We who choose to surround ourselves with lives more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.
The life of a horse, often half our own, seems endless until one day. That day has come and gone for me, and I am once again within a somewhat smaller circle. ~ Irving Townsend from Separate Lifetimes
1996 photo of Noblesse with Chesna Klimek, taken by Norma Jenner
That day comes, yet not without warning.
Noblesse, our oldest Haflinger mare, nearing 29 years old, kept convincing me this past summer she was living her best life and was not too old to keep enjoying more time on this earth. She came running when I whistled and would be the first to greet me when I came to the barn for chores.
It wasn’t all rainbows and roses for her. I would see her dozing more frequently, walking slowly due to joint pain, and showing the hallmark signs of metabolic dysfunction. I debated about calling the vet clinic to schedule her euthanasia. But then she would look at me defiantly: not yet, not yet…
This morning when I went out to the barn, she was standing with her head down, atypical for such an extroverted bossy mare who usually demands that I attend to her first. Then, she startled me by dropping down to roll and then rolled again. Not eating, reaching around to bite at her flanks. She was clearly miserable.
I knew then this was the day.
Within the hour, thanks to a responsive vet and his assistant, she was pain-free and no longer facing a cold wet winter ahead.
It is a wistful goodbye to Noblesse, given that she was born on this farm and raised her foals here. She was the first American-born gold-rated mare in AHR inspection and classification. Except for brief times away for training and always part of our Haflinger display at our regional fair, it was right and fitting that she should breathe her last on this farm.
Our circle of aging Haflingers has just become smaller. Two are her sons.
The life of a horse seems endless, until one day. For Noblesse, that day was today.
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Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes. ~Raymond Carver “Rain”from All of Us
I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me to love the world, making it impossible to turn away completely, to shut it out completely over again– it is everywhere; when I close my eyes, birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses: you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth– why would you wound me, why would you want me desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope I would refuse to see that finally nothing was left to me, and would believe instead that you were left to me. ~Louise Glück “Vespers”
How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom
By mid-November, we begin to lose daylight by 4PM. There is no wistful lingering with the descent of evening; the curtain is pulled closed and it is dark — just like that.
I’m having difficulty adjusting to the loss of daylight this year. This is perplexing as the change of seasons is no mystery to me. I sense a new deprivation beyond the fact that shorter days are simply a part of the annual autumnal routine.
As if – something precious is being stolen away
as if – I have any claim to the light to begin with
as if – maybe I exist only to notice what ceases to exist.
So I am reminded: I know there is more beyond feeling loss and lost. I would do this all again, while feeling my way in the dark. I will cling to the promise of what comes next.
I’m ready to break into blossom rather than hiding from the rain, opening up to what light is left, instead of grumbling in the dark.
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Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows…
I try to remember when time’s measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay – how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures. ~Mary Oliver from Fall Song
To let your body love this world that gave itself to your care in all of its ripeness, with ease, and will take itself from you in equal ripeness and ease, is also harvest. And however sharply you are tested – this sorrow, that great love – it too will leave on that clean knife. ~Jane Hirshfield from “Ripeness” from “The October Palace”
What is left in the trees in November is crumbling away: bright while fading, dimpling and softening, composted in the rain.
Perhaps this describes me too.
More than just spicy residue dangling by a stem, let me still feed whoever is hungry, to thrive on what little I have left to offer.
Might I ripen a bit at harvest before the inevitable drop, to sleep enveloped by the ground.
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Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. ~Frederich Buechner
…the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.
No, those things all lie with… people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving. ~Billy Coffey from “The Heart of this Land”
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. ~Martin Luther
…as the land around turns rocky and hollow… I’d never suspected: every day, Although the nation is done for, I find new flowers. ~Donald Revell from “Election Year”
This morning I search for any hint of beauty trying its best to thrive in the rocky hollowed-out cracks of our foundation.
I look for something (anything) kind and gentle and hopeful to share here.
But we, the people, have chosen a vengeful meanness to rule us, to crush, bloody and fracture us apart.
I fear beauty and goodness have gone into hiding.
Even so, we are reminded of Words spoken again and again and again to a troubled world:
if only we can hear them for ourselves if only we can reassure one another to keep planting, growing, feeding and caring for one another
The Son came to be with us when we needed saving from ourselves, and will not abandon us:
do not be afraid do not be afraid do not be afraid
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Why shouldn’t we go through heartbreaks? Through those doorways God is opening up ways of fellowship with His Son. Most of us fall and collapse at the first grip of pain; we sit down on the threshold of God’s purpose and die away of self-pity… But God will not. He comes with the grip of the pierced hand of His Son and says, “Enter into fellowship with Me, arise and shine.” If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart. ~Oswald Chambers from “Ye are not your own” from My Utmost for the Highest
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. ~C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus. ~ Blaise Pascal
Everyone is created with a hole in their heart that elicits no murmur, doesn’t show up on scans nor is it visible in surgery. Yet we feel it, absolutely know it is there, and are constantly reminded of being incomplete.
Billions of dollars and millions of hours are spent trying to fill that empty spot in every imaginable and unimaginable way.
Nothing we try fills it wholly. Nothing we find fits it perfectly. Nothing on earth can ever be sufficient.
Certainly no elected official can heal this hole. They might make it even more gaping.
So we are born wanting, longing, yearning and searching; we live hungry, thirsty and needy.
Created with a hankering heart for God, we discover only He fits, fills and is sufficient. Only Someone with a beating heart like ours can know our hollow heart’s emptiness. It is His bleeding that stops us from hemorrhaging all we have in futile pursuits.
The mystery of the vacuum is this: how our desperation resolves and misery comforted by being made complete and whole through His woundedness.
Through His pierced limbs and broken heart, it is we who are made holy, our emptiness filled forever.
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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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She skimmed the yellow water like a moth, Trailing her feet across the shallow stream; She saw the berries, paused and sampled them Where a slight spider cleaned his narrow tooth. Light in the air, she fluttered up the path, So delicate to shun the leaves and damp, Like some young wife, holding a slender lamp To find her stray child, or the moon, or both. Even before she reached the empty house, She beat her wings ever so lightly, rose, Followed a bee where apples blew like snow; And then, forgetting what she wanted there, Too full of blossom and green light to care, She hurried to the ground, and slipped below. ~James Wright “My Grandmother’s Ghost” from Above the River: The Complete Poems
…now you have taught me (but how late) my lack. I see the chasm. And everything you are was making My heart into a bridge by which I might get back From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains You give me are more precious than all other gains. ~C.S. Lewis from “As the Ruin Falls”
Early one morning, we heard a sound, someone carefully pushing a door open, but both doors were closed. The air stirred. A whirring echoed through the room. That night we had left a small lamp on. In front of it, each time it orbited, the dark shape of a bird. ~Tina Barry from “Another Haunting” from I Tell Henrietta
when my father had been dead a week I woke with his voice in my ear I sat up in bed and held my breath and stared at the pale closed door
white apples and the taste of stone
if he called again I would put on my coat and galoshes ~Donald Hall “White Apples”
I saw my grandma’s ghost once.
She was the only grandparent I actually knew and who actually knew me — the others were lost before I was born or I was too young to realize what I had lost.
She had lived a hard life after her mother’s death when she was only 12, taking over the household duties for her father and younger brother while leaving school forever. She married too young to an abusive alcoholic, lost her first child to lymphoma at age 8 and took her three remaining children to safety away from their father. For a year, they lived above a seedy restaurant where she cooked seven days a week to make ends meet.
But there was grace too. The marriage somehow got patched together after Grandpa found God and sobriety – after his sudden death while sitting in church, Grandma’s faith never wavered. Her garden soil yielded beautiful flowers she planted and nurtured and picked to sell. Her children and grandchildren welcomed her many open armed visits and hugs.
She was busy planning her first overseas trip of a lifetime at age 72 when we noticed her eyes looked yellow. Only two weeks later she was bed-bound in unrelenting pain due to pancreatic cancer, gazing heaven-ward instead of Europe-bound. Her dreams had been dashed so quickly, she barely realized her itinerary and ultimate destination had unalterably changed.
I was nearly 16 at the time, too absorbed in my own teenage cares and concerns to really notice how quickly she was fading and failing like a wilted flower. Instead I was picking fights with my stressed parents, obsessing about taking my driver’s license driving test, distracted by all the typical social pressures of high school life.
Her funeral was unbearable for me as I had never really said goodbye – only one brief hospital visit when she was hardly recognizable in her anguish and jaundice. She looked so different, I hung back from her bedside. Regrettably, I didn’t even try to hold her hand.
Mere weeks after she had been lowered into the ground next to her husband and young daughter, she came back to me in a dream.
I was sleeping when the door opened into my dark bedroom, waking me as the bright hallway light pushed its way via a shimmering beam to my bed. My Grandma Kittie stood in my bedroom doorway, a fully recognizable silhouette backlit by the illumination. She silently stood there, looking at me.
Startled, I sat up in my bed and said to her, “Grandma, why are you here? You died. We buried you.”
She lifted her hands toward me in a gesture of reassurance and said:
“I want you to know I’m okay and always will be. You will be too.”
She then gave a little wave, turned and left, closing the door behind her. I woke suddenly with a gasp in my darkened bedroom and knew I had just been visited.
She hadn’t come to say goodbye or to tell me she loved me — I knew that already.
She had come to me, with the transient fragility of something with wings, floating gently back into the world to be my bridge. She blossomed in the light she brought with her.
Grandma came to mend my broken heart and plant it with peace.
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You’re in a better place I’ve heard a thousand times And at least a thousand times I’ve rejoiced for you
But the reason why I’m broken The reason why I cry Is how long must I wait to be with you
I close my eyes and I see your face If home’s where my heart is then I’m out of place Lord, won’t you give me strength To make it through somehow I’ve never been more homesick than now
Help me Lord cause I don’t understand your ways The reason why I wonder if I’ll ever know But, even if you showed me The hurt would be the same Cause I’m still here so far away from home
In Christ, there are no goodbyes And in Christ, there is no end
So I’ll hold onto Jesus With all that I have To see you again To see you again
And I close my eyes and I see your face If home’s where my heart is then I’m out of place Lord, won’t you give me strength To make it through somehow
Won’t you give me strength To make it through somehow Won’t you give me strength To make it through somehow I’ve never been more homesick than now ~Millard Bart Marshall
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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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The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock… a universe. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. ~Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
There is a yawning separation threatening us all right now as we peer over the frightening edge of another tight election.
Once again there is a fissuring gap between us.
People who have eaten at our tables, who were good friends, who we have worshiped alongside – became estranged. This separation was buoyed by blowing of the chill wind of politics where once there had been warmth and nurture and caring.
We disagreed then and continue to disagree. We no longer understand one another’s points of view.
How did we allow these gaps between us to develop? How do we close these fissures so something new and vital can grow? How can we stalk the gaps together?
Not one of us has the corner on the Truth; if we are honest with ourselves and each other, we cower together for safety in the cracks of this world, watching helplessly as the backside of God passes by, His face too holy for us to gaze upon.
He places us there together for our own good. I see you there alongside me.
We are weaker together when one side wins and the other loses. We are dependent together. We need to hold each other up as we look over the edge of the upcoming cliff.
Only His Word – nothing else – can fill the open gaping hollow before us. His Grace is great enough to fill every hole bridge every gap bring hope to the hopeless plant seeds for the future and restore us wholly to each other.
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Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brimful of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again tho’ cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago. ~Christina Rossetti “Echo”
The real world reverberates with echoes of our losses – so much in the news pulls us down every day. When filled with tears and sorrow, we try to retreat to the safety of our dreams rather than face fear and uncertainty.
But we can’t stay in our heads or give up hope.
There is too much the world needs from us.
Like sunlight on a stream, we become the promise of illumination of the dark depths. When doors remain closed to those who need help most, we are the key meant for the lock.
Love is that light and key. God equips us with the pulse and breath to make a difference to others. And we can make a difference: one word, one smile, one vote at a time.
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