Category: gratitude

End of September

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it rained in my sleep
and in the morning the fields were wet

I dreamed of artillery
of the thunder of horses

in the morning the fields were strewn
with twigs and leaves

as if after a battle
or a sudden journey

I went to sleep in the summer
I dreamed of rain

in the morning the fields were wet
and it was autumn
~Linda Pastan “September”

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I can choose to fight the inevitable march of time with sighs and sorrows,
thus arm myself with sour bitterness for what is no more,

or I can flow unmoved for as long as I can stay afloat,
only passively aware of the passage of all around me,

or I can smile with awaking each morning, whether to sun or wind or rain,
grateful I’ve been given one more day to get it right,

or at least to care enough to try.

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What Endures

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I want to remember us this way—
late September sun streaming through
the window, bread loaves and golden
bunches of grapes on the table,
spoonfuls of hot soup rising
to our lips, filling us
with what endures.
~Peter Pereira from “A Pot of Red Lentils”

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saturdaylight

I cherish the moments that are most basic, plain, and simple and have the best chance of happening again.  I’m not talking about exotic travels, nor the extravagant meal out, nor the once in a lifetime experience. My most cherished moments are everyday, and I store them up to fill the decades full.

Most cherished of all is “that look” that says “I want to look into your eyes forever and get lost there.”

I am lucky enough to know what that feels like.  I get that butterfly in the stomach feeling anytime it happens.  My husband held my eyes with his from across a room early in our relationship, and over thirty five years later, he still holds them when he looks at me, even over bowls of soup at the kitchen table.

And I look at him just that way as well.  The eyes say what words cannot.  The eyes don’t lie.  The eyes never change even though the years bring gray hair and crow’s feet.

It is what endures. I want to look at you forever, just like this, just as you are, wherever you are because of who you are.

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Thirty Five Years Ago Today

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Before God and this gathering, I vow from my heart and spirit that I will be your wife/husband for as long as we both shall live.

I will love you with faithfulness, knowing its importance in sustaining us through good times and bad.

I will love you with respect, serving your greatest good and supporting your continued growth.

I will love you with compassion, knowing the strength and power of forgiveness.

I will love you with hope, remembering our shared belief in the grace of God and His guidance of our marriage.

“And at home, by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be–and whenever I look up, there will be you.”

(our wedding vows for our September 19, 1981 wedding at First Seattle Christian Reformed Church — the last line adapted from Thomas Hardy’s  “Far From the Madding Crowd”)

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I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you.

~Wendell Berry from The Country of Marriage

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natetomomi122414

Thirty five years ago today we became one story, a story still being told.
What joy it is to know you and be known by you!
May our story have many more chapters celebrating the poetry of life together, with a minimum of plot twists and cliffhangers.

We’ll trust the Author who touches us with Words as tenderly as we touch each other.
It is bliss to love and be loved from the first page to the last.

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A Silken Ladder

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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 “Natural History”

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No matter where I go to complete farm chores this time of year, I’m getting a face full of spider web and often a spider or two or three in my hair.  The spinners are very busy in the night dropping from rafters and branches, leaping courageously into uncharted territory with only their thread as rescue cable.

I am not so brave as they, nor as diligent.  Instead, I’m lollygagging in the art gallery of their fine work,  simply appreciating the abundant crop of silken ladders and hammocks, while trying not to destroy them.

I’m drawn back morning after morning to see what they’ve caught and how well they endure.  As long as I keep my face out of their masterpiece, all is well.

All is well.

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Incomprehensible Tangles

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I had been told how the old-time weavers, all the while they were making their beautiful and intricate patterns, saw no more than the backs of their shawls. Nothing was visible to them but a tangle of colored threads. They never saw the design they were creating until they took the finished fabric from their looms.

The parallel to the mortal lot is plain. Human experience appears to us – as the shawls did to the weavers – to be no more than incomprehensible tangles of colored threads, whereas in fact life represents the ordered threads in a great design – the design being woven daily on the loom of eternity.
~Ernest Gordon from Miracle on the River Kwai

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“Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted,
I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown.”
~Corrie Ten Boom in My Heart Sings

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What does it say about me that I’ve covered the back of countless embroidery projects so the tangles are no longer visible?  There is a sense of shame in that hiddenness of the messy side of existence, the not wanting to admit how really chaotic life is at times.

Yet out of the incomprehensible comes beauty.  Out of the mess comes order and harmony. What appears knotted and tangled and makes no sense becomes grace on our heads, like a crown.

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Let Me Remember

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danfield
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Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
 
The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.
 
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.
 
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.
~Sara Teasdale “September Midnight”
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When time stands still,
and it does, for an instant
before moving on, relentless,
I balance barely on that moment~
tipping backward to what has been,
leaning forward to what will be,
and forgetting this, now, here
until I look long into your eyes
and know you too are
now, here, this-
locked together,
leaning in
so we won’t fall
as winter comes,
so we will remember.
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Get On With Work

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There were two ways to live: get on with work,
redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).
In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
~Rachel Hadas from “The End of Summer”
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I did not grow up in a household that took time off.  Time was redeemed by work, and work was noble and honorable and proved we had a right to exist.
Vacation road trips were rare and almost always associated with my father’s work.  When he came home from his desk job in town, he would immediately change into his farm clothes and put in several hours of work outside, rain or shine, light or dark.  My mother did not work in town while we were children, but worked throughout her day in and outside the house doing what farm wives and mothers need to do: growing, hoeing, harvesting, preserving, washing, cleaning, sewing, and most of all, being there for us.
As kids, we had our share of chores that were simply part of our day as work was never done on a farm. When we turned twelve, we began working for others: babysitting, weeding, barn and house cleaning, berry picking.  I have now done over fifty years of gainful employment – there were times I worked four part-time jobs at once because that was what I could put together to keep things together.
I wish there had been more times I had taken a few moments to be more like the cows I see meandering, tranquil and unconcerned, in the surrounding green pastures. Part of every day now I pull myself away from the work to be done, the work that is always calling and staring me in the face, and try a different way to redeem my time: to notice, to record, to observe, to appreciate beauty that exists in the midst of chaos and cataclysm.
Life isn’t all about non-stop labor, yet we get on with our work because work is about showing up when and where we are needed. Not being cows, we may feel we have no choice in the matter. Just maybe, like cows, we can manage to slow down,  watch what is happening around us, and by chewing our cud, keep contemplating and digesting whatever life feeds us, the sweet and the sour.
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And the Eyes Have It

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Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
~Theodore Roethke “Root Cellar”

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I tug on the handle of the heavy root cellar cover to lift it to one side in order to descend the steps to the underground room that serves as a year round natural refrigerator on our farm.  At the bottom of the stairs, I open the thick sealed door to permit a shaft of sunlight to illuminate the inner darkness–there is always a moment of wondering what I might find on the other side in such a mysterious place.  A rush of cool earthen air blows back at me as if displaced by the light that has rushed in.  Until I snap on the lights, it is as secret as a womb harboring its precious cargo.  This place smells of dirt and moisture–the lifeblood of the fruits and roots that tarry here until it is finally their turn to be brought up into the light.  Potatoes, onions, apples, pears, nuts all resting and waiting, as if suspended in time.

It has been awhile since my last visit.  As the lights blink on, I blink too in unbelief.  There had been a startling transformation, as time no longer stands still as it had through the winter.  Long white arms, almost waving with enthusiasm, were reaching out from the potato bin in a desperate searching plunge through the blackness.   In this dark place, their blind eyes must sense a better place and have set out on a mission to get there.  The naked shoots are so entangled one with the other, it feels voyeuristic, as if I were witnessing something private and personal.

I gather them up,  apologetic for causing them a moment’s doubt about their destiny.  A trench must be dug, so they are placed gently at the base with shoots pointed toward the sky, and the dirt swept over them in a burial that is more commencement than coda.

And so the eyes have it, having reached for a light not seen but sensed.

…even the dirt kept breathing a small breath…

Was blind, but now can see.

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Tomorrows Less Long Than Today

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dandyglow1

“Let me enjoy this late-summer day of my heart while the leaves are still green and I won’t look so close as to see that first tint of pale yellow slowly creep in. I will cease endless running and then look to the sky ask the sun to embrace me and then hope she won’t tell of tomorrows less long than today. Let me spend just this time in the slow-cooling glow of warm afternoon light and I’d think I will still have the strength for just one more last fling of my heart.”
– John Bohrn, Late August

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Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?
~Paul Harding

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There are times when all appears to be perishing, especially in the dying time of year when the world is drying up and blowing away like dust storms.   The obituary pages predominate in the paper, accompanying an overload of bad news, mass shootings and suicide bombings.  All appears to be perishing with no relief or hope.

Even the leaves are bleeding red.

But it is the waning light and shortening days coloring my view like smoky haze in the sky painting a sunset deep orange.  Darkness is temporary and inevitably helpless; it can never overcome the light of all things made.

Life persists in the midst of perishing because of the cataclysm of a loving and bleeding God dying as sacrifice.  Nothing, nothing can ever be the same.

“God goes where God has never gone before.”
~ Kathleen Mulhern in Dry Bones

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Striking the Balance

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Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.
Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.
Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance
because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.
~Blaise Pascal

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We yearn for perfection,
to be flawless and faultless,
unblemished,
aiming for symmetry,
straight and smooth.

Life serves up something
far different
and our eye searches
for what is broken like us:
to find the cracks,
scratches and damage,
whether it is in
a master’s still life portrait
replete with crawling flying insects
and broken blossoms,
or in the not so still life
of those around us.

Somehow Christ bridges
Himself between God and us,
becoming a walkway for the wretched.

In the beginning we were created
unblemished,
image bearers of perfection.
No longer.
We bear witness to brokenness
with our shattered lives,
fragile minds and weakening bodies.
It is our leaks and warts
that stand out now.

To restore
our lost relationship with Him,
Christ strikes the balance;
He hung broken to mend us,
to lift and carry us across the gap,
binding us to Him
forever.

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Still Life With Flowers–Jan Huysum

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