Category: noticing

Throwing Away the Key

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When we look long at one another,
we soften, we relent, listen,

might forgive. We allow for silence
—and when we see each other,

are known, and in that moment
might change

though nothing has moved
or been spoken.

There are some who say
the walls cannot be broken,

but suddenly we are in a free place,
and the fields

that extend from its center
stretch for miles

as if out of the pupil and the iris
of that momentary kingdom.
~Annie Lighthart “When We Look” from Pax

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut.

It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.

If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.
~Annie Dillard from “Living Like Weasels”

The pupil and iris are a portal to our thoughts, our dreams, our passions and our fears. They are simultaneously window and mirror, revealing feelings we try to keep to ourselves.

Locking eyes can be one of the most thrilling, stomach-butterflies, ecstatic moments of connection. It can be tender, loving, reassuring and encouraging.

Or it can be intimidating and terrifying. I tend to avoid eye contact when passing a stranger on a dark street, or when engaged in a very stressful public interaction. I don’t want to reveal my insecurity, vulnerability, or worry through direct eye contact. While studying primates in Africa, I learned never to look a baboon in the eye as it can communicate aggression and instigate an attack.

So instead, I learned to look at my feet.

I’d much rather lock eyes and learn everything I can about you. I want to dive deep into who you are, breaking down the walls and dismantle the barriers that keep us apart from one another. Then I’m letting you in too. The black holes of our inner universe.

After all, this is preparation when we see the face of God and allow Him to lock into our eyes, knowing our truth.

No keys needed forevermore.

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Pure State of Light

barnstormingblog4 Comments

How hard it is to take September
straight—not as a harbinger
of something harder.

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent
scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent
of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end
of summer, and longs to haul it in
when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.
It leaves us by degrees
only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,
Pure State of Light and Heat, the height
to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf’s off the tree
no day following can fall free
of the drift of melancholy.
~Mary Jo Salter “Absolute September”

Only nine days left of summer –
I search the skies for what might be left of it.

The mornings lighten later,
evenings darken sooner.

How can I not sadden at the change?

Yet this is where I am in life,
this time of bringing inside the garden and orchard
to savor and salvage before the rains come.

The light leaves behind ripened fruit of foraged memories;
in the darkening, its purity sweetens over time.

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Waves of Color and Light

barnstormingblog1 Comment

When I crack open
the door beyond
my ruminations,

I find starry
bouquets
of color—
crimson,
apricot,
and yellow
at the threshold.

Dahlias wrapped
in silk ribbon
wait for me
on the porch.

Their petals
long to touch
my face,

to widen
my eyes

so I may see
the waves

of pulsing light,
alive and fragrant,

like love
yearning
to share
her secrets.

I breathe in
tenderness
of flower bodies,

cherish
the blossoming
air in my chest,

I breathe out
from brightening
lungs,

a soul
soothed
by the scent
of earth,

a heart
encouraged
to bloom
at night.
~Claire Coenen “A Secret of Life” from The Beautiful Keeps Breathing

Is it possible for the heart to bloom
with a rainbow of colors that arise
from simple dust?

For we are made of blown dust,
with God-breathed air inflating our lungs,
as we become what He visioned us to be:

the blossoming manifestation of His Love

Vibrant, abundant, reflecting
Him with every twist and turn,
lovingly picked and gathered and cherished.

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Upon the Bough of Morning

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The crust of sleep is broken
Abruptly—
I look drowsily
Through the wide crack.
I do not know whether I see
Three minds, bird-shaped,
Flashing upon the bough of morning;
Or three delicately tinted souls
Butterflying in the sun;
Or three brown-fleshed, husky children
Sprawling hilarious
Over my bed
And me.
~Jeanne D’Orge “Matins” (published in 1917)

This morning I broke through the misty tides of my dreams,
surfacing to cool morning air and prelude of a dawn bird chorus.

Today I wake imagining who I might be from a myriad of dreams…

Sometimes I wake as if once again a young girl,
sun coming through frilly curtains to shower my face with a warming light.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a sleep-thirsty student, hoping to snooze another 15 minutes before class.

Sometimes I wake once again as if a new mother,
dripping and leaking at the sound of my baby’s cries.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a weary farmer, up much of the night with a laboring mare and slow-to-suck foal.

Sometimes I wake as if once again a preoccupied physician, mentally reviewing the night’s phone calls and concerns.

Today I wake as a grandma, wishing my bed would bounce with a pile of birds and butterflies and jubilant children, wishing me good morning and eager to see me up and at ’em.

So who am I?

I was, I am, I will be all those things, as I hang tight to the bough of morning.

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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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Hiding Nothing

barnstormingblog1 Comment

You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him.
He wants to see you as you are,
He wants to be gracious to you.
You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers,
as if you were without sin;
you can dare to be a sinner.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together

In your hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know
They are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?

But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
The tulips, and the pines?

Listen, all you have to do is start and
There’ll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
Slipping over rocks?

And speaking of stones, what about
The little ones you can
Hold in your hands, their heartbeats
So secret, so hidden it may take years

Before, finally, you hear them?
~Mary Oliver “in your hands” from Swan: Prose and Poems

When I take myself to the doctor, I trust I’m seeing someone who tries to know me thoroughly enough that he or she can help me move out of illness into better health.

This is how acceptance feels: trusting someone enough to come out of hiding, allowing them to see the parts of me I prefer to keep hidden.

As a physician myself, I am reminded by the amount of “noticing” I did in the course of my work. Each patient, and there were so many,  deserved my full attention for the few minutes we were together.  I started my clinical evaluation the minute I entered the room and I began taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues offered up, sometimes unwittingly, by another human being.

During the COVID pandemic, my interactions with patients became all “virtual” so I didn’t have the ability to observe as thoroughly as I usually did. Instead, I needed them to tell me outright what was going on in their lives, their minds and their hearts in both spoken or written words. I couldn’t ‘see’ them, even on a screen, in the same way as face to face in the same room.

How can someone call out their worries to me when they are hidden behind a camera lens?

I can’t witness first hand the trembling hands, their sweatiness, their scars of self injury.  Still, I am their audience and a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand their fears to best help them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, accepting them for who they are, with every wart and blemish, offering them the gift of compassion and simply be there for them at that moment.

God isn’t blinded in His Holy work as I am in my clinical duties. He knows us thoroughly because He made us; He knows our thoughts before we put them into words. There is no point in trying to stay hidden from Him.

He holds us, little pebbles that we are, in His Hand, and He listens to our secret heartbeats.

Those of us who believe we can remain effectively hidden will never be invisible to God.

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Transfiguring the Trivial

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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing,
a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail,
the dust in the barn door; a moment,- –
and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect;
but it leaves a relish behind it,
a longing that the accident may happen again.
~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”

Man Scything Hay by Todd Reifers
dust motes and insects in the barn

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

The accident of light does happen,
again and again,
but when I least expect it. 

I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone. 

Yet in that moment,
everything is changed and transformed forever. 

The thing itself,
trivial and transient becomes something other, 
merely because of how it is illuminated. 

And so am I, trivial and transient,
lit from outside myself, winnowed and
transfigured by a love and sacrifice
that I can never deserve.

It was and is no accident.

My heart is readies for earth to be hurled to heaven’s Light.

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The Work of Weaving Dreams

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Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day.
Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly,
then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.

I too spin elaborate dreams at night:
some remembered,
some bare fragments,
some shattered,
some potentially yield a meal.

We work because we are hungry.
We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.

Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams
~out of thin air and gossamer strands~
where nothing existed before,
not as a trap or lure or lair
but as a work of beauty-
a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.

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And So It Goes…

barnstormingblog4 Comments

Toward the end of August I begin to dream about fall, how
this place will empty of people, the air will get cold and
leaves begin to turn. Everything will quiet down, everything
will become a skeleton of its summer self. Toward

the end of August I get nostalgic for what’s to come, for
that quiet time, time alone, peace and stillness, calm, all
those things the summer doesn’t have. The woodshed is
already full, the kindling’s in, the last of the garden soon

will be harvested, and then there will be nothing left to do
but watch fall play itself out, the earth freeze, winter come.
~David Budbill “Toward the End of August”

As the calendar page flips to September this morning, I feel sad for what we leave behind, while knowing what is coming.

Summer is filled with so much overwhelming activity due to 18 hours of daylight accompanying weeks of unending sunny weather resulting in never-enough-sleep. Waking on a summer morning is brim full with possibilities: there are places to go, people who visit, new things to explore and of course, a garden and orchard bearing and fruiting out of control.

As early September days usher us toward autumn, our older grandchildren will adjust to a more predictable routine of school days, ripe with learning opportunities. Great teachers will lead them into vast new worlds of knowledge.

My teacher friend Bonnie coordinates an innovative introduction to fifth grade by asking her students, with some parental assistance, to make (from scratch) their own personalized school desks that will go home with them at the end of the school year. These students create their own learning center with both brains and hands, applying wood-burned and painted designs, with inspirational quotes for daily encouragement. Their desks represent a solid reminder of what they leave behind each year, while striving to become something new.

And so it goes, year after year.

I am wistful about September’s quiet commencement despite no school or job to return to. There is a cool freshness in the air as breezes begin to pluck and toss a few drying leaves from the trees. 

I watch the days play themselves out. No longer do I feel I must direct each moment. 

And so it goes, and so it goes.
And you are the only one who knows.

Mrs. Bonnie Patterson’s fifth graders’ handmade desks
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The Grandest Spectacle

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There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
~Victor Hugo from Les Misérables

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
~John Calvin quoted in John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait 

Already the end of August.
As another summer wraps up, I am blinded to the glory surrounding me in the seemingly commonplace.

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

I didn’t notice how the morning light was illuminating our walnut tree until I saw the perfect reflection of it in our koi pond — why had I marveled at a reflection instead of the real thing itself?

I mistook a spider’s overnight artwork in the grass: from a distance, it looked like a dew-soaked tissue draped like a tent over the green blades. When I went to go pick it up to throw it away in the trash, I realized I was staring at a small creature’s masterpiece.

I miss opportunities to rejoice innumerable times a day. It takes only a moment of recognition and appreciation to feel the joy, and in that moment time stands still. Life stretches a little longer when I stop to acknowledge the intention of creation as an endless reservoir of rejoicing. 

If the sea and the sky, a blade of grass, a leaf turning color, a chance reflection, a delicately woven web — if all this is made for joy, then maybe so am I.

Colorless, plain and commonplace me – created an image-bearer and intended reflector of Light?

Grandest of all is the spectacle of the interior of the soul;
yes then, so am I.

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