Category: stars

Out of Sight

barnstormingblog1 Comment

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.

~Eavan Boland “This Moment” from In a Time of Violence

photo by Nate Gibson

This moment,
when I ordinarily pay no attention,
when I have so many things to worry about,
when I try to fuss the future into submission…

This moment,
is when I need to realize if not now, then when,

This moment
won’t return, so I must not waste it.

This moment,
is my chance to see and taste and feel and love
as if there is no next moment.

This moment,
suddenly so sweet,
suddenly is gone,
out of sight,
so I follow.

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Moments Out of Sight

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

A neighborhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
~Eavan Boland “This Moment” from In a Time of Violence

Photo by William Albert Allard
photo by Nate Gibson

At times, particularly at night, I’m keenly aware of all the unknowable and uncountable lives happening behind closed doors and curtained windows, each one living their own sacred moment in time.

So many meals being eaten, baths taken, tears shed, stories told, prayers recited, kisses shared.

These moments are the blessings of a quotidian predictability that we try to pass on to our children. In our routines, we may become oblivious to the mysteries happening all around us: innumerable stars shining, fragile moths fluttering and sweetening apples hanging heavy — yet there is mystery within each of us as well.

In the dark of night, despite our weariness:
We are remarkably loved and loving.
We try our best in difficult times and circumstances.
We grieve losses while struggling to survive sorrows.
We seek purpose and meaning, despite feeling unworthy.

Each passing moment becomes one to cherish.
Each moment mysteriously holy and sweet.

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A Big Mistake?

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Dear Lord

Does the loud ticking
Of my alarm clock
Keep you awake?

Do you lie thinking
The stars in the sky
Were a big mistake?
~Charles Simic “Dear Lord” from No Land in Sight

photo by Josh Scholten

So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear…

The tremendous figure which fills the Gospel never concealed His tears. Yet He concealed something…

He never restrained His anger. Yet He restrained something…

There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or imperious isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
G.K. Chesterton in his closing words of Orthodoxy

The Starry Night -Vincent Van Gogh from MOMA

We see humor in the Bible–irony, puns, absurdity, parodies, paradox- yet we miss hearing the laughter of the heavens as we are simply too close to the joke to get it. In fact, we are likely the punch line of the joke more often than not. 

God shows remarkable restraint when it comes to observing the absurd and hilarious antics of His children. We don’t see verses such as, “Jesus laughed” or “Jesus smiled” or “Jesus stifled a chuckle”  even though He surely had plenty of opportunity. Either that or He perhaps God wrote us off as a big mistake.

Obviously, He hasn’t written us off. We’re still here and so is He.

We often take ourselves too seriously. A little joy and joke can’t hurt. Listening carefully, we just might hear the laughter of heaven itself.

photo by Emily Vander Haak
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Preparing the Heart: The Day-Star Waking

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Venus & Mercury

I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.
~Revelation 22:16

When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.
Matthew 2: 10

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.
9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
Luke 2: 8-9

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photo by Nate Gibson

There are a few moments between the blackness of a long dark night–something we have plenty of this time of year–and the renewal of the sunrise splash of color that spreads across the sky like spilled paint jars of pink and orange. Illuminated in those few moments is a transitional dawn-light or daybreak equivalent to the evening transition of twilight.

That is when the morning “stars” of Mercury and Venus become most visible. They don’t “twinkle” or appear effervescent like the night stars. They are solid radiant globes heralding the Sun to come.

The “star” guides and leads, breaking apart the darkest night.  It points to home, illuminates the birth of God come to earth as man, and presages the New Day to come. We are witnesses only if we arise early enough, peering through the clouds of everyday troubles, and prepare, ready for the dawning to come.

We must run, not walk, to meet the Redeemer.  This is what it was like for the shepherds and the magi.  This is what it is still like for us.  Our Day-Star awakens and we, our senses stolen by glory,  are overjoyed.

1. Whence is the goodly fragrance flowing,
Stealing our senses all away,
never the like did come a-blowing,
Shepherds, in flow’ry fields of May,
Whence is that goodly fragrance flowing,
Stealing our senses all away.

2. What is that light so brilliant,
breaking Here in the night across our eyes.
Never so bright, the day-star waking,
Started to climb the morning skies!
What is that light so brilliant, breaking,
Here in the night across our eyes.

3. Bethlehem! there in manger lying,
Find your Redeemer haste away,
Run ye with eager footsteps vieing!
Worship the Saviour born today.
Bethlehem! there in manger lying,
Find your Redeemer haste away.
~ Traditional French Carol

sunrise12814all

The Dome of Heaven

barnstormingblog3 Comments

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photo of Mt. Baker reflected in Wiser Lake by Joel DeWaard

Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,

And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.
~Sara Teasdale “Stars”

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photo by Joel DeWaard

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
…while the morning stars sang together
    and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Job 38 4a, 7

God Himself tells Job the first song was sung in celebration of the beginning of all things.  We weren’t there to hear it because we were not — yet.  A joyous celestial community of stars and angels sang as the world was pieced and sewn together bit by bit.  Man was the last stitch God made in the tapestry.

As the coda of the created world, we tend to take all this for granted as it was already here when we arrived on the scene: the soil we tread, the water we drink, the plants and creatures that are subject to us.  Yet this creation was already so worthy it warranted a glorious anthem, right from the beginning, before man.  We were not yet the inspiration for singing.

We missed the first song but we were there to hear it reprised a second time, and this time it really was about us–peace on earth, good will to men.  The shepherds, the most lowly and humble of us, those who would be surely voted least likely to witness such glory,  were chosen to hear singing from the heavens the night Christ was born.    They were flattened by it, amazed and afraid.  It drove them right off the job, out of the fields and into town to seek out what warranted such celebration.

Surely once again this song will ring out as it did in the beginning and as it did on those hills above Bethlehem.
The trumpet will sound.
In a twinkling of an eye we will all be changed.
And we will be able to sing along.
Hallelujah!
Amen and Amen.

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photo by Joel DeWaard

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photo by Josh Scholten

Reflecting Back the Light

barnstormingblog2 Comments

cavortingbuttercups

sundayevenin5

With the close approach of Mars this week (maximum size in the sky will be May 30), I recalled a similar time a few years back:

It was a treasured late summer evening when temperatures hover around 70 degrees, there was a slight cooling breeze, clear starlit skies, and barely a mosquito buzzing.  We had just returned from a lovely evening outdoor wedding for two special young friends,  with a special message from our pastor about the profound mystery of marriage, not just for newlyweds, but also for those of us married for many years. We are blessed in the knowledge we depend on God’s grace every day, trying to reflect it back to our children, our community, to each other.

We decided to hike up to the top of our hill after dark to catch the best view of our neighbor Mars before we brought our Haflinger horses in for the night.  Mars was there to see, orange and bright in the southeast sky. But the Haflingers seemed to be afflicted by strange Martian fever, or perhaps it was simply because we rarely wander out into the field in the dark with flashlights in hand. There was no moon yet when we were out –simply starlight and the far-off lights from Vancouver,  British Columbia to the north and Bellingham to the south.

The Haflingers started running in the dark, kicking and snorting and bucking with the joy of a starlit, Martian-lit summer evening. Only all we could see of the Haflingers were their ghostly white manes and tails moving across the fields, jumping and twisting and cavorting.

I’m sure over the generations, in the alpine meadows of the South Tyrol, there must have been some starlit moonless lights when the Haflinger herds would run together, and all you could see in the dark were floating disembodied white manes and tails.

Perhaps that is what enchanted the mountain peasants the most about their sturdy reliable golden companions—at night they become spirit and light. They shine like the stars, even from the ground, reflecting back the lights from the heavens.

And so, in our companionship with each other and with God, do we glow with His light and reflect it to those around us.

tonysept

tonynight

Invisible at Daybreak

barnstormingblog1 Comment

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

bench2

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.
~Galway Kinnell “Daybreak”

 

We know the stars,
heavenly or terrestrial,
still shine there, though made invisible,
hidden in plain sight at daybreak
yet throwing sparks,
ever eternally lit,
in the dark.

pnpsunset714

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

 

pnpsunset

sunrise615153

Strange Sweet Sorrow

barnstormingblog1 Comment

sunrise92314

The passing of the summer fills again
my heart with strange sweet sorrow, and I find
the very moments precious in my palm.
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shone, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,
who charges me to see all lovely things…
~Jane Tyson Clement from “Autumn”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

 

Journey Work of the Stars

barnstormingblog2 Comments

wwugrasses

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
~Walt Whitman

All photos were taken this week while walking past Western Washington University garden plots on my way to and from meetings on campus.   My routine tasks, my everyday journeyman duties, are rendered extraordinary in the light of petals, pollen, webs, pigment, fruit, seed pods and always, always the nurture of soil and rain.   I chanced upon a gardener yesterday and told him the difference his work makes in my day.  The rich visual and tactile variety in the gardens is like star-lit nebulae and galaxies scattered about in planter pots and plots.

He looked up, startled, so used to not being noticed,  and simply said, “it’s been a good year for the plants.”

Indeed it is.  A good year for us all.

wwupinks

empressfruit

wwugrasses1

wwupink

pinkhydrangea

wwugras

wwubloomgrass

coleuswwu

The Permanence of Light

barnstormingblog2 Comments

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

….a lesson about the permanence of light, finding its path when every course would seem blocked, and when even its source has long faded… 

An older woman comes upon a child looking at the stars. She tells him that it’s taken eons for the light to come this far. The boy asks if you can tell which stars are dead and which are living.

“No,” she answers, “it’s impossible. Still, what a beautiful mystery that is.”
~A. J. Harmon from “Good Letters” on patheos.com

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

The stars come up spinning
every night, bewildered in love.
They’d grow tired
with that revolving, if they weren’t.
They’d say,
“How long do we have to do this?”
~Rumi