Category: clouds

From Everywhere and Nowhere At Once

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There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light…
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom;
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
~Donald Justice – excerpt from Collected Poems

I live where golden hour light is doled out sparingly
– we just might get too used to it –
where gray clouds tend to mute and muffle the spirit.

So I search for light as if it is buried like treasure.

When gilded light illuminates and glows,
when all is immersed and lifted by its radiance,
I forget the gray, as if it never was.

So I wait patiently, ready for another such burst of joy
coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
A moment in time to be preserved, not to be forgotten.

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Awaiting a Time Less Bold

barnstormingblog2 Comments

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
~Philip Larkin “Mother, Summer, I” from Collected Poems.

I am summer-born. Like almost anyone else who lives and breathes, I’m also summer-loving. But this … this has simply been too much cheerful weather all at once. Stretches of weeks with no gray skies can start to become an uneasy expectation, as if we’re somehow owed sunny days.

I too hold up each summer day and shake it suspiciously, wondering if dark clouds or angry yellow jackets and wasps may be hiding inside. I scan the skies for the potential promise of precipitation, sniffing the air for a hint of moisture. When an occasional leaf lets go and drifts to the ground, I celebrate it as a preview of the upcoming autumn shattering of trees.

When the pressures of summer become too much for people like me, we enter warm weather mental hibernation, too overwhelmed by the multitude of options and opportunities and fresh produce and,
let’s face it, … pleasure and perfect happiness.

I can’t wait for the weather to break. I can’t wait for autumn, followed by a dreary winter, when I can once again start wistfully longing …
for summer.

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Whose Beauty is Past Change

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Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”

The unconventional and unnoticed beauty,
freckled, spare and strange–
helps me feel beautiful too. 
The interplay of light and shadow
within every moment of our existence,
some moments darker than others,
some brilliant and dazzling.

I try to find the sweet and sour,
knowing I’m capturing my own dappled essence – 
a reflection of the Fathering that loves us
even in our fickleness,
who possibly could know how?

There is no perfection outside of Him;
His reflected beauty, His transfigured face
has no uniformity yet is past changing.

We give Him glory in our imperfection,
through defects and blemishes which
only He can make whole.

Who knows why He does this?
Yet He does.

Glory be.

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Walking Through the Littered Layers of History

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A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood

photo by Joel DeWaard

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
~Stanley Kunitz from “The Layers”

…we become whole by having the courage to revisit and embrace all the layers of our lives, denying none of them, so that we’re finally able to say, “Yes, all of this is me, and all of this has helped make me who I am.”

When we get to that point, amazingly, we can look at all the layers together and see the beauty of the whole.
~Parker Palmer from “Embracing All the Layers of Your Life” in On Being

My favorite photos or paintings are ones where there are several “layers” to study, whether it is a still life of petals or a deep landscape with a foreground, middle and backdrop. The challenge is to decide where to look first, what to draw into sharp focus, and how to absorb it all as a whole. In fact, if I only see one aspect, I miss the entire point of the composition. The earth is wonderfully multi-faceted and multi-layered and that is how my own life is – complex with so much diverse and subtle shading.

If I try to suppress some darker part of my own life I wish to forget and blur out, I ignore the beauty of the contrast with the light that illuminates the rest.

The layers reflect who I was created to be as an image-bearer – complex, nuanced, illuminated in the presence of darkness:

Imaginatively composed like a fugue of recurring themes,
filled with the complexity of both harmony and discord,
and ultimately transformed into layers upon layers of beauty.

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Out of One Hundred People…

barnstormingblog8 Comments

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.
~Wislawa Szymborska “A Word on Statistics”
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
~A. A. Milne from “Wind On The Hill.”

Of one hundred people who encounter this post today:

will wonder what photos of clouds have to do with statistics:
ninety two

will puzzle over what wind has to do with statistics:
seventy six

will delete without reading since it has to do with statistics:
twenty four

will “like” it because they are supportive gracious people:
six

will write a comment – if words come to them:
three

will wonder why it was necessary on a Monday morning
to be reminded about their mortality:
one hundred

At least it is nice to know we aren’t facing this alone…

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Stumbling Through Soulful Sweetness

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Cherry cobbler is a shortcake with a soul…
~Edna Ferber

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
~Stephen Dunn from “Sweetness”

When the soft cushion of sunset lingers
with residual stains of dappled cobbler clouds,
predicting the soul of sweetness in next day’s dawn~
I’m reminded to “remember this, this moment, this feeling”…

I realize this too will be lost, slipping away from me
in mere moments, a sacramental fading away.
I can barely remember the sweetness of its taste,
so what’s left is the stain of its loss.

Balancing as best I can on life’s cobbled path,
stumbling and tripping over rough unforgiving spots,
I ponder the sweet messy kindness
of today’s helping of soulful shortcake,
treasure it up, stains and all,
knowing I would never miss it this much
if I hadn’t been allowed a taste,
and savored it to begin with.

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I Dare Not Look Away

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I dare not look away
From beauty such as this,
Lest, while my glance should stray,
Some loveliness I miss.

The trees might choose to print
Their shadow on the lake;
The windless air might glint
With aspen leaves that shake.

Over the mountains there
A thin blue veil might drift;
Then in a moment rare
This thin blue veil might lift.

Ah, I must pay good heed
To beauty such as this,
Lest, in some hour of need,
Its loveliness I miss.
~Jesse Belle Rittenhouse “In the Green Mountains”

Steeped in my own worries and thoughts as I go about my housework and barn chores, I could be missing something lovely happening outside while I’m not looking. Perhaps the gray fog is clearing to reveal a cloudless blue sky, or the sun angles just right for everything to appear gilded, or magical rays of light and rainbows appear behind my back.

If I glance out at such a moment of irreplaceable beauty, I grab it and hang on as long as I can. It spreads balm over my soul and provides a gift to my spirit. It’s a wonder I get anything else done.

It is as if the loveliness was meant just for me, but I know better. Beauty is best when shared.

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As Good As Ever

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One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.

The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.

It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilacs
and cherry blossoms
sounded their long
whistle down the track

It was some glad morning.
~Joyce Sutphen “Some Glad Morning”

Amazing that it happens yet again each May:

the ground yields up a rich
and blinding verdancy,
the air scented with perfumed bloom,
the clouds strewn and boiling over on the horizon.

It is enough to overwhelm and enchant us
into waking up early for another day,
just to see what lies in store.

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Absence of Secrecy

barnstormingblog1 Comment

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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