Category: noticing

Hard at Work on Labor Day

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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”

I believed only air
stretched between the dogwood

and the barberry: another
thoughtless human assumption

sidetracking the best story
this furrow spider knew to spin.

And, trying to get the sticky
filament off my face, I must look,

to the neighbors, like someone
being attacked by his own nervous

system, a man conducting an orchestra
of bees. Or maybe it’s only the dance

of human history I’m reenacting:
caught in his own careless wreckage,

a man trying to extricate himself,
afraid to open his eyes.
~Jeff Worley “Walking Through a Spider Web” from Lucky Talk

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.

Lyrics from E.B.White poem “Natural History”
The spider, dropping down from twig
Unfolds a plan of her devising
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising

And all that journey down through space
In cool descent and loyal hearted
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning

Lyrics

Take the silver thread of a spider’s web
And spin, spin, spin
Silver wings to fly and sing
Upon the wind
High above the trees, across the seas
And through the sky
To the rainbow’s bend, where stories never end
And dreams never die

Come and See: So the House was Filled…

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Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 

So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. 

Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.
John 12: 1-11

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”

I am a man who has hoped, in time,
that his life, when poured out at the end,
would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’
like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit.

I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs.
I am an old man full of love.
I am a man of faith.

But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place.
Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat,
in the fog, in the dark.

Even a man of faith knows that …
we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.
~Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow

 She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial.
Mark 14:8

Last week, it became apparent one warm late summer evening that in the thick bushes lining the front of our farmhouse under our windows, some animal had died.

The stink wafted on the breeze into our bedrooms through our summer-open windows.

The outdoor farm cats and our dog were accounted for, so it must have been a dead squirrel, a raccoon or even a (actually dead) possum, all occasional nighttime visitors to our cat food dish on the nearby front porch.

Trying to find the offending carcass would involve cutting through dense foliage that had been growing over two decades – not an easy task to undertake. So we closed the windows and hoped the smell would dissipate quickly.

Surprisingly, a day later it was mostly gone, much to our relief. It is possible another animal scavenger decided it was worth hauling away. We were most grateful the smell of death was no longer filling our house…

Just the week before this scripture section from the book of John, Martha warned Jesus that opening Lazarus’ tomb would release the inevitable stench of death. Yet when Lazarus was raised, the odor of death was overcome by renewal and restoration.

When Martha’s sister Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with an expensive fragrant oil, normally used in preparation for burial, it fills the entire house with its perfume. Jesus sees it as a harbinger for what is to come in the next week.

His faith in God’s plan means Jesus goes through enough to kill Him.

In this broken world, we live in the smudge and stench of mortal man’s smell of death, yet we are saved by this crushed, dying Savior who pours out a perfume of Himself for us.

Like Mary, let us also do what we can:
filling God’s house with His fragrance.

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.

Reveling in Rays of Light

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A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.
I feel no obligation to deal with politics.
I do feel a responsibility to society.
A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy;
true, not false; lively, not dull;
accurate, not full of error.
He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world;
he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge.
Much writing today strikes me
as deprecating, destructive, and angry.
There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger.
But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion,
their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad:
one role of the writer today is to sound the alarm.
The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late,
and not much is being done.
Instead of carting rocks from the moon,
we should be carting the feces out of Lake Erie.
…I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer
if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle,
to accept the warming rays of the sun,
and to report them, whenever,
and if ever, they happen to strike me.
~E.B. White 1969 (on writing)

It is tiresome always feeling angry
about what it is happening in the world,
feeling that everything has become political.

I’m tired of reading (and writing) words of frustration,
but want to rail against the meanness that surrounds us,
and push back the bully to seek out a balance
of kindness, perspective and insight.

When I need to feel something other than mad,
I walk as far as I can go,
look up, revel in the gift of rays of light
and bask in their warmth and promise.

I will accept what the Sun has to offer
and tell about it
so that my anger drains away
like so much waste flushed down a pipe,
never to be seen again.

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.

An Acceptance of Decline

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In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
~Wendell Berry “September 2”

And when I rise, let me rise
Like a bird, joyfully.
And when I fall, let me fall,
Like a leaf, gracefully, without regret.
And when I stand, let me stand,
Like a tree, strong and tall.
And when I lie, let me lie,
Like a lake, peacefully, calm and still.
And when I work, let me work,
Like a bee, wholeheartedly.
And when I play, let me play,
Like a breeze, fresh and cool, light and clear.
~adapted from Wendell Berry’s “When I Rise” in The Mad Farmer Poems

The thistles, rooted out, throng in again;
The single regal rose is mobbed by weeds;
The plums, the pears, the ripening apples, rain
In the sun; and past summer plants new seeds.

Here, or there, these common yearly things
Repeat, repeat, and gardens do not range:
Yet thistles, roses, fruit trees, birds, and stings
Come to an end, and the church bells sound a change.

These many soft declensions of the day,
So hard to take to heart, bear life away.
~Dunstan Thompson from “Passage” from Here At Last Is Love

This end-of-summer winding down,
a descent into shorter days and longer nights,
this preparation for autumn austerity,
reminds me to accept my own slow decline ~
an emptying husk
once so full of fruit and seed,
now clinging to what is left of me ~
still filled with the joys, the tears, the eyes
of a brimming-over heart.

Each is Nothing Without the Others

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Theirs is a perfection of pure form.
Nobody but has his proper place and knows it.
Everything they do is functional.
Each foray in a zigzag line
Each prodigious lifting
Of thirty-two times their own weight
Each excavation into the earth’s core
Each erection
Of a crumbly parapetted tower —

None of these feats is a private pleasure,
None of them done
For the sake of the skill alone —

They’ve got a going concern down there,
A full egg-hatchery
A wet-nursery of aphids
A trained troop of maintenance engineers
Sanitation experts
A corps of hunters
And butchers
An army

A queen
Each
Is nothing without the others, each being a part
Of something greater than all of them put together
A purpose which none of them knows
Since each is only
The one thing that he does. There is
A true consistency
Toward which their actions tend.
The ants have bred and inbred to perfection.
The strains of their genes that survive survive.
Every possible contingency
Has been foreseen and written into the plan.

Nothing they do will be wrong.
~Daniel Hoffman “Ants” from Beyond Silence

The ant in the shadow of this blade of grass
Is indifferent to my presence, to the action
Of the day, to the creaking of the limbs
Of the sycamore, to the sun lowering itself
Slowly from the scaffolding of the sky…

The ant has not moved.  It is deep in meditation.

…Ants understand
The principle of undefiled silence.  My ant glows
Like charcoal now in the lengthening rays of the sun.
I kneel and whisper, “Look up at me.  I’m here.”
~John Gilgun from “The Ant in the Shadow of This Blade of Grass”

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant...

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing…

…I did this.
~Jane Hirshfield from “Today When I Could Do Nothing”

The other day, as I sat down in the grass to take pictures, I felt a tickle at the nape of my neck. I reached up, felt something, and when I looked to see what it was, I found a tiny ant crushed in my fingers.

Suddenly it felt like things were crawling everywhere on me, especially my scalp. I shook out my hair and clothes and found there weren’t any more ants. It was only one unfortunate, defenseless victim who chose the wrong place and time to inhabit me.

As a child, I was fascinated by the ant hills in the woods and fields of our small farm. I would track yards and yards of ant trails from the busy mounded colonies to tree trunks and other sources of food, watching the single-file, single-minded insects heading through all sorts of terrain to sustain their community. Having ants crawling on me wasn’t a problem then – they were part of my exploration of creation … sometimes they explored me. So I’m sympathetic to a solitary ant’s curiosity.

When we share the same few square inches of landscape, we want to ask one another: How is your life? hoping to fathom each other’s heart. We are each of us a part of something greater than all of us put together.

In this small corner of the internet, I share words or pictures I hope might bring a smile, a nod of recognition, or a moistened eye, wanting to find common ground with people I likely will never meet in the chaos of existence.

So I ask you every now and again
because I want to know:
how is your life?

Though I may do nothing else of import
in this scatter-mess of life’s anthill, I can do this:
I’m here, exploring and caring,
listening for your comments, feedback and messages.
Nothing you say will be wrong…

The Mundane Becomes Miraculous

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Last night
we were laying in bed
when my husband
rolled over and said,
“Do you hear birds?”
I said I heard
the laundry
dragging itself along
the inside of the dryer
as it turned.

My grandparents’ neighbor,
Doris, once said she heard
birds in the chimney.
Her in-home helper confessed
they weren’t birds—
she’d had a baby in the night
without knowing
she was pregnant.

Poems are like that,
insisting on being born,
heard, making themselves
known
as soon as we’re quiet
and still. We hear
birdsong in the ordinary,
and it sings us awake
in the dark
until the mundane becomes
miraculous.
~Elizabeth Wickland “Do You Hear Birds?”

Like people or dogs, each day is unique
and has its own personality quirks
which can easily be seen if you look closely.
But there are so few days as compared to people,
not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising
if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people.

But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed,
unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle.

For some reason we like to see days pass,
even though most of us claim
we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time.

We examine each day before us with barely a glance
and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,
and wait in a bored sort of way for the next,
when we are convinced,
our lives will start for real.

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted,
as some days are,
with the right amounts of sunlight and shade,
and a light breeze scented with a perfume made
from the mixture of fallen apples,
corn stubble, dry oak leaves,
and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
~Tom Hennen  “The Life of a Day”

Age concentrates the mind.
The moment you realize you will no longer do something
you’ve done all your life.
The moment you realize that you will now need to do something you’ve never had to do before.
The moment you realize that what used to be will never be the same.

Some of this could lend itself to melancholy.
But there is also a bigness to such moments that allows for wonder.
A sense that you can’t quite comprehend it all.

Like any life, mine has had its pain,
yet from the outset it seems to have been graced
by unbelievable people and events.

An anthology of miracles.
~Roger Rosenblatt from “The World is a Room with a Piano Waiting to be Played”

I am ashamed to admit I squander time shamelessly,
blind and deaf to what is happening around me,
waiting for that particularly special day
I always dreamed of,
tossing off mundane yet irreplaceable moments
as somehow not measuring up nor exciting enough.

The shock is:
there have been nearly 40 years
of such ordinary days on this farm,
one passing by after another,
emerging fresh each morning
from the mundane duff and stuff of life,
and wouldn’t you know…
every single one has ended up being exactly what I’m looking for.

The Roar of Sunset

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I go to nature not because
its flowers and sunsets speak
to me (though they do) or
listen to me inquire but

because I have filled it with
unintentionality, so that I
can miss anything personal in
the roar of sunset, so that

I can in beds of flowers hold
my head up too.
~A.R. Ammons from The Ridge Farm from Complete Poems

Take the tangle instead of the trouble it causes.
Take the world inside
as seriously as any other.
Take your elderly mother and father
at face value as they have to.
Take the mirror of the sky
mirrored in the bay.
Take the swell of new-mown hay
and the river conversing
where the valley opens its mouth
and the land begins to creak less
as the evening steals light away—
Take the wick in the far hills
and take the sun and the wind
and the look of nothing for granted.
Take a little less, all right
and try not to take fright.
Take the end in mind
instead of the end in sight.
~Brian Turner “Take This” from Taking Off

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Hours

Each of us,
intentionally made by our Creator
in His image,
yet we discover the beauty and terror of living
in His shadow.

So much happens which we don’t intend
but there is nothing unintentional with God.

Books and lectures tell us to live intentionally
while each day contains something that
brings us to our knees.

I tell myself:
even though I don’t know what tomorrow will be,
I will not take fright
Like a flower, I’ll hold my head up
I’ll just keep going
while taking His Hand and following
wherever He intends to take me.

The Winds and Sea Obey…

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rialto1

And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A gale arose on the lake, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’

And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm.

They were amazed, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’
Matthew 8:23-27

rialto2

Sweet Jesus, talking 
   his melancholy madness, 
     stood up in the boat 
       and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry. 
   So everybody was saved 
      that night… 
       
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes 
   like the wind over the water — 
      sometimes, for days, 
        you don’t think of it.

 Maybe, after the sermon, 
   after the multitude was fed, 
     one or two of them felt 
       the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight 
   before exhaustion, 
      that wants to swallow everything, 
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy, 
    as they are now, forgetting 
       how the wind tore at the sails 
          before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding 
   as he always was — 
      a thousand times more frightening 
         than the killer storm.
~Mary Oliver from “Maybe”

rialto3

We sleep through our diminishing days
even more than we sleep through the nights,
unfocused on each passing moment
which never is to come again. 

Those moments crash to shore,
then pull back to be lost forever.

There is a blindness in us all
about what is inevitably coming,
how we tumble through the years like waves,
overcome by their passage,
helpless to stop them.

Yet He is tender and luminous and demanding 
He speaks to us with the same words
as He addresses the relentless stormy destructive sea.

Peace be still!

And so we obey in our helplessness,
forgiven, saved by grace,
so silky and sorry.

A Cloud of Stink

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Like a piece of rotten meat
which not only stinks
right on its own surface
but also surrounds itself
with a stinking molecular cloud of stink,
so, too, each island of the archipelago
created and supported a zone of stink around itself.
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

If you’re looking for sympathy
you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

As I’ve written elsewhere, I spend over an hour a day dealing with the excrement of my farm critters.

This is therapeutic time for me as I have deep respect for the necessity to clean up and compost what is smelly/stinky/yucky and biblically objectionable. (Deuteronomy 23:12-14)

None of us, including God, want to take a walk having to pick our way around poop.

As I’m busy picking up manure, I watch our dogs seek out the smelliest, most vile things they can find in the barn or field (preferably dead) and roll themselves around in it one after another until they are just as stinky as the stuff they found. They are clearly joyous about it, especially when they do it together. It is curious throw-back behavior that I’ve assumed, wearing my animal behaviorist hat, was about a wild predator covering up their scent in order to stalk and capture prey more effectively without being detected – except they are really truly so smelly that any prey could sense them coming from a mile away and would learn quickly that a moving creature that smells like poop or a dead carcass is bad news and to be avoided.

This is the main reason our farm dogs live full time outdoors. We prefer to avoid stinky dirty creatures too. So I’ve tried to understand this behavior for what adaptive purpose it may have.

What makes the most sense to me is the “pack mentality” that suggests that once one dog/wolf rolls in something objectionable, that the rest of the pack does too. This is a unifying theme for anxious individuals – they aren’t really on their own if they smell and blend in with the rest of the pack. So they spread the “wealth,” so to speak.

Stink up one, stink up all. Like team spirit, it seems to improve morale – until it doesn’t anymore.

I’ve been feeling covered with stink myself lately as I’ve searched for those sympathetic around me and found myself stuck between shit and syphilis. There are so many divisive opinions right now about a variety of current issues; vile nonsense has been flying right and left on social media as well as face to face. The theory is if all stink the same from rolling in piles of misinformation, we are then no longer alone.

Yet our destiny does not have to include believing, sharing and “flinging” the stuff that stinks to see who it will stick to. I no longer want to be a target.

Time for a bath.
Time for soap and cleansing and some serious self-examination.
Time to stop joyously rolling around in it.
Time to bury the excrement so we’re not staring at the ground, picking our way around the piles and can actually hold our heads up to see where we’re heading.

A Time Less Bold

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Would you believe I’ve been looking
for rain, here, with few days remaining
in this fleeting season of summer?
Our days are numbered that we might
share with the sun in a clear blue sky
and the hours growing warmer,
and I have kept an eye out for the clouds.
Only I wish for the conditions and doubt
that might send us all deep inside
our dark homes to sleep and read and pray
in preparation for the coming colder days.
Would you believe that the sight
of slate gray spanning horizon to zenith
and down is one I am quite taken with?
~David K. Wheeler “The Cold Season” from Contingency Plans

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
~Philip Larkin “Mother, Summer, I”

Summer grass aches and whispers.

It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours
       out wishes to the overhead stars.

The rain hears; the rain answers; the rain is slow 
        coming; the rain wets the face of the grass.
~Carl Sandberg “Summer Grass”

August rushes by like desert rainfall,
A flood of frenzied upheaval,
Expected,
But still catching me unprepared.
Like a match flame
Bursting on the scene,
Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.
Like a dream
Of moon and dark barely recalled,
A moment,
Shadows caught in a blink.
Like a quick kiss;
One wishes for more
But it suddenly turns to leave,
Dragging summer away.
– Elizabeth Maua Taylor “August”

The endless clear skies of August
now broken with exuberant clouds,
rain falling in warm gusts,
leaves landing on browned ground.

This summer ended up being simply too much –
an excess of everything bright and beautiful,
meant to make us joyful,
yet bold and exhausting in its riches.

From endless hours of daylight,
to high rising temperatures and wildfires,
to palettes of smoke-filled landscapes
to fruitfulness and abundant blooms.

While summer always fills a void
after enduring cold spare dark days
the rest of the year,
I still depend on autumn returning.

I welcome darkening times back,
knowing how much I miss
those drear twilight months of longing
for the overwhelming fullness of summer.