There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone. ~Sara Teasdale “There Will Come Soft Rains”
…one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation. By a tremendous heave of the spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into the rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke. Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
Light wakes us – there’s the sun climbing the mountains’ rim, spilling across the valley, finding our faces. It is July, between the hay and harvest, a time at arm’s length from all other time, the roads ragged with meadowsweet and mallow, with splays of seedheads, slubbed and coarse, rough linen. The fields above the house, clotted with sheep all spring, are empty now and froth with flowering grasses, still in the morning light. Birds move around the leafy fields, the leafy garden.
It is the time to set aside all vigil, good or ill, to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention as dandelions let seedlings to the wind. Wake with the light. Get up and go about the day and watch its surfaces that brighten with the sun.
And later, when the light is drowsed and heavy go find the burdened fruit trees where the shade lies splashed and opened-out across the ground. Spread over it a quilt worn soft by other bodies, then curl and fall down into sleep at light.
Awaken to a world of long, loose grass-stems, and leaves above, and birds, breaking out of the leaves. ~Kerry Hardie from “Sleep in Summer”
Saying good-bye to July last week meant admitting summer is already half-baked and so are we–
we who are still doughy, not nearly done enough.
The rush to autumn is breathless. We want to hold on tight to our longish days, fall asleep in the grasses, endure sweaty nights for just a little while longer…
Please, oh please grant us unending light and steady us for the task of getting ready for letting go.
A new series of summer photo notecards from our farm is now available as a thank you gift to you for your financial support of Barnstorming — details here
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Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers.
Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions. ~Carl Sandburg “Under the Harvest Moon”
I mistake the sound of a recycling cart hitting the curb
for the latch of our gate and picture him instantly:
my father stumbling into the light of the backyard
to shoot himself.
I’d been looking at the fruit trees and the fire pit,
the loose board of the old fence in the wind.
I’d been thinking of how lost you’d have to be
to believe you knew everything there was to know
about yourself. And now this sound
I mistake for my father going through with it: one
I might hear or see or smell something completely benign and insignificant, but my brain processes it differently, its similarity to past memory or experience bringing it front and center and real again.
Often it is a song, or a smell, or a date on the calendar. It can be an unexpected, sudden sound, like a slammed door or a recorded voice or photo from long ago.
This can lead to time travel back to that previous moment in time, with the feeling of being right there again.
It can be a lovely memory, warm and comforting, or it can be a total nightmare I never want to remember or reexperience.
When it happens to me, to distract from the distress it can cause, I instead admire the stickiness of my stored memories, how powerful chemical connections are between my body and my feelings.
There is poignancy in how I relive those moments of past joy and struggles, trying to capture in words what just happened, all the while knowing, for the rest of my days, some questions will forever remain unanswered.
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“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”
There was again a division among the Jews because of these words.Many of them said, “He has a demon, and is insane; why listen to him?” Others said, “These are not the words of one who is oppressed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?”
At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter,and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon.So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”
Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep.My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.I and the Father are one.”
The Jews picked up stones again to stone him.Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?”The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me;but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands.
He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. And many came to him. And they said, “John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.” And many believed in him there. John 10: 17-42
Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not closed before. His breath (so slight it seems no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw, he dreams, hearing no music from his other spheres. Breath, mouth, ears, eyes he is curtailed who overflowed all skies, all years. ~Luci Shaw from “Mary’s Song”from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
When, in the cavern darkness, Jesus opened his small, bleating mouth (even before his eyes widened to the supple world his lungs had sighed into being), did he intuit how hungrily the lungs gasp? Did he begin, then, to love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out through the portals of tissue to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating? And how, fueled by air, the dazzling blood tramps the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks, corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails?
Bottle of the breath of God, speaking in stories, shouting across wild, obedient water, his voice was stoppered only by inquisition, unfaith and anguish. Did he know that he would, in the end, leak all his blood, heave a final groan and throw his breath, oxygen for the world, back to its Source before the next dark cave? ~Luci Shaw“Breath” from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
Greater than all – Creator of breath and sky and dust – yet came to us as helpless baby.
He who is the air we need – resides in our cells, our blood, our lungs, our heart.
He who lays down His life for us – then picks it up again – we are made in His image.
Listen for Him – watch Him change the sky – know He fills us wholly with His Words and Breath.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
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I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure — if it is a pleasure — of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one — a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table — trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna.
There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna,
rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia,
when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend
under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandana
sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole.
That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me.
Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,
even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame. ~Billy Collins Fishing On The Susquehanna In July
The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur—
….and August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light In which everything is meant for you And nothing need be explained;
I live a quiet life in a quiet place. There are many experiences not on my bucket list that I’m simply content to just imagine others doing.
I’m not a rock climber or a zip liner nor willing to jump out of an airplane. I won’t ride a horse over a four foot jump nor race one around a track. Not for me waterskis or unicycles or motorcycles.
I’m grateful there are adventurers who seek out the extremes of life so the rest of us can admire their courage and applaud their explorations.
My imagination is powerful enough, thanks to the words and pictures of others – sometimes too vivid.
I contentedly explore the corners of my quiet places, both inside and outside, to see what I can build from what’s here.
When the light is just right, what I see in my mind seems ready to spring right out of the frame.
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When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it. ~Boris Pasternak
‘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”
Years ago, a young woman I’d been treating for depression for several weeks in my clinic called unexpectedly on a Friday afternoon and canceled an upcoming appointment for the following Monday and did not reschedule.
The receptionist sent me a message as was our policy for patients who “cancel and do not reschedule.” It gave me a bad feeling that she was turning her back on her treatment plan and I was uneasy about the upcoming weekend without knowing what was going on with her.
I could have just put on my coat and headed home at the end of that long Friday after a very stressful work week and even more stressful year. I was discouraged about many aspects of my clinic work load and my after-hours responsibilities only seemed to get heavier. I was frustrated at how ineffectively I was communicating to administrative supervisors about the need for change.
I was ready to quit and walk away.
Even so, in a moment of clarity about my role and commitment to those I was responsible for, I called my patient to find out how she was doing. She didn’t answer her phone.
I mulled over my options. Protocol was to call the police to go to her address for a “well-being” check. I looked up her apartment address and decided instead to drive the few blocks to get there.
As I approached her door, I could hear someone moving around in her apartment, but she ignored my knocks and my voice and when I tried to open the door, it was locked.
So I stayed right there, talking to her through the door for about 15 minutes, letting her know I wasn’t leaving until she opened up the door. I finally told her she could decide to open the door or I would call 911 and ask the police to come to make sure she was okay. She then unlocked the door, tears streaming down her face. She had been drinking heavily, with liquor bottles strewn around on the floor. She admitted an intent to overdose on aspirin and vodka. The vodka was already consumed but the unopened aspirin bottle was in her hand.
I was the last person she expected to see at her door.
Miraculously, the inpatient mental health unit at the local hospital had an open bed. I told my patient that we could save time and hassle by heading over there together right then and there, and avoid the emergency room chaos and delay, and the possibility of an involuntary detainment.
She agreed to come with me and be admitted voluntarily for stabilization. When I went to the hospital to see ger the next day, she greeted me with a hug and thanked me for not giving up on her when she had given up on herself.
In sobriety, her eyes were brighter and she was more hopeful. She never expected anyone to care enough to come knock on her door when she was at her lowest point. It was the start of her climb out of her pain and depression.
Four years later, a small card arrived in my clinic mailbox on another most challenging work day from an unfamiliar address two thousand miles away. The name looked vaguely familiar to me but when I opened and read the contents, this time it became the knock on the door to get my attention, to focus the beating of my heart on what was most important – not the stresses of my work place — and it was my turn to let tears flow:
“Dear Doctor,
I am not sure if you will remember me considering you see a number of patients daily; however, I am a patient whose life you changed in the most positive way. I never truly THANKED YOU for listening to me and hearing my silent words of grief and hearing my cries for help. If it had not been for you, had you not knocked on my door, I would not be writing this letter to you today. I don’t know exactly what to say to the person who saved me from hurting myself fatally. You were a stranger in my life, but a dear friend in my time of need. THANK YOU, for everything that you did for me. You have a permanent place in my heart, you have given my spirit hope, you have reminded me that a life is worth living. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sincerely, L_____”
Somehow I had the sense that I needed to go knock on her door because I was keeping my word to take care of her at her lowest point. I had the stubbornness to stay put until she responded, and most of all, I’m appreciative for her gracious note letting me know it made a difference.
When I needed it the most, she made a difference for me that kept me on the job for another twenty years.
With her letter, she knocked, oh so gently, on my own locked door. I opened it, amazed that someone cared enough to let me know I kept my word.
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Hours and hours of taffy pulled and stretched to the furthest reaches of neighborhood lawns, universe of grasses cool and tickling, cushions for our bodies somersaulting and cartwheeling, tagging you’re it, while somewhere above us
the dimmer switch of Heaven would be turning down to lavender rose and deeper rose, and then the voices of the mothers streaming in through the darkening air to come home, come home. ~Andrea Potos “Summer, Childhood” from Her Joy Becomes
Once when we were playing hide-and-seek and it was time to go home, the rest gave up on the game before it was done and forgot I was still hiding. I remained hidden as a matter of honor until the moon rose. ~Galway Kinnell “Hide-and-Seek 1933” from Strong Is Your Hold.
We all long for home.
As the day wanes, the sky dims to pastels, the breezes pick up, I want to be called home: to warmth, to a good evening meal, to hugs and cozy bed.
No matter what excitement exists outside the four walls of home, I am eager for the comfort of finding my way home.
In the villages and towns all across Japan, there is a traditional folk song played daily in the early evening over loudspeakers in the streets – a reminder to the children of the neighborhood that it is time to give up their games and head home. They stream out of the parks and streets, each to their own house or apartment.
The song that thousands of U.S. soccer fans belted out after the World Cup soccer games was “Take me home, country roads.”
Last night, as I left an evening meeting at our local homeless mission shelter, I passed through the huge room housing over a hundred sleeping people on cots and floor mattresses. The overhead lights had been dimmed, each person safe, warm, fed, and welcome – no longer invisible and hidden away in the woods or alleys.
May we all know how it is to be welcomed home, when overwhelming darkness comes, knowing the Light always returns.
~Lustravit lampade terras~ (He has illumined the world with a lamp) The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter. – Blaise Pascal from “Miscellaneous Writings”
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled to leave the house and search for what might lift me back to what I had fallen away from, I stood by the shore waiting. I had walked in the silent woods: the trees withdrew into their secrets. Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray. Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies afloat on their element as I was not on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied. But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again to linger, to look North before nightfall—the expanse of calm, of calming water, last wafts of rose in the few high clouds. And was rewarded: the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying widewinged toward me, settled just offshore on his post, took up his vigil. If you ask why this cleared a fog from my spirit, I have no answer. ~Denise Levertov “A Reward” from Evening Train
Flee for a while from your tasks, hide yourself for a little space from the turmoil of your thoughts. Come, cast aside your burdensome cares, and put aside your laborious pursuits. For a little while give your time to God, and rest in him for a little while. Enter into the inner chamber of your mind, shut out all things save God and whatever may aid you in seeking God; and having barred the door of your chamber, seek him. ~Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment … a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present… ~Wendell Berry from Hannah Coulter
There were long days during my doctoring years when I would be near tears, physically spent, too fried to keep listening, problem solving, comforting.
I needed to feel something other than needed. I needed neediness myself — a sorry place to be for a physician and healer.
Of course it had happened before, many times: middle of the night mothering a vomiting child, middle of the night mothering a frail mother, middle of the night reassuring a frightened patient, middle of the night worried about the state of the world.
Yet morning always comes because God has never left, maybe not bright and shining and wondrous, maybe still hidden behind a fog, maybe not hidden at all but waiting inside my muddled thoughts –
I found if I gently closed the door to all that is not God, I would find Him looking for me and all would become clear.
Text by George Matheson: O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, That in thy ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be.
O Joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be.
When the dawn O’er hill and dale Throws her bright veil, Oh, think of me!
When the laugh With silver sound Goes echoing round, Oh, think of me!
When the rain With starry showers Fills all the flowers, Oh, think of me!
When the wind Sweeps along, Loud and strong, Oh, think of me!
When the earth Sleeping sound Swings round and round, Oh, think of me!
When the night With solemn eyes Looks from the skies, Oh, think of me!”
-Frances Anne Kemble
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. ~Annie Dillard from The Force That Drives the Flower
What inference might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works? An inordinate fondness for beetles. The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other. ~ J.B.S. Haldane, British biologist
Indeed, we stranded folk do encounter a God who saves us by flipping us back onto our feet as we lie helplessly waving our arms and legs in the air, so stuck and pitiful.
God knows all about the helplessness of suffering and hears our cry for mercy.
Once we are righted back to our feet, we walk forth forever changed – restored to the world, ready to help anyone we encounter who finds themselves stuck upside down in their misery.
When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles… …they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle. ~ Dr. Seuss from Fox in Socks
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At dusk, everything blurs and softens. From here out over the long valley, the fields and hills pull up the first slight sheets of evening, as, over the next hour, heavier, darker ones will follow.
Quieted roads, predictable deer browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s herd of heifers, the kitchen lights starting in many windows. On horseback I take it in, neither visitor nor intruder, but kin passing, closer and closer to night, its cold streams rising in the sugarbush and hollow.
Half-aloud, I say to the horse, or myself, or whoever: let fire not come to this house, nor that barn, nor lightning strike the cattle. Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights of the rooms convey what they seem to.
And who is to say it is useless or foolish to ride out in the falling light alone, wishing, or praying, for particular good to particular beings, on one small road in a huge world?
The horse bears me along, like grace, making me better than what I am, and what I think or say or see is whole in these moments, is neither small nor broken. For up, out of the inscrutable earth, have come my body and the separate body of the mare: flawed and aching and wronged. Who then is better made to say be well, be glad,
or who to long that we, as one, might course over the entire valley, over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace of flight, who presses against her breast, in grief and tenderness, the whole weeping body of the world? ~ Linda McCarriston, “Riding Out at Evening” fromTalking Soft Dutch
photo by Emily Vander Haak
On this, my 72nd birthday, I pray for this troubled world, reminding myself: be well, be glad…
I’m still here by the grace of God who carries not just me on His back through each day, but all earthly burdens.
I pray like a bird embracing the air which lifts its wings, tenderly holding to its breast a soaring freedom to transcend the weeping world.
I have seen so much goodness over 72 years, sometimes through tears of sorrow. I know there will be more joy and sadness before I’m done.
I am grateful, so very grateful to have lived all these years seeing tears shed, then dried, learning how love heals, knowing the only thing to last forever is God’s covenant promise to always carry us home.
photo by Brandon Dielemanphoto by Brandon Dieleman
video by Peter Tamminga
Whilst the world is weeping, let us do our bit. We have the time to sympathise, to listen and to sit. No needless thoughts, of the things we cannot do. But appreciate all the good bits and look at them anew.
The warmth and comfort of our homes, the food we have to eat. The family and friends we have, although we cannot meet. The village that we live in, and the community we share. So precious to us right now, so sit and think and care.
Whilst the world is full of sadness, anxiety and pain, It’s hard to imagine our lives ever carefree again. But nothing lasts forever, the clouds will always clear. Let’s heal the world with love, so the sunshine can appear. ~Sandra Rickman
Lyrics: Drop, drop, slow tears, and bathe those beauteous feet, which brought from heaven the news and Prince of Peace. Cease not, wet eyes, his mercies to entreat; to cry for vengeance sin doth never cease. In your deep floods drown all my faults and fears; nor let his eye see sin, but through my tears.
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