Category: sadness

Where You Go, I Will Go: Constant and Changeable

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Light changes slowly with subtle words
such as cautious and determined,
marking a demarcation line across the horizon,
delineating between day and night
taking over the sky. Drakes in the wetlands
are excited by the transformation.

In daylight, the moon is a white wafer.
Perception only amazes
the participant who never notices
the daily occurrences with minor variations.

What difference are the blending shades,
clouds wheeling like hawks, the way light
haunches on the edge while day begins or ends.
There is always this anticipation of the differences,
and the end results are that our expectations are met—

not in color or uncertain times for the transfers
but in the way no two days begin or end the same.
For thousands of years, the universe has palpitated,
expanded, and contracted like a heart
with such restlessness we barely notice
what is plain to the eye: the universe is constant
and changeable. We barely break the surface
of observation, and when we do, we take for granted
the drakes will migrate when marshes are ice-tinged,
and the drakes will return when spring returns,
never considering it might be otherwise.
~Martin Willitts Jr., “Transformation” from Leave Nothing Behind

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
~Jane Kenyon “Otherwise”

No two days begin or end the same way.
It is my privilege to watch and take note.

I spent much of seven decades barely noticing, absorbed in all but what transpired right beneath my feet and over my head.

Now I take the time and effort to appreciate each day’s uniqueness and share what I see and hear and feel.

Yes, palpitations in the world and within me catch my breath.
There is expansion and contraction
and some moments of skipped beats.

The point is that the beat goes on.

I’ll never take transformation for granted again.
I welcome it, even as it focuses and fascinates and frightens me.
I am well aware, now ever aware,
it always could be otherwise.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

English translation:

Hear, smith of the heavens,
what the poet asks.
May softly come unto me
thy mercy.
So I call on thee,
for thou hast created me.
I am thy slave,
thou art my Lord.

God, I call on thee
to heal me.
Remember me, mild one,
most we need thee.
Drive out, O king of suns,
generous and great,
human every sorrow
from the city of the heart.

Watch over me, mild one,
most we need thee,
truly every moment
in the world of men.
Send us, son of the virgin,
good causes,
all aid is from thee,
in my heart.

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Where You Go, I Will Go: If Still in Darkness, Not in Fear

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‘Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.’ 
is. xlv. 15.

God, though to Thee our psalm we raise
No answering voice comes from the skies;
To Thee the trembling sinner prays
But no forgiving voice replies;
Our prayer seems lost in desert ways,
Our hymn in the vast silence dies.

We see the glories of the earth
But not the hand that wrought them all:
Night to a myriad worlds gives birth,
Yet like a lighted empty hall
Where stands no host or door or hearth
Vacant creation’s lamps appal.

We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King,
With attributes we deem are meet;
Each in his own imagining
Sets up a shadow in Thy seat;
Yet know not how our gifts to bring,
Where seek thee with unsandalled feet.

And still th’unbroken silence broods
While ages and while aeons run,
As erst upon chaotic floods
The Spirit hovered ere the sun
Had called the seasons’ changeful moods
And life’s first germs from death had won.

And still th’abysses infinite
Surround the peak from which we gaze.
Deep calls to deep and blackest night
Giddies the soul with blinding daze
That dares to cast its searching sight
On being’s dread and vacant maze.

And Thou art silent, whilst Thy world
Contends about its many creeds
And hosts confront with flags unfurled
And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds
And truth is heard, with tears impearled,
A moaning voice among the reeds.

My hand upon my lips I lay;
The breast’s desponding sob I quell;
I move along life’s tomb-decked way
And listen to the passing bell
Summoning men from speechless day
To death’s more silent, darker spell.

Oh! till Thou givest that sense beyond,
To shew Thee that Thou art, and near,
Let patience with her chastening wand
Dispel the doubt and dry the tear;
And lead me child-like by the hand;
If still in darkness not in fear.

Speak! whisper to my watching heart
One word—as when a mother speaks
Soft, when she sees her infant start,
Till dimpled joy steals o’er its cheeks.
Then, to behold Thee as Thou art,
I’ll wait till morn eternal breaks.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Nondum (Not Yet)”

There is great darkness right now in our country’s leadership, spilling shadows over the rest of the world.

Each day brings a new proclamation of presumed earthly power, exacting great cost to those who are most vulnerable and powerless.

Though it may seem God is silent, He is not.

God broods, as do parents who protect their offspring.
He hears the cries of His people who are harmed and helpless.
He will respond, and His children understand
we are still in the “not yet” of His kingdom on earth,
and we wait for His return to set all things right.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Lost Are Like This

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I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

 I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “I wake and feel the fell of dark”

Surfacing to the street from a thirty two hour hospital shift usually means my eyes blink mole-like, adjusting to searing daylight after being too long in darkened windowless halls.  This particular January day is different.   As the doors open, I am immersed in a subdued gray Seattle afternoon, with horizontal rain soaking my scrubs.

Finally remembering where I had parked my car in pre-dawn dark the day before, I start the ignition, putting the windshield wipers on full speed.  I merge onto the freeway, pinching myself to stay awake long enough to reach my apartment and my pillow.

The freeway is a flowing river current of head and tail lights.  Semitrucks toss up tsunami waves cleared briefly by my wipers frantically whacking back and forth.

Just ahead in the lane to my right, a car catches my eye — it looks just like my Dad’s new Buick.  I blink to clear my eyes and my mind, switching lanes to get behind.  The license plate confirms it is indeed my Dad, oddly 100 miles from home in the middle of the week.  I smiled, realizing he and Mom have probably planned to surprise me by taking me out for dinner.

I decide to surprise them first, switching lanes to their left and accelerating up alongside.  As our cars travel side by side in the downpour,  I glance over to my right to see if I can catch my Dad’s eye through streaming side windows.  He is looking away to the right at that moment, obviously in conversation.  It is then I realize something is amiss.  When my Dad looks back at the road, he is smiling in a way I have never seen before.  There are arms wrapped around his neck and shoulder, and a woman’s auburn head is snuggled into his chest.

My mother’s hair is gray.

My initial confusion turns instantly to fury.  Despite the rivers of rain obscuring their view, I desperately want them to see me.  I think about honking,  I think about pulling in front of them so my father would know I have seen and I know.  I think about ramming them with my car so that we’d perish all, unrecognizable, in an explosive storm-soaked mangle.

At that moment, my father glances over at me and our eyes meet across the lanes.  His face is a mask of betrayal, bewilderment and then shock, and as he tenses, she straightens up and looks at me quizzically.

I can’t bear to look any longer.

I leave them behind, speeding beyond, splashing them with my wake.  Every breath burns my lungs and pierces my heart.  I can not distinguish whether the rivers obscuring my view are from my eyes or my windshield.

Somehow I made it home to my apartment, my heart still pounding in my ears.  The phone rings and remains unanswered.

I throw myself on my bed, bury my wet face in my pillow and pray for sleep without dreams,
without secrets,
without lies,
without the burden of knowing a truth
I alone now knew
and wished I didn’t..

Postscript:
I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that day. My father never asked.
He divorced my mother, and was remarried quickly,
my mother and two families shattered as a result.
Ten years later, his second wife died due to a relentless cancer, and he returned to my mother, asking her forgiveness and wanting to remarry. Within months, he too was diagnosed with cancer and Mom nursed him through his treatment, remission, recurrence and then hospice.

We became a family again, not the same as before,
yet put back together for good reason – forgiving and forgiven.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Depth of His Wounds

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…by his wounds you have been healed.
1Peter 2:24b

The first time I saw him it was just a flash of gray ringed tail
disappearing into autumn night mist as I opened the back door
to pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch:
just another stray cat among many who visit the farm.

A few stay.

So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees,
a gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish,
watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses,
creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.

There was something in the way he held his head,
an oddly forward ear; a stilted swivel of the neck.
I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish.

He ran, the back of his head flashing red, scalp completely gone.

Not oozing, nor something new, but recent. A nearly mortal scar
from an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat.
This cat thrived despite trauma and pain, tissue still raw, trying to heal.

He had chosen to live; life had chosen him.

My first thought was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep
to end his suffering, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day, envisioning florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible
in the shadowlands of the barnyard.

Yet the scar did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.

As much as I want to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation,
I always greet him from a distance, a nod to his maimed courage,
through wintry icy blasts and four foot snow,
through spring rains and summer heat with flies.

His wounds remain unhealed, a reminder of his inevitable fate.

I never will stroke that silky fur,
or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knows how,
but still feed his daily fill,
as he feeds my need to know:
the value of a life so broken,
each breath taken filled with sacred air.

The depth of his wounds shows how much he still bleeds.

This is my only close photo of our wounded farm guest

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Even in the Wilderness

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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness ,
is like being commanded to be well when we are sick,
to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst,
to run when our legs are broken.
But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless.
Even in the wilderness-
especially in the wilderness –
you shall love him.   
~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember

The wilderness might be a distant peak far removed from anything or anyone, where there is bleak darkness.

The wilderness might be the darkest corner of the human heart we keep far away from anything and anyone. 

From my kitchen window on a clear day, I sometimes see a distant mountain wilderness, when the cloud cover moves away. 

During decades of perching on a round stool in clinic exam rooms,  I was given access to hearts lost in the wilderness many times every day.

Sometimes the commandment to love God seems impossible. We are too self-sufficient, too broken, too frightened, too wary to trust God with our love and devotion. 

Recognizing a diagnosis of wilderness of the heart is straight forward: despair, discouragement,disappointment, lack of gratitude, lack of hope. 

The treatment is to allow the healing power of the Father who sent His own Son to navigate the wilderness in our place.

He reaches for our bitter, wary, and broken hearts that beat within our bodies, to bring us home from the dark wilderness of our souls.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Waiting To Be Filled

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Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.
~Rudyard Kipling “Seal Lullaby”

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.
Psalm 139: 13-18

The call came in the middle of a busy night
as we worked on a floppy baby with high fever,
a croupy toddler whose breathing squeezed and squeaked,
a pale adolescent transfusing due to leukemia bleeding.

It was an anencephalic baby just born, unexpected, unwanted
in a hospital across town, and she needed a place to die.

Our team of three puzzled how to manage a baby without a brain–
simply put her in a room, swaddled, kept warm but alone?
Hydrate her with a dropper of water to moisten her mouth?
Offer her a taste of milk?

She arrived by ambulance, the somber attendants
leaving quickly, unnerved by her mewing cries.

I took the wrapped bundle and peeled away the layers
to find a plump full term baby, her hands gripping, arms waving
once freed;  just another newborn until I pulled off her stocking cap
and looked into an empty crater — only a brainstem lumped at the base.

No textbook pictures had prepared me
for the wholeness, the holiness of this living, breathing child.

Her forehead quit above the eyebrows with the entire skull missing,
tufts of soft brown hair fringed her perfect ears,
around the back of her neck.
Her eyelids puffy, squinting tight, seemingly too big
above a button nose and rosebud pink lips.

She squirmed under my fingers, her muscles strong, breaths coming steady despite no awareness of light or touch or noise.

Yet she cried in little whimpers, mouth working, seeking,
lips tentatively gripping my fingertip. A bottle warmed,
nipple offered, a tentative suck allowing tiny flow,
then, amazing,  a gurgling swallow.

Returning every two hours, more for me than for her, I picked her up
to smell the salty sweet scent of amnion still on her skin as she grew dusky.

Her breathing weakened, her muscles loosened, giving up her grip
on a world she would never see or hear or feel to behold
something far more glorious, as I gazed
into her emptiness, waiting to be filled.

(this poem has been published in Sarah Arthur‘s wonderful Lenten and Eastertide anthology Between Midnight and Dawn)

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Someplace We Never Dreamed of Going

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I came to your door
with soup and bread.
I didn’t know you
but you were a neighbor
in pain: and a little soup and bread,
I reasoned, never hurt anyone.

I shouldn’t reason.
I appeared the day
your divorce was final:
a woman, flushed with cooking
and talk, and you watched,
fascinated,
coiled like a spring.

You seemed so brave and lonely
I wanted to comfort you like a child.
I couldn’t of course.
You wanted to ask me too far in.

It was then I knew
it had to be like prayer.
We can’t ask
for what we know we want:
we have to ask to be led
someplace we never dreamed of going,
a place we don’t want to be.

We’ll find ourselves there
one morning,
opened like leaves,
and it will be all right.
~Kathleen Norris “Answered Prayer”

When I struggle with how to pray,
I fall back to asking for strength
to cope with whatever is to come,
rather than pray for what I hope won’t happen –
my prayer as someone terrified,
worried and weak.

How is it with God, in whom all things are possible,
even He asked for the cup to be taken,
knowing it would remain in His Hands.
His will
would be done,
even when terrified,
worried, and weary.

So instead of closing off,
as I would have done,
not wanting to go somewhere
I don’t want to be,
He opened up Himself
like a unfolding leaf,
the earth becoming His flesh,
His flesh one with the tree.

And it was all right.
It will always be
all right.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Mourning Bench

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…we all suffer.
For we all prize and love;
and in this present existence of ours,
prizing and loving yield suffering.
Love in our world is suffering love.

Some do not suffer much, though,
for they do not love much.
Suffering is for the loving.
This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.

Over there, you are of no help.
What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is.
I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation.

To comfort me, you have to come close.
Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

I wondered if 7:30 AM was too early to call her. As a sleep-deprived fourth year medical student finishing a long night admitting patients in the hospital, I selfishly needed to hear her voice.

I wanted to know how Margy was doing with the latest round of chemotherapy for breast cancer; I knew she was not sleeping well these days. She was wearing a new halo brace—a metal contraption that wrapped around her head like a scaffolding to secure her degenerating cervical spine from collapsing from metastatic tumor growths in her bones.

She knew, we all knew, she was trying to buy more time from a life of rapidly diminishing days.

Each patient I had seen the previous 24 hours while working in the Emergency Room benefited from the interviewing skills Margy had taught each medical student in our class. She reminded us that each patient had an important story to tell, and no matter how pressured our time, we needed to ask questions that gave permission for that story to be told. As a former nun now married with two teenage children, Margy had become our de facto therapist at a time no medical school hired supportive counselors.

She insisted physicians-in-training remember the suffering soul thriving inside the broken body.

“Just let the patient know with certainty, through your eyes, your body language, your words, that you want to hear what they have to say. You can heal so much hurt simply by sitting beside them and caring enough to listen…”

After her diagnosis with stage 4 cancer, Margy herself became the broken vessel who needed the glue of a good listener. She continued to teach, often from her bed at home. I planned to visit her that day, maybe help out by cleaning her house, or take her for a drive as a diversion.

Her phone rang only once after I dialed her number. There was a long pause; I could hear a clearing of her throat. A deep dam of tears welled behind a muffled “Hello?”

“Margy?”

“Yes? Emily? ”

“Margy? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Her voice shattered like glass into fragments, strangling on words that struggled to form.

“Gordy’s gone, Emily. He’s gone. He’s gone forever…”

“What? What are you saying?”

“A policeman just left. He told us our boy is dead.”

I sat in stunned silence, listening to her sobs, completely unequipped to know how to respond.

None of this made sense. I knew her son was on college spring break, heading to Mexico for a missions trip.

“I’m here, what’s happened?”

“The doorbell rang about an hour ago. Larry got up to answer it. I heard him talking to someone downstairs, so I decided to try to get up and go see what was going on. There was a policeman sitting with Larry on the couch. I knew it had to be about Gordy.”

She paused and took in a shuddering breath.

“The group was driving through the night in California. He was asleep in the back of the camper. They think he was sleepwalking and walked right out of the back of the moving camper and was hit by another car.”

Silence.  A strangling choking silence.

“They’ll bring him home to me, won’t they? I need to know I can see my boy again. I need to tell him how much I love him.”

“They’ll bring him home to you, Margy.
I’m on my way to help you get ready…“

God is not only the God of the sufferers
but the God who suffers. …
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live.
I always thought this meant
that no one could see his splendor and live.
A friend said perhaps it meant
that no one could see his sorrow and live.
Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. …
Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Restless in Winter’s Grip

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This morning’s sun is not the honey light
of summer, thick with golden dust and slow
as syrup pouring from a jug. It’s bright,
but thin and cold, and slanted steep and low
across the hillsides. Frost is blooming white,
these flowers forced by icy winds that blow
as hard this morning as they blew all night.
Too cold for rain, but far too dry for snow.

And I am restless, pacing to and fro
enduring winter’s grip that holds us tight.
But my camellias, which somehow know
what weather to expect—they’re always right—
have broken bud. Now scarlet petals glow
outside the window where I sit and write.
~Tiel Aisha Ansari “Camellias” from Dervish Lions

Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.
~Carol Snow “Tour”

Camellias are hardy enough to withstand winter’s low temperatures, defying freezing winds and hard frosts with their resilience.

On windy days, full and ripe camellia blooms plop to the ground without warning, scattering about like a nubby floral throw rug. They are too bulky to step on, so the tendency is to pick a path around them, allowing them the dignity of a few more days before being swept off sidewalks.

In one sense, these fallen winter blossoms are holy messengers, gracing the paths the living must navigate. They are grounding for the passersby, a reminder our own time to let go will soon come. As we restlessly pursue our days and measure our steps, we respectfully make our way around their fading beauty.

An unexpected blessing is bestowed in the camellia’s restlessness:
in their budding,
in their breaking open,
in their full blooming,
in their falling to earth,
in their ebbing away.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
    Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of our God endures forever.
Isaiah 40:7-8

Mortals, born of woman,
    are of few days and full of trouble.
They spring up like flowers and wither away;
    like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.
Do you fix your eye on them?
Job 14: 1-3

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

AI image created for this post
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Going Forth with the Dawn

barnstormingblog1 Comment

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
~Georgia Douglas Johnson “The Heart of a Woman” from The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems

Some mornings I’m not sure what else to do with my worry,
so I fling my tender heart out ahead of me, hoping
I might eventually catch up with it
to bring it back home before nightfall.

Sometimes it is a race to see
if anyone else rescues it first
or if someone even notices it out there
fluttering its way through the day,
trying to stay aloft.

Perhaps, in its lonely flight,
it will try winging its way home
and there I’ll find it patiently waiting for me
on the doorstep as I return empty-handed.

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