Trust that there is a tiger, muscular Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been seen and never will be seen by any human eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword- fish will never near a ship, that far from cameras or cars elephant herds live long elephant lives. Believe that bees by the billions find unidentified flowers on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe in caves of contentment, bears sleep. Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun. I must trust all this to be true, though the few birds at my feeder watch the window with small flutters of fear, so like my own. ~Susan Kinsolving “Trust”
It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address. ~Thomas Smith “Trust”
When I stand at the window watching the flickers, sparrows, finches, juncos, grosbeaks, chickadees, and red-winged blackbirds come and go from the feeders, I wonder who is watching who.
They remain wary of me, fluttering away quickly if I approach with lens in hand. They fear capture, even within a camera. They have a life to be lived without my witness or participation. So much happens that I never see or know about.
I understand: I fear being captured too. I prefer to remain an enigma.
Even if only for a moment as an image preserved forever, I know it doesn’t represent all I am, all I’ve done, all I feel, all my moments put together. The birds and bees and snakes and horses are, and I am, so much more than one moment.
Only God sees us fully in every moment, witness to our freedom and captivity, our loneliness and grief, our joy and tears, our sleeping and waking, knowing our best and our worst.
And because He knows us so well and knows the address to which we will be delivered – in Him we must trust.
photo by Tomomi Gibson
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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
March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night,
but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion. ~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light Was Like.
This year, spring has been emerging early from an exceptionally warm and un-snowy winter, yet blizzard conditions last night closed the Cascade mountain passes with high winds causing extensive power outages in the Puget Sound region.
Our hilltop farm was spared overnight – we are grateful for light and heat this morning.
Up until now, all growing things have been several weeks ahead of the usual budding/blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape suddenly turns from monochrome to technicolor with a soundtrack going from forlorn to glorious.
Like most folks, I too yearn for spring to commence, tapping my foot impatiently as if I’m personally owed an extravagant seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.
We wait for the Great Physician’s announcement that His patient survived winter once again: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too addled by last night’s windstorm for you to expect much from her just yet.”
As we celebrate her imminent healing, we are reassured His Creation is still very much alive- we rejoice in this temporary home of ours. A promising prognosis for this patient coming out of the fog of winter: she lives, she breathes, she thrives, to bloom and sing with everything she’s got. So soon, so will I.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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Yesterday, running slowly in the gravel I saw a tiny bird feathered pulsating globe of white and gray on its back black pinprick eyes pointing up to the sky. I stooped down closely to peer. We stared at one another— creature to creature— for a small eternity. I scooped him into my hands and placed him gently an offering upright onto the grass whispering a prayer to the One who sees and knows each one every sparrow and every sorrow. ~Karen Swallow Prior “Creature to Creature”
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows. Luke 12:6-7
God of the sparrow, care for us, Speak in our sorrow, Lord of grief. Sing us Your music, lift our hearts, Pour out Your mercy, send relief. ~Craig Courtney (link to song below)
A little bird, with plumage brown, Beside my window flutters down, A moment chirps its little strain, Then taps upon my window-pane, And chirps again, and hops along, To call my notice to its song; But I work on, nor heed its lay, Till, in neglect, it flies away.
So birds of peace and hope and love Come fluttering earthward from above, To settle on life’s window-sills, And ease our load of earthly ills; But we, in traffic’s rush and din Too deep engaged to let them in, With deadened heart and sense plod on, Nor know our loss till they are gone. ~Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Sparrow”
The first thing I heard this morning was a soft, insistent rustle, the rapid flapping of wings against glass as it turned out,
a small bird rioting in the frame of a high window, trying to hurl itself through the enigma of transparency into the spacious light.
A noise in the throat of the cat hunkered on the rug told me how the bird had gotten inside, carried in the cold night through the flap in a basement door, and later released from the soft clench of teeth.
Up on a chair, I trapped its pulsations in a small towel and carried it to the door, so weightless it seemed to have vanished into the nest of cloth.
But outside, it burst from my uncupped hands into its element, dipping over the dormant garden in a spasm of wingbeats and disappearing over a tall row of hemlocks.
Still, for the rest of the day, I could feel its wild thrumming against my palms whenever I thought about the hours the bird must have spent pent in the shadows of that room, hidden in the spiky branches of our decorated tree, breathing there among metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie here tonight picturing this rare, lucky sparrow tucked into a holly bush now, a light snow tumbling through the windless dark. ~Billy Collins “The Christmas Sparrow”from Aimless Love
Through the winter, I feed the sparrows, the woodpeckers and chickadees, the juncos and finches and towhees, and yes — even the starlings.
They all would be fine without my daily contribution to their well-being, but in return for my provision of seeds, I am able to enjoy their spirited liveliness and their gracious ability to share the bounty with one another.
These birds give back to me simply by showing up, without ever realizing what their presence means to me.
How much more does God lay out for me on a daily basis to sustain me even if I fail to show up for Him?
How oblivious am I to His gracious and profound gifts?
How willingly do I share these gifts with others?
Unlike the birds, I could never survive on my own without His watchful care.
When life feels overwhelming, when I am filled with worries, sorrow, regrets and pain, I seek out this God who cares even for sparrows. He knows how to quiet my troubles and strengthen my faith and perseverance, a comfort that extends far beyond sunflower seeds.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
God of the sparrow, sing through us Songs of deliv’rance, songs of peace. Helpless we seek You, God our joy, Quiet our troubles, bid them cease, Quiet our troubles, bid them cease. Alleluia.
God of the sparrow, God of hope, Tenderly guide us, be our song, God of affliction, pain and hurt, Comfort Your children, make us strong, Comfort Your children, make us strong. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
God of the sparrow, care for us, Speak in our sorrow, Lord of grief. Sing us Your music, lift our hearts, Pour out Your mercy, send relief.
God, like the sparrow, we abide In Your protection, love and grace. Just as the sparrow in Your care, May Your love keep us all our days, May Your love keep us all our days. Amen. ~Craig Courtney
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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.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
I know this sound, first birds of morning. As a child, I waited for hours for the drape of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song, able at last to close my eyes. I know this sound, some kind of redemption, waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment even as the work of the previous day marks my bones in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls like a promise you hoped someone would keep. ~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light
Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.
Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.
It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.
When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:
“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…
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Whenever the question comes up, the poets all say the same thing: the only poem we’re interested in is the next poem, the one not written, the poem of tomorrow.
It’s a perfect answer, which conjures up a bit of hope and manages to place on the higher tray of the scale of pride a gram of modesty.
But the problem is as soon as you start to write it, the next poem no longer is the next poem, rather just another poem you are writing, and the next poem has become an imaginary mushroom waiting in the future in a dark forest of pine needles.
And that is probably why I have lost interest in this poem, in where it is going or how it will manage to find a way to end.
It could droop into a reverie, maybe shift to the doctor’s waiting room where I am entering it into a notebook, or circle back to that mushroom for all I care.
All I care about is the next poem, not this current one, which might even turn out to be my last—
the last orange on my miniature tree, a shroud pulled over my baby grand, the ultimate chirp of my canary, or, how about this? the final striped umbrella on the vacant beach of my soul? ~Billy Collins “The Next Poem”
It has been awhile since I posted my various local mushroom photos, so sharing Billy Collins’ poem about searching for the next poem to write gives me a good excuse.
After seventeen years of writing nearly daily, I sometimes run dry. Like Billy, I tend to be thinking about what comes next, rather than focusing on what is right in front of me.
I tend to forget about living in the “now” in my effort to reconcile yesterday with what I hope will happen tomorrow.
I forget that tomorrow isn’t a given and yesterday is old news already.
So I search for what otherwise might remain hidden and mysterious, hoping to find something worthy to share today.
I hope these not-so-imaginary mushrooms fill the bill, because I can’t help myself — I’m already thinking about what to write tomorrow.
instead of silly mushroom songs (and there are plenty!), here are two recent recordings I enjoyed listening to…
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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm. “How often already you’ve had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God. ~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head. ~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold”found in A Hundred White Daffodils
For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.
The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.
The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.
Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.
As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.
It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.
I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return. It won’t be long.
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Don’t worry, spider, I keep house casually. ~Kobayashi Issa (translation by Robert Hass)
There’s a web like a spider’s web, Made of silk and light and shadows, Spun by the moon in my room at night. It’s a web made to catch a dream, Hold it tight ’til I awaken, As if to tell me, my dream is all right. ~Lyrics of Spider’s Web Folk Song (see below)
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that. ~E. B. White, from Charlotte’s Web
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. ~E.B. White from “Natural History”
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”
…humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling…
As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.
Our lives are linked together. No man is an island. ~Frederick Buechner from The Hungering Dark
I’ve had a new friend for several months now, beginning in late fall and into winter. She lives in our bathroom, in a terraced silken network between the cabinet and the back of the toilet.
This is someone with only one request: we leave her home undisturbed during our brief visits.
And so I have. Normally I would be brushing visible cobwebs down in my quick cleans, but when I noticed this co-habiter back in November as the weather got chilly, I couldn’t help but think “Charlotte” and the ordinary miracles of creatures like her.
So there she stays as I await a profound web message from her.
Instead of messages, she is extending her network in the hope of catching what little insect life there is in a winter house. Her web does get some misting when we shower or bathe, so she has the moisture she needs to thrive. She goes on reconnaissance missions of her little tiled kingdom — there are small webs laced into most of the corners, above the tub and behind the door.
I really can’t see that she eats often; my research says she doesn’t need much. So we will co-exist as long as she wants to stay, although when spring comes, I know a front porch bench that will be a far better source of regular meals. And then I can do a little deeper clean of the crevices in the bathroom.
I hope she might agree to move on at that point. That is, unless she writes me a web message asking to stay “linked in.”
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I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds that I had when I was ten. And it has been forever since I pushed my head under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.
The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king whose name we could almost remember. Under the rooty bank you could dimly see the bunk beds of the turtles.
Nobody I know mentions these things anymore. It’s as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.
Now I want to turn and run back the other way, barefoot into the underbrush, getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.
Down to the muddy bed of the little stream where my cupped hands make a house, and
I grew up on a small farm with several acres of woodland. It was my retreat until I left for college; I walked among twittering birds, skittering wild bunnies, squirrels and chipmunks, busy ant hills and trails, blowing leaves, swimming tadpoles, falling nuts, waving wildflowers, large firs, pines, cottonwoods, maples and alder trees.
I had a favorite “secret” spot sitting perched on a stump where a large rock provided a favorite sunning spot for salamanders. They and I would make eye contact, pondering our common Creator.
At college I longed for a place as private, as serene, but nothing could match the woods and creatures of my childhood home. After living a decade in the city, I nearly forgot what a familiar woods felt like.
On this farm we’ve stewarded for nearly forty years, I’ve longed for a similar sanctuary, yet my distractions are so much greater than when I was a child. Filled with greater worries, I can’t empty my head and heart as completely to receive the varied gifts to be found around me.
In my ever-shortening timeline to accomplish what I’ve been placed here to do, I need to study the faces of creation, knowing those eyes reflect the face of God.
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