Category: nature

Preserving the Sweetness

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photo by Joel DeWaard

How beautiful the things are that you did not notice before!
A few sweetclover plants
Along the road to Bellingham,
Culvert ends poking out of driveways,
Wooden corncribs, slowly falling,
What no one loves, no one rushes towards or shouts about,
What lives like the new moon,
And the wind
Blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.
~Robert Bly from “Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life”

culvert

“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
~Maxine Kumin “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins”

The Robert Bly poem reminds me to see in a new way
as I travel the road to Bellingham, Washington
(not Bly’s Bellingham, Minnesota).

My eyes scan for the unnoticed and unremarkable,
along these rural byways I traveled decades to work,
now only to meetings or shopping –
when feeling the need to wander and wonder.

Forty years ago in my twice-daily
hour-long Seattle traffic commute to reach my clinic,
I could only pay attention to the cars around me,
blinkered to all else happening.

Since moving north to Whatcom County,
I try to notice what small things
I might keep handy in my memory for another day,
like a jar of canned peaches in our root cellar,
just so I won’t forget,
ready to pull them off the shelf someday
so I might share
their sweetness with someone else.

morning113157
photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. 
…to get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way
that takes nothing for granted. 
Everything is phenomenal;
everything is incredible;
never treat life casually.
To be spiritual is to be amazed.
~Abraham Joshua Hershel

photo by Harry Rodenberger
photo by Harry Rodenberger
groundcover

Let Us Gather a Vase of Flowers

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Master, how serene
Are all the hours
We waste
If, as we waste them,
We place them in a vase
Like flowers.

There are no sorrows
In our lives
Nor joys either.
Let us learn then,
Innocent sages,
Not to live life,

But to pass through it,
Tranquil, serene,
Taking children
As our teachers,
Eyes full
Of Nature . . .

Beside a river,
Beside a road,
Wherever we are,
Living life
With the same
Light ease.

Let us gather flowers.
Let us bathe our hands
In the calm rivers,
And from them
Learn their calm.

[12 June, 1914]
~Fernando Pessoa from “Ode 1” translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean 
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; 
To which, besides their own demean, 
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. 
Grief melts away 
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing. 

Who would have thought my shriveled heart 
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone 
  Quite underground; as flowers depart 
To see their mother-root, when they have blown, 
Where they together 
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown. 

 These are thy wonders, Lord of power, 
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell 
And up to heaven in an hour; 
Making a chiming of a passing-bell. 
We say amiss 
This or that is: 
Thy word is all, if we could spell. 

         Oh that I once past changing were, 
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! 
Many a spring I shoot up fair, 
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; 
Nor doth my flower 
Want a spring shower, 
My sins and I joining together. 

But while I grow in a straight line, 
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, 
Thy anger comes, and I decline: 
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone 
Where all things burn, 
When thou dost turn, 
And the least frown of thine is shown? 

And now in age I bud again, 
After so many deaths I live and write; 
I once more smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing. Oh, my only light, 
It cannot be 
That I am he 
On whom thy tempests fell all night. 

These are thy wonders, Lord of love, 
To make us see we are but flowers that glide; 
Which when we once can find and prove, 
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; 
Who would be more, 
Swelling through store, 
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
~George Herbert “The Flower”

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee from “From Blossoms”

Our small church has a couple of gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards and fields each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.

It is a special treat to walk into church and see what they brought to the altar to share with us all on Sunday morning. I keep a photo album of these very unique Sunday “pulpit posies” our keepers of gardens share.

Why are these arrangements special?
After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.

These are special as many of these flowers are seeded, watered, fertilized and nurtured by one of our own, grown with love and caring, just as God cares for each of His children.

These are special as some are considered simple weeds, and are gleaned from ditches and hedges. They are part of God’s creation and have a wild beauty that can be as breathtaking as a hothouse orchid.

These are special because they often go home with a congregant or visitor who will enjoy their loveliness for many more days, as if they represent the manifestation of God’s Word itself.

Some of us are dahlias, zinnias and roses.
Some of us are rare gardenias and orchids.
Most of us are dandelions, sagebrush, Queen Anne’s lace,
fireweed, burdock, and daisies thriving
in the crevasses, ditches and hedgerows of life.

No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of our loving gardening God. He created us to take care of His creation.

Each week, we bud afresh for Him.

As If in Prayer

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His long teeth on her withers,
her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild.
Her long teeth on his withers,
his oiled-teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild.
Their shadows’ chiasmus will fleck and fill with flies,
the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth.
From ear-flick to tail-switch, they stand in one body.
No luck is as boundless as theirs.
~Jane Hirshfield “The Love of Aged Horses”

Two horses
lean in the field
clasped against each other as if in prayer,
grooming each other’s manes the way
my thumb strokes the back of my thumb.

Together, tall, conductive
around them, fenced lightning,
above, a promise of more rain to come,
the force of faith condensing, cumulative—

A wave tries to return to the river what it has been given, futile.

Two swans, only ever as far apart as palms, a wingspan,
float by shore, sucking up silt, throats rippling,
taking in something as vast as the sea in small sips.

If, on cold nights,
before bed,
I pray for something as simple as the warmth of my hands—
~Ace Chu “Dear” from The Hopper

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.   
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me   
And nuzzled my left hand.   
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
~James Wright “A Blessing”

May we easily find one another’s itches, just as we know our own.
May we greet all visitors with a gentle and humble welcome.
May we bow our heads together when in need of community.
May we clasp hands in prayer to God, warming each other’s hands
when the world is feeling far too cold.


Lyrics:
Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night. ​​​​​​​​
(Mark Twain left this poem on his daughter’s tombstone)

A Stone Where the Crust of Time is Thin

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I went by the Druid stone 
   That stands in the garden white and lone,   
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   
   That at some moments there are thrown
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   
   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,
   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me,   
   Though how do you get into this old track?”
   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   
   As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see
   That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision   
   A shape which, somehow, there may be.”
   So I went on softly from the glade,
   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   
As she were indeed an apparition—
   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
~Thomas Hardy “The Shadow on the Stone”

Scarce images of life,
one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways;
like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones,
upon a forlorn moor…
~John Keats from “Hyperion”

As living stones around a font today,
Rejoice with those who roll the stone away.
~Malcolm Guite from “Baptism”

hole

When Dan discovered this mighty boulder completely underground, near our family’s swing set, he decided it was to be unearthed to create our own standing stone garden close by.

Pulling out the stone took much digging and a strong tractor-pulled chain around its girth, but now here it sits, a Whatcom County sitting stone, where the crust of time is thin…

Big Rock Garden, Bellingham, WA
This dolmen is above the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland
Legananny Dolmen, Northern Ireland

Just as a signpost warns of rockfalls near a cliff-edge,
the standing stones were meant to mark a spot of danger.
A spot where … what?
Where the crust of time was thin?
Where a gate of some sort stood ajar?
~Diana Gabaldon from Outlander

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria, UK

A Witness to Dawn

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My heart is like a little bird
That sits and sings for very gladness.
Sorrow is some forgotten word,
And so, except in rhyme, is sadness.

The world is very fair to me—
Such azure skies, such golden weather,
I’m like a long caged bird set free,
My heart is lighter than a feather.

I rise rejoicing in my life;
I live with love for God and neighbor;
My days flow on unmarred by strife,
And sweetened by my pleasant labor.

Oh youth! oh spring! oh happy days,
Ye are so passing sweet, and tender,
And while the fleeting season stays,
I’ll revel care-free, in its splendor.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox “Joy”

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms
and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray

I believe in Christianity
as I believe that the sun has risen:
not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more…
~from Les Miserable

I wasn’t the only one watching the light emerging over the foothills this morning. A bird sitting atop our barn’s weathervane greeted this morning’s dawn, a silent witness, along with me.

I thought we might face the new day together, both preparing ourselves for whatever might come our way.

Yet he flew away, leaving me behind to face it on my own.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
~Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend April 1885

Come and See: The Father Who is True

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So he said to them again, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” 

So the Jews said, “Will he kill himself, since he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?”  

He said to them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”  

So they said to him, “Who are you?”

Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been telling you from the beginning.  I have much to say about you and much to judge, but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” 

 They did not understand that he had been speaking to them about the Father. 

So Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” 

 As he was saying these things, many believed in him.
John 8:21-30

My Father God, in Heaven great,
We remembrance keep
Of fathers You have given us;
Today, though, many weep.

Countless tears right now are shed
For fathers in the grave.
Some the dirt atop still fresh
When life this week upgave.

Others in mind of fathers whom
Abandoned years ago.
Children who are missing them;
Their longing won’t let go.

Some have fathers who have failed
And brought unmeasured pain.
But their children love them still,
And love is ne’er in vain.

Then I think of men whose child
Left the fold of sheep.
These fathers’ hearts afflicted yet;
With prayer, they vigil keep.

What about the man who wants
To loving father be,
And share his overflowing heart
With one upon his knee?

Fatherhood has broken been
And touched on earth by curse;
But God His work continues still;
All will in time reverse.

On this day of joy and pain,
Hope is not all lost.
God in heaven holds the tears
Of those in suffering tossed.

Saints who ache for father love
Have One who fills their cup;
A Father faithful, kind and wise,
With love that won’t give up.

My Father God, in Heaven great,
Who His children keep
Hold tightly those today who mourn,
For Lord, so many weep.
~Gigi Ryan from “Many Weep”

There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in—
the wild with the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.
~Danna Faulds “Allow” From Go In and In

On this Sunday solstice, on this day to honor Fathers:
we hear the Son tell the truth about our heavenly Father,
who made us in His image, to know and love us.

We have struggled to trust our belief
as the Son indeed rose up,
our doubts and sin taken upon Him,
so we would never be alone.

This is our Father who loves us from the beginning.
This is His Son who bears our darkness into the Light.
This is the Spirit embedded within us.

They are true, so we can believe.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

A Labyrinth of Wrinkles

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Like Time’s insidious wrinkle
On a beloved Face
We clutch the Grace the tighter
Though we resent the crease
~Emily Dickinson

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul – let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
~Salvador Dali

kale

People are more than just the way they look.
~Madeleine L’Engle from A Wrinkle in Time

1966
1971
1976
1980
1993
2022
2025

Just a glance in the mirror tells me all I need to know:

my increasing folds and creases remind me
each wrinkle is grace in action,
so tangible, so telling, so mobile –
multiplying when I smile
so I try to smile often.

I don’t hide them under a mask
nor surgically tighten them away
or inject them smooth.

Instead I grin at the wrinkle of time passing,
knowing each line gained
is a grace clutched tightly
in an otherwise loosening grasp.

2023
2 days ago on a windy day at the Space Needle

The Fade to Twilight

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some words need to be

repeated
the way a sunset plays
every night
in the fade to twilight
the same scene
over and over
but never once
lost in its sameness
~Juniper Klatt “some words need to be” from I was raised in a house of water

Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Comes like the stir of day:
One whose breath is a fragrance,
One whose eyes reveal the road to stars,
The wind in his countenance,
The glory of heaven upon his back.
He steps like a vision hung in air,
Diffusing the passion of eternity;
His abode is the sunlight of morn,
The music of eve his speech:
In his sight,
One shall turn from the dust of the grave,
And move upward to the woodland.
~Yone Noguchi “The Poet”

Once in your life you pass
Through a place so pure
It becomes tainted even
By your regard, a space
Of trees and air where
Dusk comes as perfect ripeness.
Here the only sounds are
Sighs of rain and snow,
Small rustlings of plants
As they unwrap in twilight.
This is where you will go
At last when coldness comes.
It is something you realize
When you first see it,
But instantly forget.
At the end of your life
You remember and dwell in
Its faultless light forever.
~Paul Zimmer “The Place” from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited.

I like the slants of light; I’m a collector.
That’s a good one, I say…
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I won’t forget the glow on the hill as the sun drops,
centering behind our sentinel tree.
I won’t forget the rays coming through the branches,
glistening on a tattered web
and an evening primrose unwrapping.
I won’t forget the way the air itself changes as the color spreads,
like a fragrant scent carried on the wind.

The light is faultless but I am not.
My collection of slants of light
and words to describe them
may fade with time.

Even so, it was – maybe just once –
so perfect, so pure, so ripe.
And I’ll remember I was there to witness it.

Something Aimed At You

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And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering
power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.
~Osip Mandelstam “And I Was Alive” (translated by Christian Wiman) from Stolen Air 

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. 
One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that
there are two sides to your encounter with the world.
You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present,
but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience.
It means something because it is addressed to YOU. 
~Marilynne Robinson from The Paris Review 2008

We mostly live through routine and ordinary days, unconscious of many treasures and abundance laid before us.

In fact, these are addressed to us as pure gift –
postmarked to our address, fully paid, no postage due.

Daily I search the soil of my life, this farm, this faith
to find what in me still yearns to grow, to blossom, to fruit,
in order to be harvested to share with others.

Such sweetness undoes our inevitable decay.

I am so grateful for the tie that binds me to those who visit this page, hoping what I share makes a difference in your ordinary,
but still so precious, day. 

The gift of ordinary time is now.
Its numinosity is aimed at each one of us.

Poem by Dana Gioia

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves.
Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur
of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer
of entrances and exits, midnight
whisper traveling the wires.
Seducer, healer, deity or thief,
I will see you soon enough—
in the shadow of the rainfall,
in the brief violet darkening a sunset—

but until then I pray watch over him
as a mountain guards its covert ore
and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

Light Becomes What It Touches

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…The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~Lisel Mueller from “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language

Monet’s corner of a lily pond (1918-1919)

“Heaven pulls earth into its arms…”

We all see things differently, don’t we?
What seems ordinary to one is extraordinarily memorable to another.

How might I help others to see the world as I do?
How might I learn to adjust my focus to see things as you do?

The world is in flux;
my delight and dismay flows
from moment to moment,
from object to absence,
from light to darkness,
from color to muted.

Perhaps the blur from Monet’s cataracts
also impedes my vision, creating a deeper understanding,
as I use my imagination to fill in what I can’t quite discern.

My heart and mind expands exponentially
to claim this world and all that beauty has to offer,
while heaven – all this while – pulls me into its arms.

In heaven, my focus will be clear.
All will be extraordinarily ordinary.