Category: peace

When a Great Soul Dies

barnstormingblog8 Comments

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.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls, dependent upon their
nurture,now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

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”

Sara,
my dear friend of nearly forty years,

When I learned you died this morning, your body overwhelmed by a sudden illness no one anticipated – I sat in stillness, trying once again to remember your soft voice, as if you were still part of this world.

I knew you were gone.

It was God’s timing to collect you back and so you went. We all are poorer without you – you the richer as you settle into a body no longer a burden and a struggle.

As recently as last week, you wondered aloud if you had it in you, after decades of surviving chronic illness and two cancers, to keep going with all your physical challenges. God heard your prayer. Instead of feeling depleted and emptied of purpose, you are now restored. The love and energy you shared during your long life, through your doctoring and farming and mothering and grandmothering, is replenished in the presence of Jesus Christ.

You have left so much of yourself behind:
Your mentoring made me a better doctor.
Your example made me a better mother.
Your gentle compassion made me a better friend.
Your forgiving grace and quiet patience made me a better person.

I wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye to you:
I regret not saying everything I needed to say.
I regret not taking more walks with you.
I regret not letting you know how much you blessed me
and the world simply by existing.

Now there is no doubt you are blessing heaven.
And so we who love you – your husband, children, grandchildren,
your friends, colleagues, former patients –
gratefully share the rare gift of grace that is
Dr. Sara Cuene Watson.

All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers,
the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.
Isaiah 40: 6-8

(Photos from Dordt University prairie)

No Place to Call Home

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My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
~Fady Joudah “Mimesis” from Alight

Like these lands we travel through,
I have grown weary, so rough, so dry.
I wet a finger to give suck
but it never lasts longs. When the baby
cries, the sound comes sharper. It cuts me.

Some didn’t believe the stories
of soldiers pouring south, what they did
to the women, to children.
Made the men watch then let them live.
Some didn’t believe, but my husband
did not hesitate: we cannot wait, he said.

We travel between slaughter and exile.
A foreign land, people who already hate us.
How will they ever take us in? What will we do
when they turn us back? Afraid ourselves,
we instruct the little ones to be quiet,
but an infant only understands hunger.

I lay him against me, try the finger trick;
he snuggles in and falls asleep, his lips
still moving. The moon was full
but is now empty, like me. I was a child
but now am woman, a mother. Is this all

I can give this child—a world of rage and shame,
of bloodshed and vengeance?
~Edward Dougherty from “Between Slaughter and Exile”

Over the eons of human history, very few people groups have been able to remain exactly where they first settled.

The forces that drive tribes, cultures and communities to move on or be chased out are multiple and often overlapping: natural disasters, poverty, disease, prejudice, persecution, oppression, drought, starvation, war, politics.

Some simply seek refuge in hope of a better life.

We who sit safe and snug in our homes forget there was no such comfort for many of the generations preceding us. Those displaced faced terrible risks as they sought out safety. Millions have suffered and died in the hope of securing a future for themselves and their descendants. Countries – even ours, the richest on earth – struggle to house and feed their own residents, much less able to cope with those who arrive even more destitute and desperate. Doors and borders around the world slam shut and remain closed.

No child should be caught in this ongoing cycle of grief and weeping, rage and shame, bloodshed and vengeance, slaughter and exile. We watch history repeat itself, again and again; we become history in the making.

May God work out a solution when mere people cannot.

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Prayer for a Child

barnstormingblog2 Comments

God keep my jewel this day from danger;
From tinker and pooka and bad-hearted stranger.
From harm of the water, from hurt of the fire.
From the horns of the cows going home to the byre.
From the sight of the fairies that maybe might change her.
From teasing the ass when he’s tied to the manger.
From stones that would bruise her, from thorns of the briar.
From evil red berries that wake her desire.
From hunting the gander and vexing the goat.
From the depths o’ sea water by Danny’s old boat.
From cut and from tumble, from sickness and weeping;
May God have my jewel this day in his keeping.
~Winifred Lett (1882-1973) “Prayer for a Child“

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Anna Blake

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.
~C.S. Lewis

This “prayer for a child” has hung on the wall in our home for nearly four decades, purchased when I was pregnant with our first. When I first saw it with its drawing of the praying mother watching her toddler leave the safety of the home to explore the wide world, I knew it addressed most of my worries as a new mama, in language that helped me smile at my often irrational fears. I would glance at it dozens of time a day; it would remind me of God’s care for our children through every scary thing, real or imagined.

I continue to pray for our grown children and their God-given spouses, and now for six precious grandchildren, the latest of whom was born yesterday afternoon.

I pray because I can’t not pray, and because I’m helpless without the care and compassion of our sovereign God for each of us, especially when we are brand new, completely dependent and helpless.

May I be changed by my prayers and molded into a truly “grand” mother for our half dozen cherished grandchildren, each a jewel in His keeping.

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Under My Eyelashes

barnstormingblog1 Comment
9/24/2023 -7:12 AM
9/24/22 6:55 AM
9/24/21 6:34 AM
9/24/20 7:22 AM

You can
die for it-
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
~Mary Oliver “Sunrise”

9/24/19 6:55 AM
9/24/18 6:50 AM
9/24/17 7:03 AM
9/24/17 (later)
9/24/17 (even later~)

Over the years, I have not missed many early autumn sunrises – most I have not recorded as they are often gray and rainy.

This particular day of September – the 24th – has been a treasure trove of color and cloud patterns and light for the last decade. Today I share these with you in their variety and beauty.

Every day, let us watch the sun rise with its light under our eyelashes – the fire of happiness illuminating us all as morning breaks open, like the First Day.

9/24/16
9/24/15
9/24/14
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Summer Ends Now

barnstormingblog2 Comments

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, willful-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 gave 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”

This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”

There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.

Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience)
~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones

Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh
Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh

Am I the only one who awakes praying
that today be a day of healing between peoples
when the barbarous becomes beautiful
rather than broken?

A day of
no missiles being launched,
no one gunned down
no overdoses in the streets,
no vehicles used as weapons,
no child misused,
no one sold into slavery,
no one overdosing, abandoned,
homeless and starving.

Am I the only one who awakes and seeks only
to watch the clouds
to praise the heavens
to see the leaves turn color
to save this day and taste it
so as to balance somehow on this brokenness?

I am not the only one.
I know I cannot be…

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A Wondrous and Terrible Turning

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When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper.

But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation.

Call it what you will—“God’s fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain.

And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever.

And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?
~Thomas Centolella “Why I’m in Awe of the Spiral”

photo by Kate Steensma
Photo by Kate Steensma

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper, though
that, too, but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.
~A. R. Ammons, “Poetics” from A Coast of Trees

Our very origin as a unique organism is a process of unfolding and spiraling: from our very first doubling after conception expanding to a complexity of trillions of cells powering our every thought and movement.

Now I look everywhere in my backyard world for beginnings and endings, wanting to understand where I fit and where I am in the unfolding process of this spiraling life. As I grow older, I find myself more peripheral than central, just as I am meant to be – I have more perspective now having spun out from the vortex.

I can see where I came from, and have a sense of where I am headed.

We unfurl slowly, surely, gently, in the Hands of our Creator God. He knows how each of us began as He was there from the beginning, forming the very center of us. He remains at the core of our being, as our unfolding lasts forever.

Making for the Light

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Let us go forward quietly,
forever making for the light,
and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge
that we are as others are
and that others are as we are,
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –
believing all things,
hoping for all things,
and enduring all things…
~Vincent Van Gogh in Letter to Theo Van Gogh – 3 April 1878

Yet another racially motivated killing appeared in the headlines today. So much collective societal energy is spent emphasizing, elaborating, indeed celebrating our diverse differences. If anything, this separates us rather than unites us, whether it be issues of race, culture, religion, political leanings or sexuality.

Yet we are alike far more than we are different. Despite the variety inherent in all living creatures, we share remarkable similarities deep in our cellular functions – mirror images of each other, intentionally created in the image of God.

“…we are as others are
and that others are as we are,
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –“

Each of us are born from the womb of our mother and each of us will die to dust someday. Those bookends to our lives bind the pages of our lives together, rather than tear us apart.

For some, similarities are not welcome – many hesitate to admit it is true, desiring to maintain distance and disagreement.

Can we make for the Light, enduring this painful journey together? Can we be bound by striving for unity? Can we agree to agree rather than disagree – it is right and true and worthy to love one another just as we are loved by our Creator?

The Dewy Cheek of Day

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The red east glows, the dewy cheek of Day
Has not yet met the sun’s o’erpowering smile;
The dew-drops in their beauty still are gay,
Save those the shepherd’s early steps defile.
Pleas’d will I linger o’er the scene awhile;
The black clouds melt away, the larks awaken–
Sing, rising bird, and I will join with thee:
With day-break’s beauties I have much been taken,
As thy first anthem breath’d its melody.
I’ve stood and paus’d the varied cloud to see,
And warm’d in ecstacy, and look’d and warm’d,
When day’s first rays, the far hill top adorning,
Fring’d the blue clouds with gold: O doubly charm’d
I hung in raptures then on early Morning.
~John Clare “Daybreak”

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.
~Linda Pastan “Imaginary Conversation”

How to begin each day like the first day, rather than the last…

It would mean unbridled awe and astonishment, hung in raptures. Look Not only gratitude that the world exists, but also grateful that I exist within it.

Instead of living as if this were my last day, I want to be newly created and dew-baptized in amazement – just like my first day.

The Moon-Pale Promise

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from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque in memory of my mother

There’s D-flat major at the first and last,
but in between, a haze of harmonies
yearns lightward, though the light has long since passed.

I played the notes; she heard the light. The keys
were mine to coax and animate; their sound
was hers to claim: a shimmer of heart’s ease.

And while my fingers stretched and danced and found
their way through black and white, her ear would find
a prism—her own light parsed and unbound.

She had a knack for joy and was inclined
to wonder. Clair de lune had mesmerized
her, in a spell that left me far behind.

After my mother’s death, I was surprised
I still played it so often; I suppose
the effort occupied and organized

my sorrow-scattered mind. So in the throes
of grief, I practiced, as if I’d impress
a ghost with my devotion. And in those

half-haunted hours, I mastered more, I guess,
than just the notes. I hadn’t thought I’d learn
to hear what she did—but through some finesse

of time and skill and need, I now discern
the half-lit murmurings that no midnight
can mute, the moon-pale promise that can turn

unrest to peace, a star-sung appetite
for breath. At last I share my mother’s light.
~Jean Kreiling “Claire de Lune“

photo by Lea Lozano

I never practiced as much as I could have. Since the old piano sat in the living room right next to the kitchen, my mother endured my wrong notes and mis-timed rhythms, but never said a word of criticism. She was not an avid music listener, preferring radio talk and news, but committed to taking me to piano lessons over eight long years, sitting in the car reading a book while she waited for me.

Though not someone who listened to classical music for pleasure, she did love Clair de Lune, saying she could “see” the moon rise when I played it. Thus encouraged, I chose it as a recital piece so I could play it often for her, flowing my fingers across the keyboard smoothly, steadily, faithfully, like the rise of the moon in the night sky.

I want to feel a connection to a piece of music that so grips my heart and waters my eyes. It happens only rarely when I play – as an average pianist, I never truly progressed beyond technique – hitting the right notes and being true to the timing. But this piece comes close. When I hear it, I am no longer the youngster practicing it over and over, trying to somehow bring light to our dark living room. With age, I can now lose myself in the beauty of what Debussy was trying to convey in his choice of progression of notes, his resolution of harmony and key change, his slowing and flowing illumination of the piano keys.

I begin to hear what my mother must have heard, although I made so many mistakes, over and over.

Even so, the moon still rose for her.

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One Silvery Ping

barnstormingblog3 Comments

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.
~Linda Pastan “Rereading Frost” from Queen of a Rainy Country. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 
I have been one acquainted with the night.
~Robert Frost “Acquainted with the Night”

This morning

poem hopes 

that even though
its lines are broken 

its reader 

will be drawn forward to the part where blueberries
firm against fingers 

say roundness sweetness unspeakable softness
     in the morning
light.
~L.L. Barkat, “This Morning” from The Golden Dress

I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver “Everything”

Some of you ask why I post poems by other authors when I could be writing more original work myself.

My answer, like poet Linda Pastan above is:

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

Yet, like Linda, I’ve decided not to stop trying. Since I’ve committed myself to being here every day to share something that may help me and someone else breathe in the fragrance of words and the world – I try to be the necessary and eloquent silver ping when the Conductor points at me at precisely the right moment in time. More often, I’m the “clang” creating a ruckus ringing the farm triangle bringing in everyone from all over the barnyard for lunch.

Even when my written lines are broken, or I say again what another has already said yet I feel it bears emphasis — I too try to write with quiet hands, in reverence and awe for what unseeable, unspeakable gifts God has granted us all.

I try to celebrate by illuminating words and pictures with a unique “ping” all of my own.

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