Category: clouds

Good Things in Abundance

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There was an entire aspect to my life that I had been blind to — the small, good things that came in abundance.
~Mary Karr from The Art of Memoir

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
~Thornton Wilder, quotes from “Our Town”

The smell of baking bread, smooth floured hands,
butter waiting to be spread with blackberry jam,
and I realize, this is no small thing.
These days spent confined,
I am drawn to life’s ordinary details,
the largeness of all we can do
alongside what we cannot.
The list of allowances far outweighs my complaints.
I am fortunate to have flour and yeast, a source of heat,
not to mention soft butter, the tartness of blackberries
harvested on a cold back road.
A kitchen, a home, two working
hands to stir and knead,
a clear enough head to gather it all.
Even the big toothy knife feels miraculous
as it grabs hold and cracks the crust.
~Ellen Rowland “No Small Thing”

The words from “Our Town” written over 80 years ago still ring true:
our country a Great Depression of the economy then –
now we stagger under a Great Depression of the spirit.

Despite being more connected electronically, we are actually more divisive than ever, many feeling estranged from family, friends, faith.

Some less economically secure,
yet many emotionally bankrupt.

May we be more conscious of our abundance –
our small daily treasures.

God knows we need Him.
He cares for us, even when
we turn our faces away from Him.

I search the soil of this life,
this farm, this faith
to find what still yearns
to grow, to bloom, to fruit,
to be harvested to share with others.

My deep gratitude goes to you
who visit here once in awhile, or daily.
Thank you to those who let me know
the small and the good I share with you
makes a difference.

I’m right here,
alongside you in joint Thanksgiving
to our Creator and Preserver.

Many blessings today and always,
Emily

Let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

CHORUS:There’s a gathering of spirits
There’s a festival of friends
And we’ll take up where we left off
When we all meet again

I can’t explain it
I couldn’t if I tried
How the only things we carry
Are the things we hold inside

Like a day in the open
Like the love we won’t forget
Like the laughter that we started
And it hasn’t died down yet

Oh let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

Oh yeah now didn’t we
And don’t we make it shine
Aren’t we standing in the center of
Something rare and fine

Some glow like embers
Like a light through colored glass
Some give it all in one great flame

Throwing kisses as they pass

So let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

East of eden
But there’s heaven in our midst
And we’re never really all that far
From those we love and miss
Wade out in the water
There’s a glory all around
And the wisest say there’s a thousand ways
To kneel and kiss the ground

Oh let it go my love my truest
Let it sail on silver wings
Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain
But it’s such a fine thing

Emptying Like a Cloud

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God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
Annie Dillard from “Feast Days” in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel

Soon we will enter the season of Advent, an opportunity to reflect on a God who “takes the substance, contours of a man”, as He “empties himself into the earth like a cloud.” 

Like drought-stricken parched ground, we prepare to respond to the drenching of the Spirit through the Son, and be ready to spring up with renewed growth.

He walked among us before His dying and subsequent rising up.
He walked among us again, appearing where least expected,
sharing a meal, causing our hearts to burn within us,
inviting us to touch and know Him.

His invitation remains open-ended,
His heart preparing us for our eternal home.

I think of that every time the clouds gather, open up, and empty.  
He freely falls to earth, soaking us completely,
through and through and through.

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A Rainy Dark Day

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Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
~Raymond Carver “Rain” from All of Us

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely over again–
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth–
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
that you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers”

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~Lisel Mueller “In Passing” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

By mid-November, we begin to lose daylight by 4PM. There is no wistful lingering with the descent of evening; the curtain is pulled closed and it is dark — just like that.

I’m having difficulty adjusting to the loss of daylight this year. This is perplexing as the change of seasons is no mystery to me. I sense a new deprivation beyond the fact that shorter days are simply a part of the annual autumnal routine.

As if –
something precious is being stolen away

as if –
I have any claim to the light to begin with

as if –
maybe I exist only to notice what ceases to exist.

So I am reminded:
I know there is more beyond feeling loss and lost.
I would do this all again, while feeling my way in the dark.
I will cling to the promise of what comes next.

I’m ready to break into blossom rather than hiding from the rain,
opening up to what light is left, instead of grumbling in the dark.

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This Tree…

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What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?

What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?

The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.

What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.
~Christian Wiman “Hard Night”

photo by Bob Tjoelker

Even the darkest night has a sliver of light left,
if only in our memories of home.
We remember how it was and how it can be —
the promise of better to come.

While the ever-changing sky swirls as a backdrop,
a tree on a hill becomes the focal point, as it must,
like a black hole swallowing up all pain, all suffering,
all evil threatening to consume our world.

What clarity, what calm,
what peace can be found at the foot of that tree,
where our hearts can rest in this knowledge:
our sin died there, once and for all
and our names carved in its roots for eternity.

Intended for Joy

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There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
~John Calvin as quoted in  John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988) by William J. Bouwsma

It is too easy to become blinded to the glory surrounding us if we allow it to seem routine and commonplace. 

I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a blade of grass, given how focused I am in mowing it into conformity and submission. 

During the summer months, I’m seldom up early enough to witness the pink sunrise. In the winter, I’m too busy making dinner to take time to watch the sun paint the sky red as it sets.

I miss opportunities to stop and notice what surrounds me innumerable times a day. It takes only a moment of recognition and appreciation to feel the joy, and for that moment time stands still.  So life stretches a little longer when I stop to acknowledge the intention of creation as an endless reservoir of rejoicing.  

If a blade of grass, if a palette of color,
if all this is made for joy,
then perhaps, so am I.
Even colorless, commonplace, sometimes stormy me.
Indeed, so am I.

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A World Too Beautiful

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O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,– Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,– let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “God’s World”

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
– every, every minute? 
I’m ready to go back. I should have listened to you.
That’s all human beings are!
Just blind people.
~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town

Let me not wear blinders through my days.
Let me see and hear and feel it all
even when it seems too much to bear.

Lord,  prepare me to be so whelmed at your world, that
Heaven itself will be familiar, and not that far,
Just round the corner.

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A World Upside Down

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Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course
in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
~Richard Wilbur “Praise in Summer”

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 
~G.K.Chesterton from Orthodoxy

I need no help to imagine this world feels upside down much of the time. When I read the headlines, I have difficulty understanding how anything makes any sense anymore.

Creation inversed: the birds somehow soar through the earth beneath us and the moles and mushrooms are populating the clouds. Instead of stars in the sky, there are innumerable molehills gracing the hillside. We are all mixed up in our perspective, turning creation on its head.

Thank goodness and thank God that everything is put back where it belongs when we are in sore need of reorientation. When we forget our purpose in creation, He reminds us by restoring predictable order and rhythms. When we destroy, He heals and protects. When we get bored with how things are – desperate for innovation and excitement in our attempt to turn the world upside down – He demonstrates contentment with how things were created, and turns it back to right again.

There is enough to keep us busy in this world: crazy weather, global pandemics, volcanic eruptions and quaking ground. We don’t need to complicate an already complicated creation with our designed messes.

We’re meant to admire the birds’ soaring in the skies and appreciate that grubs and gophers course through the soil beneath us. We can praise the sun as it rises each morning and the moon’s varied journey at night – so predictable and reliable and meant to be that way from the very beginning.

Keep it going, God. Do it again.

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At Summer’s Pace

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had 
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
~Philip Larkin “Cut Grass” from The Complete Poems

June is the month when grass grows abundantly.

Light and wind work magic on a field of flowing tall grass. The blades of the mower lay it to the ground in green streams that course up and down the slopes. It lies orderly in stoneless cemetery rows.

Farmer’s fields are lined with rows of mown grass, a precious commodity to be harvested for the livestock to eat the rest of the year. Some of the green is bagged up like big marshmallows for easy storage and some put in silos for later in the winter.

The grass’ death is critical to the life of the animals we raise.

What was once waving and bowing to the wind is cut and crushed:
no longer bending but bent,
no longer flowing but flown,
no longer growing but mown.

At summer’s pace, while the clouds saunter overhead, the grasses are stored as fodder for the beasts of the farm on those cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.

It will melt in their mouths. As we watch them chew, we’ll remember the overflowing abundance of summer in June.

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The Tree With Lights

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Sometimes there is nothing
absolutely nothing
to do but watch
and wait
and let the clock which breaks our days
let go its grasp
until the mind is able
to trust the storm
to bear up the weight of flesh and bone
to take on the time of breath
a rhythm of blood
a rhythm held
between two breaths
a bright cry
a last rasp
~Moya Cannon “Attention”

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the cracks, and the mountains slam.
~Annie Dillard, from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through
the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver from “The Summer Day”

I don’t know why, of all the trees that peppered this hill over 150 years ago, this one was spared.  Perhaps she was the tallest at the time, or the straightest, or just didn’t yield to the ax as the others did.

She has become the sentinel on our farm, a focal point:
the marker by which all else is measured.

She is aging – now some bare branches, though still heavy with cones – the constantly changing backdrop of clouds, color and light shift and swirl around her. Some days she knocks me breathless; I’m struck like Annie Dillard’s bell.

Visitors climb the hill to her first before seeing anything else on the farm, to witness for themselves the expanse that she surveys.  Her limbs oversee gatherings of early Easter morning worship, summer evening church services, winter sledding parties, and Fourth of July celebrations.

This one special fir tree stands alone, apart from the others, but is never lonely – not really.  She shares her top with the eagles and hawks and her shade with humans and other critters.

This is her home that she shares with us.
This is her one wild and precious life.

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”

Rending the Heavens

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Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs ablaze
and causes water to boil…
~Isaiah 64:1-2

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which 
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
-Wendell Berry “To My Mother” from Entries

It was a summer morning six years ago, beginning much like this one: something woke me early at 4:45 AM.  

Perhaps it was the orange glow bathing my face through the curtains. Never one to miss a light show, I heeded the call and got up and dressed.

Once outside, I was amazed to see storm clouds boiling –  shifting and swirling in unrest as if something or someone may emerge momentarily.

No trumpets though.
The music in the air was the usual early morning bird song,
and sherbet-orange leaves normalized to green.

Within a minute, the heavens settled. Unentangled from my dismay, so did I.

Yet for a moment that morning, I did wonder what might become of us all. That thought still occurs to me each morning, as I realize how much merciful grace embodies the heavens above.

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