Category: peace

A Light of Beginnings

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For seasons the walled meadow
south of the house built of its stone
grows up in shepherd’s purse and thistles
the weeds share April as a secret
finches disguised as summer earth
click the drying seeds
mice run over rags of parchment in August
the hare keeps looking up remembering 
a hidden joy fills the songs of the cicadas

two days’ rain wakes the green in the pastures
crows agree and hawks shriek with naked voices
on all sides the dark oak woods leap up and shine
the long stony meadow is plowed at last and lies
all day bare
I consider life after life as treasures
oh it is the autumn light

that brings everything back in one hand
the light again of beginnings
the amber appearing as amber
~ W. S. Merwin, “September Plowing” from Flower & Hand

photo by Joel De Waard

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew
~W.S. Merwin “To the Light of September”

Now that it has rained a bit, the light of September is a filtered, more gentle illumination than we have experienced for the past several months of dry summer glare.

It is more lambent: a soft radiance that simply glows at certain times of the day when the angle of the sun is just right, and the clouds are in position to soften and cushion the luminence.

It is also liminal: it is neither before or after, on the threshold between seasons when there is both promise and caution in the air.

Sometimes I think I can breathe in light like this, if not through my lungs, then through my eyes.

It is a temptation to bottle it up with a stopper somehow, stow it away hidden in a back cupboard. Then I can bring it out on the darkest days, pour a bit into a glass, and imbibe.

But for now, I fill myself full to the brim. And my only means of preservation is with a camera and a few words.

So I share it now with all of you to tuck away for a future day.
Perhaps you too will be thirsty for a lambent light.

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In the Light-Charged Air

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When I saw the figure on the crown of the hill,
high above the city, standing perfectly still

against a sky so saturated with the late-
afternoon, late-summer Pacific light

that granules of it seemed to have come out
of solution, like a fine precipitate

of crystals hanging in the brightened air,
I thought whoever it was standing up there

must be experiencing some heightened state
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,

thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
Or maybe, looking again, it was a statue

of Jesus or a saint, placed there to bestow
a ceaseless blessing on the city below.

Only after a good five minutes did I see
that the figure was actually a tree—

some kind of cypress, probably, or cedar.
I was both amused and let down by my error.

Not only had I made the tree a person,
but I’d also given it a vision,

which seemed to linger in the light-charged air
around the tree’s green flame, then disappear.
~Jeffrey Harrison “The Figure on the Hill” from Into Daylight

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister,
And our ice-cream man whose continuing requiem
Is the twenty-one flavours children have by heart.
Our cobbler mends shoes for everybody; our butcher
Blends into his best sausages leeks, garlic, honey;
Our cornershop sells everything from bread to kindling.
Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised?
All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised.
~Michael Longley “All of These People”  from Collected Poems

Who among us appear
in the light-charged air,
visible on the crown of the hill of life –
who might be mistaken
for a martyr or a saint or a visionary,
when each one of us is
merely a person
responsible to a family,
committed to help friends,
dedicated to serve a community,
placed in this world to steady a broken civilization.

There is the simple truth that we need a person
with roots deep in the ground,
branches that reach up and out,
bearing fruit to share with those around us.

But surely not
this misery, not this blight, not this trouble,
certainly not these murders,
which only bears and shares
a heart-rending, horrible grief.

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Calling from the Wind Phone

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The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed

the rubble still piled on the beach at Tohoku, Japan, a year after the 3/11/11 tsunami

In the wrecked landscape
of Fukushima

a white telephone booth
shines

with many panes of glass
in the hinged door

and a man steps in
dials the cell number

of his wife’s phone,
of course unanswering—

she was swept away
in the tsunami,

a photo in the paper
shows her sitting outside

on a blanket, knees
up, rocking back in laughter.

I pick up the black
receiver, still warm

from his hand, dialing
my sister’s number I used

to know by heart.
No answer from the sea

or her, just the whirling sound
of blood pounding in my ear.
~Patricia Clark “The Wind Phone”

photo by Nate Gibson at Sendai, Japan
photo by Nate Gibson 11/11
photo by Nate Gibson 11/11
photo by Nate Gibson of Sendai rubble pile 11/11

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
~Emily Dickinson “Parting”

Original windphone is Otsuchi Garden, Japan

In 2012, we stayed with our friends Brian and Bette at their cabin on a bluff just above the Pacific Ocean at Sendai, Japan, just a few dozen feet above the devastation that wiped out an entire fishing village below during the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami.

As we walked that stretch of beach, we heard the stories of the people who had lived there, some of whom did not survive the waves that swept their houses and cars away before they could escape. We walked past the footprints of foundations of hundreds of demolished homes, humbled by the rubble mountains yet to be hauled away a year later, to be burned or buried. There were acres of wrecked vehicles piled one on another, waiting to become scrap metal.

It was visual evidence of life so suddenly and dramatically disrupted and carried away.

This had been a place of recreation and respite for some who visited regularly, commerce and livelihood for others who stayed year round and, in ongoing recovery efforts, struggling to be restored to something familiar. Yet it looked like a foreign ghostly landscape. Many trees perished, lost, broken off, fish nets still stuck high on their scarred trunks. There were small memorials to lost family members within some home foundations, with stuffed animals and flowers wilting from the recent anniversary observance.

Tohoku is a powerful place of memories for those who still live there and know what it once was, how it once looked and felt, and painfully, what it became in a matter of minutes on 3/11/11. The waves swept in inexplicable suffering, then carried their former lives away. Happiness gave ground to such terrible pain that could never have hurt as much without the joy and contentment that preceded it.

We are tempted to ask God why He doesn’t do something about the suffering that happened in this place or anywhere a disaster occurs –but if we do, He will ask us the same question right back. We need to be ready with our answer and our action.

God knows suffering. Far more than we do. He took it all on Himself, feeling His pain amplified, as it was borne out of His love and joy in His creation.

This beautiful place, and its dedicated survivors have slowly recovered, but the inner and outer landscape is forever altered. What remains the same is the pulsing tempo of the waves, the tides, and the rhythm of the light and the night, happening just as originally created.

With that realization, pain will finally give way, unable to stand up to His love, His joy, and our response to His sacrifice.

We can call Him up anytime and anywhere.

bent gate at Sendai beach -2012
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Arriving Home Without a Sound

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Once only when the summer
was nearly over and my own
hair had been white as the day’s clouds
for more years than I was counting
I looked across the garden at evening
Paula was still weeding around
flowers that open after dark
and I looked up to the clear sky
and saw the new moon and at that
moment from behind me a band
of dark birds and then another
after it flying in silence
long curving wings hardly moving
the plovers just in from the sea
and the flight clear from Alaska
half their weight gone to get them home
but home now arriving without
a sound as it rose to meet them
~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning

In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.

There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.

Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.

The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.

Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud.
Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress.
Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally.
I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
~Madeleine L’Engle

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The Moonshining Place

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At the edge of the city,
at the edge of the world,
at the edge between
the earth and endless sky,
the moonshining place,
the place where we hung
our long summer legs
over the edge and fought
the urge to drop a shoe
or sneak a real first kiss,
the place where we played
hide-and-go-seek
and Tag, you’re it!
until we couldn’t breathe
or the sun went down,
the place where we came
on the quietest nights
to feel the moon kiss
the edge between
our skin and endless sky.
~Sarah Kobrinsky, from Nighttime on the Otherside of Everything

Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up
on the game before it was done
and forgot I was still hiding.
I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose.
~Galway Kinnell “Hide-and-Seek 1933” from Strong Is Your Hold.

Tomorrow
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….
~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning.

As a kid playing hide-n-seek, I always preferred to be the “seeker” as I was secretly afraid if I hid, I would be forgotten, everyone would go home and I wouldn’t be found.

Even so, I was too proud to quit the game and come out of hiding. Of course that never happened in real life. I was really lousy at hiding.

When I got older, I was no better at hiding, though I tried. God would always locate me, even without sending the tell-tale spotlight of the moon to find me.

I gave up hiding long ago. Once found, there is no point in trying to disappear from His sight.

His eye shines bright upon us all.

photo of supermoon by Harry Rodenberger
photo of supermoon by Bob Tjoelker
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The Healing Crack in the Coil

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Needing them still, I come
when I can, this time to the sea
where we share a room: their double bed,
my single. Morning fog paints the pale
scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing,
the chenille spread folded back,
my father’s feet white sails furled
at the edge of blue pajamas.
Every child’s dream, a parent
in each hand, though this child is fifty.
Their bodies fit easily, with room
to spare. When did they grow
so small? Grow so small—
as if it were possible to swell
backwards into an earlier self.

One more year, I ask the silence.
Last night to launch myself
into sleep I counted their breaths, the tidal
rise and fall I now put my ear to,
the coiled shell of their lives.
~Rebecca McClanahan from “Watching my Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea” from Deep Light: New and Selected Poems.

“Her Room” by Andrew Wyeth in the Farnsworth Art Museum

My parents have been gone now for some time, my father 30 years, my mother, nearly 17 years. Their dying was a long process of counted breaths and pauses. I witnessed their bodies curling into themselves, shrinking smaller, worn down by illness and age.

I still miss them as I’m reminded of them by the events of my own life, still wanting them to take me by the hand as I navigate my own daily path.

After mom’s death, those possessions not distributed to family members have remained packed up and stored in our barn buildings. I know it is well past time to deal with their stuff as I become keenly aware of my own graying and aging.

In the house, next to where I write, is a box of over 500 letters written by my mother and father between 1941 and 1945. The letters began as they were getting to know each other at college, going from “pinned” to “engaged” and continue for three and a half more years after a hurried wedding Christmas Eve 1942. By mid-January 1943, my newly minted Marine officer father shipped out to spend the next three years of his life fighting on the battlefields of Saipan, Tinian and Tarawa in the Pacific Ocean, not to return again to the states until late summer of 1945.

My mother wrote her letters from the small rural eastern Washington community of Colville, living in a “teachers’ cottage” with other war wives who taught school while waiting for their husbands to return home – or not.

It took me a decade to find the courage and time to devote to reading these letters they treasured and never threw away. I sorted them unopened by postmark date into some semblance of order and sat down to start at the very beginning, which, of course, is my beginning as well. I opened each one with some trepidation and a lump in my throat about what I might find written there. I worried I may find things I didn’t want to know. I hoped I would find things that I desperately needed to know.

Most of all I wanted to understand the two people who became my parents within the coiled shell of their forty years together, though broken by a painful divorce which lasted a decade. Having lived through that awful time with them, I want to understand the origin of a love which eventually mended their cracked shell of companionship, gluing them back together for five more years before my father died.

As I ponder their words, I too cross a bridge back to them both, my ear pressed to the coiled shell of those fading voices, as if I might still hear the sea, at times bringing them closer, then pulling them farther away.

AI image created for this post
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An Earth of Many Colors

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In the darkness something was happening at last.

A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and…. hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself.

There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.

The earth was of many colors: they were fresh, hot, and vivid.  They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~Raymond Carver “Late Fragment”

Beautiful things and varied shapes appeal to [the eyes],
vivid and well-matched colors attract;
but let not these captivate my soul.
Rather let God ravish it;
he made these things exceedingly good, to be sure,
but he is my good, not they.
~St. Augustine

Every time I open my eyes
and listen for the voice of the morning,
I am reminded how precious is this moment,
how welcome is each breath and each heartbeat.

We are created for this.
We are, everyone of us, beloved by our Creator.
We are meant to wonder breathless at this,
without ceasing, through the long day.

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In the Willow Stillness

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…today, the unseen was everything.
The unknown, the only real fact of life.
All this he saw,
for one moment breathless and intense,
vivid on the morning sky;
and still, as he looked, he lived;
and still, as he lived, he wondered.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Purposefully lost in the willow stillness
of a late summer meadow
in the deer-filled dusk—a silver evening
following a blue and amber day.
~Tim Hawkins “Purposefully Lost” from West of the Backstory

I search for the unseen,
purposely lost,
hoping to find meaning in the unknown.

I am bewildered by this life much of the time.
Anyone looking at what I share here sees
my struggle each day to discern
how to make this sad and suffering world
a little bit better place.

I have little to offer you
other than my own wrestling match
with the mysteries we all face.

Then, when a light does shine out through darkness, 
when a deer steps out of the woods into the meadow,
I am not surprised. 

I simply need to pay attention.
Illumination was there all the time,
but I needed the eyes to see its beauty laid bare,
brave enough to show itself even brighter in the light of day.

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Another Mammogram Day

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“They’re benign,” the radiologist says,
pointing to specks on the x ray
that look like dust motes
stopped cold in their dance.
His words take my spine like flame.
I suddenly love
the radiologist, the nurse, my paper gown,
the vapid print on the dressing room wall.
I pull on my radiant clothes.
I step out into the Hanging Gardens, the Taj Mahal,
the Niagara Falls of the parking lot.
~Jo McDougall, “Mammogram” from In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.
~Lisel Mueller “In November”

It does not escape me,
especially on call-back mammogram days
when I’m asked to return for a
“closer look” at something that
wasn’t there before.

which turns out to be a 1 cm. nonspecific solid something,
maybe getting smaller over the past ten days.

Maybe a bruise. Maybe not.
Check again in a month.
A brief reprieve that some in the
dressing cubicles around me
don’t get.

I wake every day knowing:
an earthquake happens somewhere else,
a war is leaving people homeless and lifeless,
a tornado levels a town,
a drunk driver destroys a family,
a fire leaves a house in ashes,
a famine causes children to starve,
a flood ravages a town,
a devastating diagnosis darkens
someone’s remaining days.

No mistake has been made,
yet I wake knowing recently
it was my turn to hear bad news,
my heart was heavy,
yet it
still beats,
still breaks,
still bleeds,
still believes
in the radiance of each new day I’m given.
I was reminded again today.

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Back to Back

barnstormingblog1 Comment

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
~Jane Kenyon “The Suitor”

Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947

Happiness can be an elusive suitor and is altogether undependable.

I too have had glimpses of it throughout my life – a fleeting “this is it.”
Then the clouds roll in and the ecstasy of the realization fades to mist.

I tend to trust the old reliable friends who show up regularly – like “hopeful” and “contented” and “being at peace” – plus moments when the sweetness of each breath brings tears of overwhelming joy.

Instead of pursuing happiness, (always a pursuit rather than a destination), I thrive on knowing I love deeply and am loved.
That knowledge is what gets me through the really tough times when happiness doesn’t always put in an appearance.

Love shows up.
Love has my back when I’m afraid and full of doubt.
Love persists through sadness.
Love doesn’t give up when everything hurts.
Love is sufficient.

Love is enough to bring those happy tears to my eyes…

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a

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