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly