Category: nature

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Break Through to Bright Air

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Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,
Then fall upon me with your freeing flail
To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear
As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall
May be more fruitful and my autumn still
A golden evening where your barns are full.
~Malcolm Guite “Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls Into the Ground and Dies”

…new life starts in the dark.
Whether it is a seed in the ground,
a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb,
it starts in the dark.
~Barbara Brown Taylor from Learning to Walk in the Dark

The ground is slowly coming to life again;
snowdrops, crocus, and daffodils are surfacing from months of dormancy,
buds are swelling, the spring chorus frogs have come from the mud to sing again
and birds now greet the lazy dawn.

The seed shakes off the darkness surrounding it as growth begins.

I too began a mere seed, plain and simple, lying dormant
in the darkness of my mother’s body.

Just as the spring murmurs life to the seed in the ground,
so the Word calls a human seed of life to stir and swell,
becoming at once both an animate and intimate reflection of Himself.

I was awakened in the dark to sprout, bloom and fruit, 
to reach as far as my tethered roots allow,
aiming beyond earthly bounds to touch the light.

Everything, everyone, so hidden;
His touch calls us back to life.
Love is come again
to the fallow fields of our hearts.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Wounds to be Healed

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The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out in the sun,
After frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die. 
~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light Was Like.

Spring is emerging slowly this year from an exceptionally haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are a month behind the usual budding blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.

Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.  We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”

I wait impatiently to celebrate her healing, yet I know Creation is very much alive- this temporary home of ours. No invalid this patient.
She lives, she breathes, she thrives,
she will bloom and sing with everything she’s got
and soon, so will I.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Absence of Secrecy

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I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea –
and to temper my spirit on their edges. 
“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one,
and one I cannot but recommend. 
These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan,
the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula —
are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world…. 
That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft,
holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain,
makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist,
only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatique,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
~Denise Levertov “Witness”

Even on the days when the mountain is hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence it is there.  It has not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover today, but it will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day, maybe not until next week. 

I know this and have faith it is true – the mountain does not keep itself a secret.

On the days when I am not bothering to look for it, too preoccupied so walk right past its obvious grandeur and presence, then it reaches out to me and calls me back, refocusing me. 

There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there it is, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness.  I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.

It witnesses my lack of witness and, so in its mysterious way of being in plain sight, stays put to hold me fast yet another day.  And so I keep coming back to gaze, sometimes just at clouds, yearning to lift the veil, and as a result, lift my veil, just one more time.

photo by Nate Gibson

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An Unexpected January Light

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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies
in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape
to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away.
You know you’re alive.
You take huge steps,
trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”

After years of rarely paying attention,
too busy with whatever household,
work-place, or barnyard task needed doing,
I realized there are only a finite number
of sunrises and sunsets left to me.

Now I stop, take a deep breath,
sense the earth’s roundness
and feel lucky to be alive,
a witness to a moment of manna
falling from the sky.

Sometimes it is as plain and gray
as I am, but at times,
a fire is lit from above and beneath,
igniting the sky, overwhelming me.

I am swept away by light and shadow,
transfixed and transformed,
forever grateful to be fed
by heavenly bread broken over my head.

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Driving at Night

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I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,

awake and assured
in your own private world,
seeing all the lines
on the road ahead,

down a long stretch
of empty highway
without any other
faces in sight.

I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and put my life back
in your hands.
~Michael Miller “December”

Up north, the dashboard lights of the family car
gleam in memory, the radio
plays to itself as I drive
my father plied the highways
while my mother talked, she tried to hide
that low lilt, that Finnish brogue,
in the back seat, my sisters and I
our eyes always tied to the Big Dipper
I watch it still
on summer evenings, as the fireflies stream
above the ditches and moths smack
into the windshield and the wildlife’s
red eyes bore out from the dark forests
we flew by, then scattered like the last bit of star
light years before.
It’s like a different country, the past
we made wishes on unnamed falling stars
that I’ve forgotten, that maybe were granted
because I wished for love.
~Sheila Packa “Driving At Night” from The Mother Tongue

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night…
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.
~Hayden Carruth from “The Cows at Night”

Some of my most comfortable childhood memories come from the long ride home in the car at night from holiday gatherings. My father always drove, my mother humming “I See the Moon” in the front passenger seat, and we three kids sat in the back seat, drowsy and full of feasting. The night world hypnotically passed by outside the car window. I wondered whether the rest of the world was as safe and content as I felt at that moment.

On clear nights, the moon followed us down the highway, shining a light on the road.

Now as a driver at night, transporting grandchildren from a family gathering, I want them to feel the same peaceful contentment that I did as a child. As an older driver, I don’t enjoy driving at night, especially dark rural roads in pouring rain. I understand the enormous responsibility I bear, transporting those whom I dearly love and want to keep safe.

In truth, I long to be a passenger again, with no worries or pressures – just along for the ride, watching the moon and the world drift by, knowing I’m well-cared for.

Despite my fretting about the immense burden I feel to make things right in a troubled world, I do realize:
I am a passenger on a planet that has a driver Who feels great responsibility and care for all He transports through the black night of the universe. He loves me and I can rest content in the knowledge that I am safe in His vigilant hands. I am not the driver – He knows how to safely bring me` home.

I see the moon, it’s shining from far away, Beckoning with ev‘ry beam.
And though all the start above cast down their light, Still the moon is all that I see
And it’s calling out, “Come run a way!
And we’ll sail with the clouds for our sea,
And we’ll travel on through the black of the night, ‘til we float back home on a dream!”
The moon approaches my window pane, stretching itself to the ground.
The moon sings softly and laughs and smiles, and yet never makes a sound!
I see the moon! I see the moon!
Part A
And it’s calling out, “Come run a way!
And we’ll sail with the clouds for our sea,
And we’ll travel on through the black of the night, ‘til we float back home on a dream!”
Part B
I see the moon, it’s shining from far away, Beckoning with ev‘ry beam.
And though all the stars above cast down their light, Still the moon is all that I see
~Douglas Beam

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Such Letting Go

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the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
~Lucille Clifton “Lesson of the Falling Leaves” from Blessing the Boats

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Autumn” translated by Robert Bly

Sometimes I wake from my sleep
with a palpitating start:
dreaming of falling,
my body pitching and tumbling
yet somehow I land,
~oh so softly~
in my bed,
my fear quashed and cushioned by
awaking safe.

I feel caught,
held tightly,
rescued amid the fall
we all do someday,
like leaves drifting down
from heaven’s orchard,
like seeds released like kisses
into the air,
the earth rises to meet me
and Someone cradles me there.

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These Dark Days of Autumn Rain

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My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
     She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
     Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
     The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
     And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.
~Robert Frost “My November Guest”

November,
this month of rapid darkening,
transforms itself
to a recounting of gratitude
of our daily thanksgiving and blessings~~
it is good to dwell on our gifts.

Even so, it is right
to invite Sorrow
to sit in silence with us,
her tears ever-blending with ours.

These deepening days
of bare stripped branches
feed our growing need
for the covering grace
of His coming light.

The mountains are steep and the valley’s low
And already I’m weary but I have so far to go
Oh, and sorrow holds my hand and suffering sings me songs
But when I close my eyes I know to whom I belong
And who makes me strong
And I will be free, I will be free to run the mountains
I will be free, free to drink from the living fountain
Oh, I’ll never turn back ’cause he awaits for me
Oh, I will be free
A wise man, a rich man in pauper’s clothes
A shepherd to lead us through the land of woes
Though many battles I have lost so many rivers yet to cross
But my eyes behold the Son who bore my loss and who paid the cost
I will be free, I will be free to run the mountains
I will be free, oh, free to drink from the living fountain
Oh, I’ll never turn back ’cause He awaits for me, oh
Oh, I will be free, oh
Oh and I’ll dance on silver moonlight and I’ll walk through velvet fields
Oh, and I’ll run into the arms the arms that set me free
Oh, I will be free to run the mountains, I will be free
Free to drink from the living fountain
Oh, I’ll never turn back ’cause He awaits, oh
I’ll never turn back
Don’t you ever turn back
‘Cause someday, someday we’re gonna see
That we will be free
Songwriter: Cindy Lavonne Morgan

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Is There Anybody There?

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‘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”

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
Revelation 3:20

This poetic tale of a mysterious traveller, knocking but getting no response from a house of silent apparitions, has been cited as an appropriate ghost story for Halloween. This is a day of trick or treat knocks on doors everywhere.

I read the poem differently: to me this describes the return of Christ to retrieve us on the final day, just as He said He would.

If we are the phantom listeners, ignoring His knocks on our door despite hearing His announcement of arrival, we have lost the opportunity to open the door and welcome Him in.

Is anybody there?

It isn’t enough to be just a listener. We must respond and answer the door, welcoming the Son of Man who is doing exactly as He promised.

Let Him in. There can be no better treat.

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The Chance of One Sweet Last Hour

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Bending above the spicy woods which blaze,
Arch skies so blue they flash, and hold the sun
Immeasurably far; the waters run
Too slow, so freighted are the river-ways
With gold of elms and birches from the maze
Of forests. Chestnuts, clicking one by one,
Escape from satin burs; her fringes done,
The gentian spreads them out in sunny days,
And, like late revelers at dawn, the chance
Of one sweet, mad, last hour, all things assail,
And conquering, flush and spin; while, to enhance
The spell, by sunset door, wrapped in a veil
Of red and purple mists, the summer, pale,
Steals back alone for one more song and dance.
~Helen Hunt Jackson “October”


And how like a field is the whole sky now
that the maples have shed their leaves, too.
It makes us believers—stationed in groups,
leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters
over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone,
bagging gold for the cold days to come.
~David Baker from “Neighbors in October”

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded…
~T.E. Hulme from “Autumn”

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 
In which being there together is enough.
~Wallace Stevens from "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"

No other time of year is quite like the end of October. God prepares us for the long haul of winter gray by giving us one last sweet hour of golden memories to bag up as keepsakes for the dark cold nights ahead.

The air is now pristine after a wind and rain storm yesterday. I am finally seeing the golden glow of October.

As Robert Frost wrote, “nothing gold can stay” so I bid this gilded air goodbye for another year. I nod in recognition at the rising moon and wave at bare branches dancing leafless in the wind and celebrate the last sweet hours of October.

It’s now time to dwell together, huddled and cuddled, in the chill of the autumn evening air.

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The Misty Mountains Cold

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Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.
~J.R.R. Tolkien from “Far over the misty mountains” in The Hobbit

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token—
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
~Edgar Allen Poe from Spirits of the Dead

Photo above by Joel De Waard

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.
What is your life?
You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
James 4:14

I pray that the breath of God would blow away the veils of mist and mystery in my life. The reality is – so much is hidden from me, I must proceed on faith alone without always seeing where I am going.

God has made it clear, we perceive Him through a glass darkly, a dim reflection. The mists of mystery are transient and shall be pulled back in the fullness of time. In the meantime, I gaze in wonder at what appears now only in shadow, waiting for that amazing moment when all shall be revealed.

photo above by Joel De Waard

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