The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats’ wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. ~Leila Chatti “I Went Out to Hear” from Wildness Before Something Sublime
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars
of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders
of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is
nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ~Mary Oliver “In Blackwater Woods” from Devotions
(thinking today of God’s gift to the world of Jane Goodall, whose life was about keeping promises)
When the earth and all that is in it glows indigo in the angled light of October; opening my eyes as witness to beauty takes my breath away.
I can’t imagine letting go this life, yet the other side of ashes and loss is salvation.
My God. I am so finite. I hold this close to my bones with miles to go before I sleep.
My life depends on realizing I’m living a life I would die for.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, and Eternity in an Hour.
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day ~William Blake from “Auguries of Innocence”
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ~William Butler Yeats “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
If I look closely enough underfoot, I might find the extraordinary in the commonplace things of life.
So I keep my eyes alert; my heart open to infinite possibilities and try to tread softly.
Sometimes what I see is so beautiful, it is uncovering heaven come to earth, when the cosmos is contained within the commonplace.
The God of Light and Living Water is no further away than my back yard.
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The thing is to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. ~Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love
...everything here seems to need us —Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple. ~Ellen Bass from “The World Has Need of You” from Like a Beggar
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees. Shards of the shattered vase will rise and reassemble on the table. Plastic raincoats will refold into their flat envelopes. The egg, bald yolk and its transparent halo, slide back in the thin, calcium shell. Curses will pour back into mouths, letters un-write themselves, words siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair will darken and become the feathers of a black swan. Bullets will snap back into their chambers, the powder tamped tight in brass casings. Borders will disappear from maps. Rust revert to oxygen and time. The fire return to the log, the log to the tree, the white root curled up in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly into the lark’s lungs, answers become questions again. When you return, sweaters will unravel and wool grow on the sheep. Rock will go home to mountain, gold to vein. Wine crushed into the grape, oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in to the spider’s belly. Night moths tucked close into cocoons, ink drained from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds will be returned to coal, coal to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light to stars sucked back and back into one timeless point, the way it was before the world was born, that fresh, that whole, nothing broken, nothing torn apart. ~Ellen Bass “When You Return” from Like a Beggar
There is so much grief these days so much anger, so much loss of life, so much weeping.
How can we withstand this? How can we know, now, when we are barely able to breathe that we might know – at some point – we might have the stomach to love life again?
This time of year, no matter which way I turn, autumn’s kaleidoscope displays new patterns, new colors, new empty spaces as I watch the world die into itself once again.
Some dying is flashy, brilliant, blazing – a calling out for attention. Then there is the hidden dying that happens without anyone taking notice: just a plain, tired, rusting away letting go.
I spent this morning adjusting to the change in season by occupying myself with the familiar task of moving manure. Cleaning barn is a comforting chore, allowing me to transform tangible benefit from something objectionable and just plain stinky to the nurturing fertilizer of the future.
It feels like I’ve actually accomplished something.
As I scoop and push the wheelbarrow, I recalled another barn cleaning 24 years ago, just days before the world changed on 9/11/01.
I was one of three or four friends left cleaning over ninety stalls after a Haflinger horse event that I had organized at our local fairgrounds. Some people had brought their horses from over 1000 miles away to participate for several days, including a Haflinger parade through our town on a quiet Sunday morning.
There had been personality clashes and harsh words among some participants along with criticism directed at me as the organizer that I had taken very personally. As I struggled with the umpteenth wheelbarrow load of manure, tears stung my eyes and my heart.
I was miserable with regret, feeling my work had been futile and unappreciated.
One friend had stayed behind with her young family to help clean up the large facility and she could see I was struggling to keep my composure. Jenny put herself right in front of my wheelbarrow and looked me in the eye, insisting I stop for a moment and listen:
“You know, none of these troubles and conflicts will amount to a hill of beans years from now. People will remember a fun event in a beautiful part of the country, a wonderful time with their Haflingers, their friends and family, and they’ll be all nostalgic about it, not giving a thought to the infighting or the sour attitudes or who said what to whom. So don’t make this about you and whether you did or didn’t make everyone happy. You loved us all enough to make it possible to meet here and the rest was up to us. So quit being upset about what you can’t change. There’s too much you can still do for us.”
Jenny had no idea how wise her words were, even two days later, on 9/11.
During tough times since (and there have been plenty), Jenny’s advice replays, reminding me to cease seeking appreciation from others or feeling hurt when harsh words come my way.
She was right about the balm found in the tincture of time. She was right about giving up the upset in order to die to self and self absorption, and instead to focus outward.
I have remembered.
Jenny herself did not know that day she would subsequently spend six years dying while still loving life every day, fighting a relentless cancer that was only slowed in the face of her faith and intense drive to live.
She became a rusting leaf gone holy, fading imperceptibly over time, crumbling at the edges until she finally had to let go. Her dying did not flash brilliance, nor draw attention at the end. Her intense focus during the years of her illness had always been outward to others, to her family and friends, to the healers she spent so much time with in medical offices, to her firm belief in the plan God had written for her and those who loved her.
So Jenny let go her hold on life here. And we reluctantly let her go. Brilliance cloaks her as her focus is now on things eternal.
You were so right, Jenny. The hard feelings from a quarter century ago don’t amount to a hill of beans now. The words you spoke to me that day taught me to love life even when I have no stomach for it.
All of us did have a great time together a few days before the world changed. And manure transforms over time to rich, nurturing compost.
I promise I am no longer upset that I can’t change what is past nor the fact that you and so many others have now left us.
But we’ll catch up later.
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The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. ~ C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love. But if the soul cannot yet feel this longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God. ~Meister EckhartfromFreedom from Sinful Thoughts
I tend to get distracted, losing my sense of purpose and the reason I’m here; I become too absorbed by the troubles of the moment, or dwelling on the troubles of the past, or anticipating the troubles of tomorrow.
My feelings end up overwhelming all else – am I uncomfortable? restless? discouraged? peevish? worried? empty?
When my spirit grows cold, I need igniting. I long for the spark of God to set me aflame again, even at the risk of getting singed.
We’re all His kindling ready to be lit. I long for longing at the beginning and ending of every day.
Lyrics: From the love of my own comfort From the fear of having nothing From a life of worldly passions Deliver me O God
From the need to be understood From the need to be accepted From the fear of being lonely Deliver me O God Deliver me O God
And I shall not want, I shall not want when I taste Your goodness I shall not want when I taste Your goodness I shall not want
From the fear of serving others From the fear of death or trial From the fear of humility Deliver me O God Deliver me O God
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Once only when the summer was nearly over and my own hair had been white as the day’s clouds for more years than I was counting I looked across the garden at evening Paula was still weeding around flowers that open after dark and I looked up to the clear sky and saw the new moon and at that moment from behind me a band of dark birds and then another after it flying in silence long curving wings hardly moving the plovers just in from the sea and the flight clear from Alaska half their weight gone to get them home but home now arriving without a sound as it rose to meet them ~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning
In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.
There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.
Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.
The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.
Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud. Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress. Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. ~Madeleine L’Engle
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At the edge of the city, at the edge of the world, at the edge between the earth and endless sky, the moonshining place, the place where we hung our long summer legs over the edge and fought the urge to drop a shoe or sneak a real first kiss, the place where we played hide-and-go-seek and Tag, you’re it! until we couldn’t breathe or the sun went down, the place where we came on the quietest nights to feel the moon kiss the edge between our skin and endless sky. ~Sarah Kobrinsky, from Nighttime on the Otherside of Everything
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.
Tomorrow there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the “snow” that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn’t working. Soldiers will toss their weapons in the grass. The oceans will stop their inexorable rise. No one will have to sit on a committee. When twilight falls, the aurora borealis will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet. We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek, decorate our hair with fireflies, spin until we’re dizzy, collapse on the dew-decked lawn and look up, perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines of cold code written in the stars…. ~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning.
As a kid playing hide-n-seek, I always preferred to be the “seeker” as I was secretly afraid if I hid, I would be forgotten, everyone would go home and I wouldn’t be found.
Even so, I was too proud to quit the game and come out of hiding. Of course that never happened in real life. I was really lousy at hiding.
When I got older, I was no better at hiding, though I tried. God would always locate me, even without sending the tell-tale spotlight of the moon to find me.
I gave up hiding long ago. Once found, there is no point in trying to disappear from His sight.
His eye shines bright upon us all.
photo of supermoon by Harry Rodenbergerphoto of supermoon by Bob Tjoelker
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There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it. ~N. Scott Momaday from “House Made of Dawn”
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1
He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy. He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute. ~St. Augustine of Hippo
Will there really be a “Morning”? Is there such a thing as “Day”? Could I see it from the mountains If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies? Has it feathers like a Bird? Is it brought from famous countries Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor! Oh some Wise Men from the skies! Please to tell a little Pilgrim Where the place called “Morning” lies! ~Emily Dickinson
Something happened.
Something happened, lighting the darkness and overcoming nothingness.
Something happened and the story of the Beginning breathes within us.
Something happened when God’s word broke the silence as He spoke us into being.
Something happened and it was the Morning of forever.
His Word was in the Beginning, and always has been, and always will be.
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As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk city streets, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the fields, Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. Every spear of grass — the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them…
What stranger miracles are there? ~Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass
Everywhere I turn, there is a miracle in the making. I know this deep in my bones, even when our days on this earth are short. I focus my camera to try to preserve it; I search for words to do it justice.
God touches every square inch of earth as if He owns the place, but these square inches are particularly marked by His artistry. It is a place to feel awed by His magnificence.
The strange miracle is that we are here at all: in an instant we are formed in all our unique potential, never having happened before and never to happen again—to become brain and heart and skin and arms and legs. We were allowed to be born, a miracle in itself in this modern age of conditional conception.
The strangest miracle of all is that we are still loved, corrupted as we are. We are still offered salvage, undeserving as we are. We are still gifted with the miracle of grace until our last breath.
How strange indeed. How utterly wondrous.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ~Gustav Flaubert
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine! ~Abraham Kuyper
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My father would lift me to the ceiling in his big hands and ask, How’s the weather up there? And it was good, the weather of being in his hands, his breath of scotch and cigarettes, his face smiling from the world below. O daddy, was the lullaby I sang back down to him as he stood on earth, my great, white-shirted father, home from work, his gold wristwatch and wedding band gleaming as he held me above him for as long as he could, before his strength failed down there in the world I find myself standing in tonight, my little boy looking down from his flight below the ceiling, cradled in my hands, his eyes wide and already staring into the distance beyond the man asking him again and again, How’s the weather up there? ~George Bilgere “Weather”.
It was hard work, dying, harder than anything he’d ever done.
Whatever brutal, bruising, back- breaking chore he’d forced himself
to endure—it was nothing compared to this. And it took
so long. When would the job be over? Who would call him
home for supper? And it was hard for us (his children)—
all of our lives we’d heard my mother telling us to go out,
help your father, but this was work we could not do.
He was way out beyond us, in a field we could not reach. ~Joyce Sutphen “My Father, Dying”
Deep in one of our closets is an old film reel of me about 16 months old sitting securely held by my father on his shoulders. I am bursting out with giggles as he repeatedly bends forward, dipping his head and shoulders down. I tip forward, looking like I am about to fall off, and when he stands back up straight, my mouth becomes a large O and I can almost remember the tummy tickle I feel. I want him to do it again and again, taking me to the edge of falling off and then bringing me back from the brink.
My father was a tall man, so being swept up onto his shoulders felt a bit like I was touching heaven.
It was as he lay dying 30 years ago this summer that I realized again how tall he was — his feet kept hitting the foot panel of the hospital bed my mother had requested for their home. We cushioned his feet with padding so he wouldn’t get abrasions even though he would never stand on them again, no longer towering over us.
His helplessness in dying was startling – this man who could build anything and accomplish whatever he set his mind to was unable to subdue his cancer. Our father, who was so self-sufficient he rarely asked for help, did not know how to ask for help now.
So we did what we could when we could tell he was uncomfortable, which wasn’t often. He didn’t say much, even though there was much we could have been saying. We didn’t reminisce. We didn’t laugh and joke together. We just were there, taking shifts catching naps on the couch so we could be available if he called out, which he never did.
This man: who had grown up dirt poor, fought hard with his alcoholic father left abruptly to go to college – the first in his family – then called to war for three years in the South Pacific.
This man: who had raised a family on a small farm while he was a teacher, then a supervisor, then a desk worker.
This man: who left our family to marry another woman but returned after a decade to ask forgiveness.
This man: who died in a house he had built completely himself, without assistance, from the ground up.
He didn’t need our help – he who had held tightly to us and brought us back from the brink when we went too far – he had been on the brink himself and was rescued, coming back humbled.
No question the weather is fine for him up there. I have no doubt.
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Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ~William Butler Yeats from “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven“
I know for a while again, the health of self-forgetfulness, looking out at the sky through a notch in the valley side, the black woods wintry on the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across. And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which I may even step forth from myself and be free. ~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2000
John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life — thresholds was the word he loved— where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear.
If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.
There are huge thresholds in every life.
You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information.
But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this.So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.
Over a decade ago, someone told me that my writing reflected a “sacramental” life — touching and tasting the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread of God’s eternal grace and gift.
I allow those words to sit warmly beside me during the hours I struggle to know what to share here.
It is all too tempting to focus on sacrament over the sacrifice it represents. As much as I love the world and the beauty in the moments I share here, we should explore the “thin places” between heaven and earth, through forgetting self, stepping forth through a holy threshold into something far greater.
I feel so unworthy — in fact, threshed to pieces most days, incapable of thinking of anything but how I feel reduced to fragments. Perhaps those fragments are like the droplets coming from a farm sprinkler at sunset, sparkling and golden despite waning light, bringing something essential to someone feeling dry, parched and dusty.
I may even step forth from myself and be free.
Then we can walk each other home.
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