Than these November skies Is no sky lovelier. The clouds are deep; Into their grey the subtle spies Of colour creep, Changing that high austerity to delight, Till ev’n the leaden interfolds are bright. And, where the cloud breaks, faint far azure peers Ere a thin flushing cloud again Shuts up that loveliness, or shares. The huge great clouds move slowly, gently, as Reluctant the quick sun should shine in vain, Holding in bright caprice their rain. And when of colours none, Not rose, nor amber, nor the scarce late green, Is truly seen, — In all the myriad grey, In silver height and dusky deep, remain The loveliest, Faint purple flushes of the unvanquished sun. ~John Freeman “November Skies”
November is usually a barren landscape peasant-bare and farmer-plain. Even so, this austere month is sometimes offset by a royal light show in the skies with golden and purple hues painted by the rising and setting sun.
The sky has subtlety and nuance, not unlike what we see in a beloved and aging face. Indeed, a remembered beauty becomes liminal beyond the myriad gray. The horizon’s folds, lines and wrinkles glow with lambent light and depth.
Despite these darkening days, our sun is never vanquished. May we also be illuminated like these incredible skies, our grayness enrobed in royal golds and purples.
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And when light comes from nowhere I can see, when my soul is clothed in golden bandages, ribbons of grace, how can I tell you? Or even tell myself so I can write it down? No words are bright enough to catch those fingerprints of radiance that flicker on my wall. ~Luci Shaw from “I Say Light, Thinking”in Harvesting Fog
That afternoon, the air’s large hand took hold of their backyard apricot tree, the one that had fruited, bountifully, a lush yield in late summer, caught it in a downdraft of chill, shook it lightly, again, again, loosening each leaf from its thumb of stem. For two days I watched the leaves’ pale, ground-ward drift, each leaf singly, in its gentle shedding, among all the glints of gold, each crumpled flick of fiber from its stem’s thumb a departure, a declaration. An announcement, God saying, gently, Thank You for a lovely job. Now, time to let go. ~Luci Shaw “Loewy’s Apricot Tree, Fall 2022”
Here God lives, burrowing among the petals, cross- pollinating. Here is Christ’s mind juiced, joined, fleshed, celled.
Here is the clash, the roil, an invasion, not gentle as dew; the rose is unfurled violently until the scent explodes and detonates in the air
I awake with my mind as askew as my hair, brushing away the cobwebs of dreams, smoothing down worries ever present, curling the whiff of memories long forgotten.
And I realize these same molecules transmitting my thoughts also carried Christ’s while He walked this earth; the earthbound thoughts of God Himself, borne by His integration of chemistry with ions, in millions of electrical explosions per second.
My own mind trembles with the thought of it:
here God lives and shines His Light, here He leaves His radiant fingerprints, here He thinks in Words I understand, here He loves, catching me when I let go…
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Certain I can’t carry another sadness, I step outside and let the shine of the mid-morning sun stroke my cheek like a lover. And the air has a strange bright citrus tang. I inhale it again and again. Whatever it means to be alive, it has something to do with this— scent of leaf and spruce and shadow. The astonishing warmth of a late October day. The weight of loving another, that weight without which I would be nothing. ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “Whatever It Means”from The Wonderment: Poems
Night and day seize the day, also the night — a handful of water to grasp. The moon shines off the mountain snow where grizzlies look for a place for the winter’s sleep and birth. I just ate the year’s last tomato in the year’s fatal whirl. This is mid-October, apple time. I picked them for years. One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.
Fifty years later we hold each other looking out the windows at birds, making dinner, a life to live day after day, a life of dogs and children and the far wide country out by rivers, rumpled by mountains. So far the days keep coming. Seize the day gently as if you loved her. ~Jim Harrison, from “Carpe Diem” from Dead Man’s Float
What prayer or magic spell or luck leaves us breathless, thunder struck just from looking in each other’s eyes across the breakfast table? Surprise of love comes as a kind of Divine Grace, as if I’d never seen your face before and now am stunned that you adore the likes of me; whatever for I do not know but now you’re stuck and seem enamored of my face, its every ruck and deep crevasse your sheer delight; it defies all reason. Yet this spell causes us to rise and with no word we tenderly embrace. The sweetest feelings rush to fill the space as if God came in through an open door and we are nothing like we were before. ~Red Hawk “The Transformation” from #45 – Fall 2014 Tribute to Poets of Faith
Over forty-five years later, the days keep coming, a life lived together day after day after day.
I try not to take a single one for granted, each morning a gift to be seized gently, embraced with reverent gratitude.
There is so much to cling to, as if this were the only day, the only night, knowing it can never come again.
There is so much that has passed, like a blink – we wonder where time disappears to, where it hides after it disappears over the horizon.
There is so much to remember and never forget. There is so much yet to come that is unknowable.
So I seize each day, oh so gently, like a lover.
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a calling out to the others to see if they’re there; ~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. ~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life edited by David Friend
Over the past week, the cacophony from the constant calling of migrating geese has been deafening at times. They pass overhead by the hundreds on their way to their winter homes, sometimes landing in nearby harvested cornfields for a snack.
Soon they are on their way again. Their voices call out, commanding my full attention during the brief time they are here: going home, going home, I am going home.
I can’t help but notice; they are calling out to anyone who will listen.
It reminds me of my past doctoring work in my clinic; at times I felt overwhelmed by the amount of “noticing” I needed to do as part of my job. Each patient – and there were so many – deserved my full attention for the few minutes we are together.
I would start my clinical evaluation the moment I walked into the exam room, taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues sometimes offered by another human being.
How and why are they reaching out to me? What do they want and need me to notice and understand? I must listen carefully.
I become audience and a witness; even more, I must understand it in order to best assist them. I must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, offering them the gift of being noticed and being there for them, just them.
The doctoring work I did became its own kind of love: the patient became the entire focus for a few moments. I was grateful to be watching and listening.
As my patients called out to me, on their own life journey, may they never have felt they were playing to an empty house.
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Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree. ~Louise Glück “All Hallows”
All houses wherein men have lived and died Are haunted houses. Through the open doors The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall.
The stranger at my fireside cannot see The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear; He but perceives what is; while unto me All that has been is visible and clear…
…So from the world of spirits there descends A bridge of light, connecting it with this, O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “Haunted Houses”
Most of the apples have already fallen. The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls. But what if my land is the land of the living? The bird from the dust takes flight Then turns multiple—
A handful of birds rising in the dead sky Opened to receive them. But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them. Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust. ~Lindsay Turner from Halloween
The old trees on this farm have souls, bearing fruit for all to enjoy, the deer, the raccoons, the birds, our family.
Rarely, when one topples in a windstorm, its 100-plus years of fruitfulness abruptly ended, I sense its soul’s return to the dust beneath, sinking back to the roots which held firm through many storms, its hollow trunk now a telescope to the beyond.
Goodbye, sweet broken soul. To dust we someday return until called back to fruitfulness…
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou from “When Great Trees Fall”
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Once again, the field rehearses how to die. Some of the grass turns golden first. Some simply fades into brown. Just this morning, I, too, lay in corpse pose, practicing how to let myself be totally held by the earth without striving, how to meet the day without rushing off to do the next necessary or beautiful thing. Soon, the grass will bend or break, molder or disintegrate. Every year, the same lesson in how to join the darkness, how to be unmade, how quietly we might lean into the uncertainty, how generous the ground. ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “Shavasana”
The grasses are collapsing, withering to the ground, all spent after a season of flourishing. The next wind and rain storm will finish the job. Stems and leaves become rich compost in the seasons that follow, a generous bed for future seeds.
We expect this fading away.
I know it doesn’t mean the end – there is still vitality lying dormant, hidden away, waiting for the right moment to re-emerge, resurrect and live again.
I know this too about myself. The dying-time-of-year doesn’t get easier. It seems more real-time, vivid, and personal. Colors fade, leaves wrinkle and dry, fruit falls unconsumed and softened.
Our beauty, so evident only a short time ago, thrives inward, silently germinating, ready to rise again when called forth.
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It takes a peculiar vision to be able to detect Precisely where
The field grasses brushed by blowing Stars and the odor of spring In the breath of sweet clover buds And the star-mingled calls of the toads In the threading grasses and the paws Of the clover brushing through the field Of stars and the star-shaped crickets In the ears of the sweet grasses And the tail of the night flicking Through the calls of the clover and the spring Stars slinking past the eyes of midnight And the hour of the field mouse passing Through the claws of the stars and the brushing Haunches of the weeds and starry grasses Threading through the eyes of the mouse And the buds of the stars calling With the sweet breath of the field
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay. Soon, on cold nights, you’ll be saying “Excuse me” if you want to get out of your chair. But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat is “Excuse me.” Nor Einstein’s famous theorem. Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.” In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. In this world where much is missing, a cat fills only a cat-sized hole. Yet your whole body turns toward it again and again because it is there. ~Jane Hirshfield “A Small-Sized Mystery” from Come, Thief
(from the Barnstorming archives)
Chores at our farm are rarely routine since our batch of four male kittens were born 6 months ago. They were delivered unceremoniously in the corner of one of the horse stalls by their young mother whose spontaneous adoption we accepted a mere four weeks before, not realizing we were accepting five kitties, not just one.
They were born under a Haflinger horse’s nose, and amazingly survived the ordeal and managed to stay safe until the next day when we came in to clean and discovered them nicely warmed near a nice fresh pile of poop. What a birthing spot this mama had chosen. Thankfully Haflingers are tolerant about sharing their space as long as you don’t ask for a share of their food too…
We moved them and mama to a safer spot in the barn, away from big Haflinger feet, and they thrived, getting more adventuresome by the week, until they are now in full adolescent glory, mock fighting with each other, scrambling up and down the hay bales, using the shavings as their personal litter box, doing rodent patrol, and most of all, strolling along the shelves that line the stalls, breathing in the Haflinger smell, and rubbing their fur up against Haflinger noses through the wire. They are best of friends with these ponies in the light of day, as after all they were born right in a Haflinger bed.
But at night it’s another story. Each evening as I come out to do chores after returning home from work, it is pitch dark and the Haflingers, out in their winter paddocks, must walk with me one by one back to their box stalls for the night. Only this is now far more of an adventure thanks to four cats who glory in stealth attacks in the dark, like mountain lions in the shadows, waiting for their prey to pass by.
These four rascals are two tabbies, one black and one gray, all four perfectly suited to be camouflaged in the northwest dim misty fall evenings along a barely lit pathway between paddocks and barn. They flatten themselves tight on the ground, just inches from where our feet will pass, and suddenly, they spring into the air as we approach, just looking for a reaction from either the horse or myself. It never fails to unnerve me, as I’m always anticipating and fearing the horse’s response to a surprise cat attack.
Interestingly, the Haflingers, used to kitten antics all night long in the barn, are completely bored by the whole show, but when the tension from me as I tighten on the lead rope comes through to them, their head goes up and they sense there must be something to fear. Then the dancing on the lead rope begins, only because I’m the one with the fear transmitted like an electric current to the Haflinger. We do this four times along the path to the barn as four kittens lay in wait, one after another, just to torment me. By the end of bringing in eight horses, I’m done in by my own case of nerves.
You’d think I’d learn to stop fearing, and start laughing at these pranksters. They are hilarious in their hiding places, their attempts to “guard” the barn door from intruders, their occasional miscalculations that land them right in front of a hoof about to hit the ground. Why I haven’t had at least one squished kitten by now is beyond my comprehension.
Yet they survive to torment me and delight me yet another night. I cuddle them after the horses are all put away, flopping them on their backs in my arms, and tickling their tummies and scolding them for their contribution to my increasingly gray hair.
I’m a slow learner. These are like so many of my little daily fears, which seem to hide, blended in to the surroundings of my daily life, ready to spring at me without warning, looking like much bigger scarier things than they really are. I’m a highly skilled catastrophizer in the best of circumstances, and if I have a kitten-sized worry, it becomes a mountain lion-sized melodrama in no time. Only because I allow it to become so.
Stepping back, taking a deep breath, if I learn to laugh at the small stuff, then it won’t become a “cat”astrophe, now will it? If I can grab those fears, turn them over on their back and tickle their tummies until they purr, then I’m the one enjoying a good time.
I’ll try that the next time I feel that old familiar sensation of “what if?” making my muscles tense and my step quicken. I just might tolerate that walk in the dark a little better, whether it is the scary plane flight, the worry over a loved one’s health, the state of the economy, why there are ongoing wars causing civilian deaths, or the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring.
I’ll know that behind that mountain lion is a soft loving purring fur ball, granting me relief from the routine, for which I’m extremely grateful. Life is always an adventure, even if it is just a stroll down a barn lane in the dark wondering what might come at me next on the path.
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
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I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they arebut simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what C.S. Lewis callstheir “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence. ~Clyde Kilby in “Amazed in the Ordinary”
Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….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.
An open heart is alive to wonder, to the sheer marvel of “isness.” It is remarkable that the world is, that we are here, that we can experience it. This world is not ordinary. Indeed, what is remarkable is that it could ever look ordinary to us. An open heart knows “radical amazement.” An open heart and gratitude go together. We can feel this in our bodies. In the moments in my life when I have been most grateful, I have felt a swelling, almost a bursting in my chest. ~Marcus Borg from The Heart of Christianity
photo by Nicole Moorephoto by Nicole Moorephoto by Nicole Moorephoto by Nicole Moore
Much of the time I sleep-walk through each day, oblivious, as if in dense fog with unseeing wide-open eyes.
Especially if I’m rushing from here to there, I sense time slowing: I stumble through the days, the path appears indiscernible, my future uncertain, my purpose elusive.
How to stay awake and aware of the radical amazement of each moment given to me?
When I’m simply glad, everything becomes more vivid — the sounds of geese flying overhead, the smell of the farm, the layers of a foggy landscape, the taste of an autumn apple right from the tree, the string of fog-drop pearls on a spider web, the necessity and intensity of every breath, my purpose to be witness.
So wake me to be amazed anew -please- to see all that is around me. I want to chew on it again and again, simply savoring and simply glad.
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Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? ~William Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready” from Ask Me
Now after nearly seventeen years of daily writing here in this spot:
I have come to know you who I will never meet face to face in this life but who share with me: your love of the land, the clouds, the light, your families, your vocations and gifts, your hopes and dreams, and most of all — our Lord and Creator.
What do I want to remember about today? I treasure your encouragement as it finds its way here to light the gray and dusty corners of my life: a kind word, a silent tear, a gentle smile, a shared prayer.
What do I want you to remember about having visited here? I want you to feel the nurture of hope in these words, sensing the warmth of the sun on your face from these photos, to almost feel you are here, or as close as possible.
Mostly, I want you to know each morning, I invite you to walk with me as a fellow pilgrim.
Carry this with you, pass on its message to others. You never know where it might end up.
lyrics: Even before we call on Your name To ask You, O God, When we seek for the words to glorify You, You hear our prayer; Unceasing love, O unceasing love, Surpassing all we know. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Even with darkness sealing us in, We breathe Your name, And through all the days that follow so fast, We trust in You; Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace, Beyond all mortal dream. Both now and forever, And unto ages and ages, Amen.
Dawn comes later and later now, and I, who only a month ago could sit with coffee every morning watching the light walk down the hill to the edge of the pond and place a doe there, shyly drinking,
then see the light step out upon the water, sowing reflections to either side — a garden of trees that grew as if by magic — now see no more than my face, mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,
startled by time. While I slept, night in its thick winter jacket bridled the doe with a twist of wet leaves and led her away, then brought its black horse with harness that creaked like a cricket, and turned
the water garden under. I woke, and at the waiting window found the curtains open to my open face; beyond me, darkness. And I, who only wished to keep looking out, must now keep looking in. ~Ted Kooser “A Letter in October”
God knows we seek out light these autumn mornings
praying to see multicolors filling the lines outside; my face a shadow in a blackened window pane
Some mornings we can only see our own reflection mirrored by darkness, startled by time, as we wonder what comes next.
God knows, as each year passes, we need His Light illuminating us as we look beyond ourselves, but even more as we look within.
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