Category: contentment

Good Things in Abundance

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There was an entire aspect to my life that I had been blind to — the small, good things that came in abundance.
~Mary Karr from The Art of Memoir

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
~Thornton Wilder, quotes from “Our Town”

The smell of baking bread, smooth floured hands,
butter waiting to be spread with blackberry jam,
and I realize, this is no small thing.
These days spent confined,
I am drawn to life’s ordinary details,
the largeness of all we can do
alongside what we cannot.
The list of allowances far outweighs my complaints.
I am fortunate to have flour and yeast, a source of heat,
not to mention soft butter, the tartness of blackberries
harvested on a cold back road.
A kitchen, a home, two working
hands to stir and knead,
a clear enough head to gather it all.
Even the big toothy knife feels miraculous
as it grabs hold and cracks the crust.
~Ellen Rowland “No Small Thing”

The words from “Our Town” written over 80 years ago still ring true:
our country a Great Depression of the economy then –
now we stagger under a Great Depression of the spirit.

Despite being more connected electronically, we are actually more divisive than ever, many feeling estranged from family, friends, faith.

Some less economically secure,
yet many emotionally bankrupt.

May we be more conscious of our abundance –
our small daily treasures.

God knows we need Him.
He cares for us, even when
we turn our faces away from Him.

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

My deep gratitude goes to you
who visit here once in awhile, or daily.
Thank you to those who let me know
the small and the good I share with you
makes a difference.

I’m right here,
alongside you in joint Thanksgiving
to our Creator and Preserver.

Many blessings today and always,
Emily

Let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

CHORUS:There’s a gathering of spirits
There’s a festival of friends
And we’ll take up where we left off
When we all meet again

I can’t explain it
I couldn’t if I tried
How the only things we carry
Are the things we hold inside

Like a day in the open
Like the love we won’t forget
Like the laughter that we started
And it hasn’t died down yet

Oh let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

Oh yeah now didn’t we
And don’t we make it shine
Aren’t we standing in the center of
Something rare and fine

Some glow like embers
Like a light through colored glass
Some give it all in one great flame

Throwing kisses as they pass

So let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

East of eden
But there’s heaven in our midst
And we’re never really all that far
From those we love and miss
Wade out in the water
There’s a glory all around
And the wisest say there’s a thousand ways
To kneel and kiss the ground

Oh let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

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Spoonful By Spoonful

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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…
~T.S. Eliot from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Tokyo Starbucks
photo of Edinburgh street, taken from Starbucks

I read recently that Starbucks’ business has suffered a loss of customers because of longer waits for service, and price increases for custom-ordered drinks that take more barista time to create.

I have been a pretty loyal coffee customer since Starbucks opened their first shop at Pike Street Market in Seattle over 50 years ago. I have visited countless Starbucks, including one in the bustling Narita Airport in Tokyo and an upstairs shop on a drizzly corner in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Over that time, I’ve graduated from brewed coffee from dark roast beans to dark roast decaf beans. There is a difference between 20 year old me and 70 year old me; caffeine is no longer my friend.

Over a decade ago, I was buying my usual twice a month supply of decaf coffee beans from my local Starbucks shop. The barista looked at me apologetically and said “have you heard?”. She said my favorite blend was being phased out and soon would no longer be available. 

This completely disturbed my decaffeinated equilibrium.

I immediately wrote to the “Starbucks Customer Care” website to see if they really do care about their customers.

How could it be that I became so attached to a particular brand, a specific taste, a daily routine that something so insignificant in the scheme of things should become so significant to me? 

I was upset at myself for being perturbed by this.

So what if I’m in a minority of coffee drinkers who can only handle decaf because caffeine now makes my pulse race and my hands jittery.

So what if I’m part of an aging cohort who may not be all that important to the corporate world bent on marketing the newest taste trend to the young and fashionable. 

So what if I’m ridiculously dependent on that 5:30 AM home brewed cup of coffee, not because of needing a drug to wake me up, but because it is something I have done happily for years,
measuring out my days spoonful by spoonful.

I am indeed grateful for routine, and in my own grudging way, I can learn to be grateful for change. I suppose I’ll could get used to another blend if I have to (please, not too “herbal” or “flowery”). 

But life will not be the same – the evenings, mornings, afternoons I know so well.

It’s just tough to adapt when each morning has been defined by “Decaffinated, yet rich and well-balanced with a dark cocoa texture and a roasty sweetness, like the flavor of a fire-roasted marshmallow after you pull off the darkened cap. To be enjoyed with chocolate truffles and dinner guests who stay late.”  

Wow, they pay people to write stuff like that.  

I guess it isn’t as appealing to say “to be cherished with morning oatmeal by farmer physician poets who can’t handle caffeine.”

Too bad. We’re actually a pretty nice bunch. 
All one of us.

Postscript: My favorite decaf blend was phased out but later reintroduced and became one of their best sellers. I guess we’re all getting older…

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The Welcome Grace of Air

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All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one—
not knowing even
that was what he did—
in the blowing
sounds in the dark,
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.
~Jane Hirshfield “Hope and Love” from The Lives of the Heart

photo by Josh Scholten

Whenever we noticed her
standing in the stream, still
as a branch in dead air, we
would grab our binoculars,
watch her watching,
her eye fixed on the water
slowly making its own way
around stumps, over a boulder,
under some leaves matted against
a fallen log. She seemed
to appear, stand, peer, then
lift one leg, stretch it, let
a foot quietly settle into the mud
then pull up her other foot, settle
it, and stare again, each step
tendered, an ideogram at the end
of a calligrapher’s brush.
Every time she arrived, we watched
until, as if she had suddenly heard
a call in the sky, she would bend
her knees, raise her wide wings,
and lift into the welcome grace
of the air, her legs extending
back behind her, wings rising
and falling elegant under the clouds:
For more than a week now
we have not seen her. We watch
the sky, hoping to catch her great
feathered cross moving above the trees.
~Jack Ridl “The Heron” from Practicing to Walk like a Heron

photo by Josh Scholten

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
~Jane Kenyon, from “Things” in Collected Poems

photo by Josh Scholten

I know what it is like to feel out of step with those around me, an alien in my own land – like a heron among Haflinger horses.

At times I wonder if I belong at all as I watch the choices others make.

I grew up this way, missing a connection I found only rarely, never quite fitting in, a solitary kid becoming a solitary adult. The aloneness bothered me, but not in a “I’ve-got-to-become-like-them” kind of way.

I went my own way, never losing hope.

Somehow misfits find each other. Through the grace and acceptance of others, I found a soul mate and community. Even so, there are times when the old feeling of not-quite-belonging creeps in and I wonder whether I’ll be a misfit all the way to the cemetery, placed in the wrong plot in the wrong graveyard, forgotten altogether.

We disparate creatures are made to be connected, sometimes with those who look and think and act like us, or more often with those who are something completely different. I’ll keep on the lookout for my fellow misfits, just in case there are others out there looking for company along this journey of grace we’re on.

photo by Josh Scholten
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It’s Heavy Work

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From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
~Kay Ryan “Spiderweb”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
~Walt Whitman “The Noiseless Patient Spider”

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I am stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I leap between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is hard and heavy work, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or some unaware creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is beautifully delicate and functional.

Sometimes it is blurry, full of holes, and ultimately useless. The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays and tears. It doesn’t last long.

But it was something I labored with purpose and intent to create.
And that effort makes it all worthwhile.

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The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White

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It Will Not Stay

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It will not stay.

But this morning we wake to pale muslin
stretched across the grass.
The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets
shrouded by clouds.
The Weber wears a dunce cap
and sits in the corner by the garage
where asters wrap scarves
around their necks to warm their blooms.
The leaves, still soldered to their branches
by a frozen drop of dew, splash
apple and pear paint along the roadsides.
It seems we have glanced out a window
into the near future, mid-December, say,
the black and white photo of winter
carefully laid over the present autumn,
like a morning we pause at the mirror
inspecting the single strand of hair
that overnight has turned to snow.
~Robert Haight “Early October Snow”

No snow here in the northwest yet this fall, but when we visited family in Denver last year during the last week of October, heavy snow had fallen overnight, then gone within a day.

It did not stay. But it did return.

I can catch a glimpse of the future if I pay attention. Sometimes it is too painful to acknowledge, so I quickly look away. That one thick white hair discovered at age 28 is now a full head of thin white at 70.

I need to be courageous about looking straight ahead through the veil of snow at how change takes place, whether it is the melting piles on the pumpkins, or the mop of white in the mirror topping my wrinkles.

And so it goes and so it goes…

It is as it is meant to be. It is as it must be.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

those white hairs…
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Let the Evening Come

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Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

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”

photo by Josh Scholten

We resist nightfall in our lives. We fear the dark.

I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment with the energy I feel with the dawn. But I know that the forward momentum of time inevitably will wind me down to twilight.

I thought of this poem today as many of us struggle with newly elected leadership, uncertain what it means for us short-term and long-term.

We are not alone in our need to catch our breath and be still.
Each of us is created in the image of God, no matter how we disagree. 

So let evening come, as it will – there is no stopping it –
our lungs filled with the breath of God, our Creator.

We will not be left comfortless.

Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.
~Robert Frost from “Acceptance”

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Finding Joy in Small Things

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It greets me again on some cold November evening
Crested with cherry and yellow hearted
A most magnificent leaf on the ground by the train station

Tuesday morning and the windows are foggy
My room is cold and my bed is warm
And it sings it’s bright hello in crisp morning sunlight

On the 9:36 to Euston I find it in a stranger
who can’t hold in his laugh, hand over mouth
Chuckling through his nose. He is wonderful.

Three old ladies outside a bistro chattering
Canyon laugh lines and bright lipstick
When they dimple at me, I return my biggest smile

And on Saturday I do the dishes at my sister’s house
Through the kitchen window the tall grass
On the mountainside dances in the amber evening

Something soft blooms in my chest in answer
To the cobweb glistening with dew, dragonflies,
The little yellow boat at Portnoo pier, darling and weathered

To mist below the hill and the first sip of a good cup of tea
My niece’s laugh and my father’s teaspoon collection
And that silk moth I saw sunsoaking on a hot afternoon and I know

It cannot all be luck. My days are threaded with joy
So small and featherlight, a breath against the wind.
Woven together in defiant splendour

These small things
And Your glory therein.
~Mary Clement Mannering “This Small Thing”

dragonfly wings photo by Josh Scholten

When cold, wet, dreary days are more gray than sunlit – even these November days still contain small things of joy.

The trick is to notice the simple threads through the day, sometimes unraveling but mostly weaving a story-telling tapestry.

I never want to forget to keep looking, even when my eyes feel heavy, my heart is weary and the news is consistently discouraging.

The small things of beauty are out there, woven together to cloak us in His glory.

photo of a windy day at Manna Farm from Nate Lovegren
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A Slow and Radiant Happening

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In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven’s paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven’s calm, they take each other’s arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down, the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that’s said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds
pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we’re here, I think it must
    be heaven.
~Elizabeth Spires from “In Heaven it is Always Autumn” from Now the Green Blade Rises

The Bench by Manet

We wander our autumn garden mystified at the passing of the weeks since seed was first sown, weeds pulled, peapods picked. It could not possibly be done so soon–this patch of productivity and beauty, now wilted and brown, vines crushed to the ground, no longer fruitful.

The root cellar is filling up, the freezer packed. The work of putting away is almost done.

So why do I go back to the now barren soil my husband so carefully worked, numb in the knowledge I will pick no more this season, feel the burst of a cherry tomato exploding in my mouth or the green freshness of a bean straight off the vine?

Because for a few fertile weeks, only a few weeks, the garden was a bit of heaven on earth, impermanent but a real taste nonetheless. 

We may have mistaken Him for the gardener when He appeared to us radiant, suddenly unfamiliar. He offered the care of the garden, to bring in the sheaves, to share the forever mercies in the form of daily bread grown right here and now.

When He says my name, I will know Him. 

And the light is golden.

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None of These

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Not only the leaf shivering with delight

No,

Not only the morning grass shrugging off the weight of frost

No,

Not only the wings of the crane fly consumed by fire

No,

Not only steam rising from the horse’s back

No,

Not only the sound of the sunflower roaring

No,

Not only the golden spider spinning

No,

Not only the cathedral window deep inside the raindrop

No,

Not only the door opening at the back of the clouds,

No,

Not only flakes of light settling like snow 

No,

Not only the sky as blue and smooth as an egg

No,

Not only these things

No,

But without you none of these things.
~Brian Patten “Not Only”

The world is more vivid and beautiful when I am with people I love. Being with family after months apart reminds me how much I am missing.

“And when my love for life is running dry, you come and pour yourself on me.” (Bread – “If”)

If only I could be two places at one time…

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To Walk Alongside

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One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.
~Mary Oliver “The Journey”

None of us can “mend” another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it.

Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.

What we can do is walk alongside the people we care about, offering simple companionship and compassion. And if we want to do that, we must save the only life we can save, our own.

Only when I’m in possession of my own heart can I be present for another in a healing, encouraging, empowering way. Then I have a gift to offer, the best gift I possess—the gift of a self that is whole, that stands in the world on its own two feet.
~Parker Palmer writing about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
~Eugene O’Neill

We are born hollering, suddenly set apart,
already aware of our emptiness
from the first breath,
each tiny air sac bursting
with the air of a fallen world~

The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether alveoli
or stomach
or synapses starving for understanding,
still hollering our loneliness
and heart break.

So we are mended
through our walk with others
who are also broken –
we patch up our gaps
by knitting the scraggly fragments
of lives lived together.
We become the crucial glue
boiled from gifted Grace,
all our holes
somehow made holy.

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