Category: nature

The Leaping Combustion of Spring

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This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, 
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, 
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between 
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. 
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration 
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze 
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, 
Faces of people streaming across my gaze. 
And I, what fountain of fire am I among 
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed 
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng 
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
~D.H. Lawrence “The Enkindled Spring”
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I’m a bit wary of looking out the window these days as I am so easily swept away and then am useless to accomplish anything else.  The landscape is exploding with layers of color and shadow and standing too close, I too am ignited.  It is impossible to witness so much unfolding life and light and not be engulfed and singed.

It lures me outside where flames of green lap about my ankles as I stroll the fields and each fresh breeze fans the fires until I’ve nothing left of myself but ash and shadow.
Consumed and subsumed.  Combusted and busted.
What a way to go.
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The Grass of Heaven

barnstormingblog7 Comments

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Green hills, 
embroidered
mist, rich
rising ridge
fog filled
plunging fields
cattle, 
black, weightless
rise poised
from bare bank
grazing
the grass of
heaven
~Steven Federle

 

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May is always an overwhelming time of year – my senses work overtime with the feel of cool air mornings and evenings, the fragrance of blossoms everywhere, the dawn chorus of birdsong and the nightly coyote choir and peeper swamp symphony, the softness of mist rising from warm ground and the explosion of green – everywhere.

We are happily drowning in green – so much to be done quickly:  mowed, gathered, stored, treasured.

Surely heaven too is mostly green.  It can be no other.

 

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A Flower’s Unquiet Spirit

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In the meadow-grass
The innocent white daisies blow,
The dandelion plume doth pass
Vaguely to and fro, –
The unquiet spirit of a flower
That hath too brief an hour.
~Ellen Mackay Hutchinson Cortissoz

 

 

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Tis May; and yet the March flower Dandelion
Is still in bloom among the emerald grass,
Shining like guineas with the sun’s warm eye on–
We almost think they are gold as we pass,
Or fallen stars in a green sea of grass.
They shine in fields, or waste grounds near the town.
They closed like painter’s brush when even was.
At length they turn to nothing else but down,
While the rude winds blow off each shadowy crown.
~John Clare

 

 

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There are dandelions on fire and wearing jewels
everywhere I look.
Like a seed released when buffeted,
or simply blown aloft at the moment of ripeness,
may I be the unquiet flower spirit
carrying your Word on fragile wings
to far corners and hidden places;
settling softly, taking root
wherever your breath takes me.

 

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Let Us Be Left

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The darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Inversnaid”

 

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There is despair in the wilderness of untamed hearts.
Such wildness lies just beneath the surface;
it rounds and rounds, almost out of reach.
How are we spared drowning in its pitchblack pool?
How can we thrill to the beauty rather than be sucked into the darkness?
He came not to destroy the world’s wildness,
but to pull us, gasping,
from its unforgiving clutches as we sink in deep.As weeds surviving in the wilderness,
we must grow, flourish, and witness to a wild world bereft.
O let us be left.
Let us be left.

 

 

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When Faith Appears Like Dew

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Faith steals upon you like dew:
some days you wake and it is there.
And like dew, it gets burned off 
in the rising sun of anxieties,
ambitions, distractions.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss

 

 

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My faith,
refreshed in the light of morning,
can evaporate in the dry stress of the day.
May I turn my face up
each night, asking to be washed
in the mist of God’s dew,
my anxiety settled like dust.

 

 

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The Earth An Invalid

barnstormingblog5 Comments

roseleafrain

 

 

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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. London: Faber & Faber, 2003

 

 

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centralnorth

 

 

Spring emerged slowly this year from an exceptionally haggard and droopy winter.
All growing things were a month behind the usual budding blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape suddenly turns from monochrome to technicolor.

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

And now her recovery has happened in an overwhelming rush — the colors, the scents, the bird songs, the softness more than overwhelming the sharp-edged bare barbed wire of winter.

I waited impatiently for her emergence and now celebrate my immersion in her healing.
She is very much alive, this temporary home of ours.
No invalid this patient.
She lives, she breathes, she thrives,
she is blooming with everything she’s got
and now so am I.

 

 

 

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The Clouds That Veil

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Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted
and one is able to glimpse the glory of God.
~Celtic saying

 

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For as a cloud received Him from their sight,
So with a cloud will He return ere long:
Therefore they stand on guard by day, by night,
Strenuous and strong.

They do, they dare, they beyond seven times seven
Forgive, they cry God’s mighty word aloud:
Yet sometimes haply lift tired eyes to Heaven—
“Is that His cloud?”
~Christina Rossetti from “Ascension Day”

 

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Stretching Himself as if again,
through downpress of dust
upward, soul giving way
to thread of white, that reaches
for daylight, to open as green
leaf that it is…
Can Ascension
not have been
arduous, almost,
as the return
from Sheol, and
back through the tomb
into breath?
Matter reanimate
now must reliquish
itself, its
human cells,
molecules, five
senses, linear
vision endured
as Man –
the sole
all-encompassing gaze
resumed now,
Eye of Eternity.
Relinquished, earth’s
broken Eden.
Expulsion,
liberation,
last
self-enjoined task
of Incarnation.
He again
Fathering Himself.
Seed-case splitting.
He again
Mothering His birth:
torture and bliss.
~Denise Levertov  “Ascension”

 

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We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed .
~Malcolm Guite “Ascension”

 

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Heidelberg Catechism Question and Answer 49

Q. How does Christ’s ascension to heaven
benefit us?

A. First, he is our advocate
in heaven
in the presence of his Father.

Second, we have our own flesh in heaven
as a sure pledge that Christ our head
will also take us, his members,
up to himself.

Third, he sends his Spirit to us on earth
as a corresponding pledge.

By the Spirit’s power
we seek not earthly things
but the things above, where Christ is,
sitting at God’s right hand.

 

 

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It doesn’t matter what you have been or what you have done. It doesn’t matter how flawed and foolish you are.

When the eyes of God the Father look at you, they see the ascended Jesus; when they listen to you, they hear him.

When God looks and listens to you, he sees and hears infinite beauty . . . He sees Jesus not sitting at the right hand but standing on his behalf, advocating for him.
~Tim Keller

 

Jesus is not on sabbatical from His earthly flesh; this day of observance of His ascension to heaven forty days after His Resurrection reminds us He remains flesh, just like our flesh,  while sitting at the right hand of God the Father – our representative, our interceder, our advocate.

The clouds that veil that thin line between earth and heaven still can’t help but shine with His glory.   We remain directly connected by our flesh/His flesh to God in heaven.

 

 

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Lifting a Veil of Gauze

barnstormingblog3 Comments

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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

 

 

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Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. 
Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
~Leonora Carrington from The Hearing Trumpet

 

 

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Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

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Too much of my life is lived behind a gauzy veil, hiding my face and feelings so my flaws and foibles are not so obvious to the world.

Yet God lifts my veil as a groom does his bride’s;  He reminds me I’m made in His image and He wants to see me wholly to make me holy.

Just as the dawn restores with light what has dwelled in darkness, God removes our shroud of hiddenness to tell us: “You, my child, are beautiful because I made you.”

 

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Every Green Moment

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sunrise82414

 

aprilsunsetpoplar

 

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.
~Ted Kooser “A Birthday Poem”

 

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Right now
all is green~
every square inch
and every misty mythical moment.

So I feast while I can,
knowing soon the darkness descends
and I too am called
to come home,
the bells I bear
swinging and ringing.

 

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What Remains of My Day

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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day

 

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To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out:
“I am an evening cloud too.”
They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me.
Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings.
That is how evening clouds greet each other.
They had recognized me.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God

 

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During the quiet moments in the evening after we ascend the hill to watch the sun descend the sky, we see clouds move and change in the diminishing light.  They’re unable to remain the same as they are pushed across the horizon, constantly reinvented and renewed, adopting new shapes, new colors, new juxtapositions.

Even when I believe things will never change, they will,  and I will.  What is left of the remains of the day may be the best yet.

If I stop, watch and listen, I’ll soon hear that greeting of recognition.

 

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