Keep Pouring

As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum  
in painted quiet and concentration 
keeps pouring milk day after day 
from the pitcher to the bowl 
the World hasn’t earned 
the world’s end.
~Wislawa Szymborska “Vermeer” tr. by Claire Cavanagh
and Stanislaw Baranczak from Here

Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

As ever, the sun rises and the sun sets, day after day.
God continues to pour out His colors across the skies.

God loves us enough to plant each of us here
with a plan for our redemption.

We don’t know how much longer.

Today we wave flags,
some in a show of power,
some in a show of gratitude,
some in a show of discontent.

Instead, I pour milk as a daily sacrament:
quietly, with great concentration and appreciation,
as that is the work I must do, day after day.

To milk the cows and raise wheat for bread
and conceive children and raise them up to pour and bake.

This is God’s created world, after all.
We must do our best to restore and preserve all that He has made.

So keep milking and keep pouring.

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An Undivided Wonder

One grief, all evening—: I’ve stumbled
upon another animal merely being
             itself and still cuffing me to grace.

             This time a bumblebee, black and staggered
above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop
             at what I think is dying

             to deny loneliness one more triumph,
I see instead a thing drunk
           with discovery—the bee entangled

            with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom
gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly
             I receive the cold curves and severe angles

             from this morning’s difficult dreams
about faith:—certain as light, arriving; certain
            as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.

            How many strokes of undivided wonder
will have me cross the next border,
            my hands emptied of questions?

~Geffrey Davis “West Virginia Nocturne” from Night Angler

So much happens in the lives of creatures in the world
above, around, and beneath our feet.
The dewy immobilized bumblebee,
the ladybug floating, rescued by a cloverleaf,
the translucent spider hiding in a blossom fold.

Most of the time we are oblivious,
absorbed in our own joys, fears, and sorrows,
struggling to understand our own place in the world,
unsure if we people are the only image of our Creator.

But life’s drama doesn’t just belong to us.

It is the baby bird fallen from the nest too young,
rescued from mouth of the barn cat.
It is the farmyard snake abandoning its ghost-like skin.
It is the spider residing in the tulip, ready to grab the honey bee.
It is the praying mantis poised to swallow the fly.
It is the katydid, the cricket, the grasshopper trying to blend in.

When I struggle with my faith in this often cruel world,
I realize not every question, not every doubt, needs answers.
It is enough, as a trusting witness of all that is wondrous around me,
to pray someday it will no longer be mysterious.

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Code Written in the Stars

When I drink in the stars and upward sink
into the theater your words have wrought,
I touch unfelt immensity and think—
like Grandma used to pause in patient thought
before an ordinary flower, awed
by intricacies hidden in plain view,
then say, “You didn’t have to do that, God!”—

Surely a smaller universe would do!


But you have walled us in with open seas
unconquerable, wild with distant shores
whose raging dawns are but your filigree
across our vaulted skies. This art of yours,
what Grandma held and I behold, these flames,
frames truth which awes us more: You know our names.

~Michael Stalcup “The Shallows”

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

But when Aurora, daughter of the dawn,
With rosy lustre purpled o’er the lawn.

~Homer from the Odyssey

Aurora is the effort
Of the Celestial Face
Unconsciousness of Perfectness
To simulate, to Us.

~Emily Dickinson

…for the sun stopped shining.
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 
Luke 23:45

A little over a year ago, an incredible display of aurora borealis paid a rare visit to our part of the Pacific Northwest. It felt appropriate to whoop and holler when the expanse of multicolored lights began to shimmer and shift above us.

Yet as the colors deepened and danced, what struck me most was the sense of how the heavens and earth seek a “thin place” where the space between God and us narrows to a hair-breadth, summoning us to communion with Him.

Just as the curtain barring us from the holy of holies in the temple was torn in two at Christ’s moment of death, with this display, the curtain between heaven and earth seems pulled apart allowing His Light to reach us.

All earthly matters which cause grief cease to matter, such as
wars and talk of wars, with politicians grandstanding 24/7.

Sadly though, our flawed and fallen human foibles continue on, oblivious to the perfection of our Creator and His universe.

We are unable to separate ourselves from God’s grandeur and creation when He bids us to witness His celestial face.

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I’m Comfortable in this Spot

There are no creatures you cannot love.
A frog calling at God
From the moon-filled ditch
As you stand on the country road in the June night.
The sound is enough to make the stars weep
With happiness.
In the morning the landscape green
Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.
The day is carried across its hours
Without any effort by the shining insects
That are living their secret lives.
The space between the prairie horizons
Makes us ache with its beauty.
Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue
To the farthest cold dark in the universe.
The cottonwood also talks to you
Of breeze and speckled sunlight.
You are at home in these
great empty places
along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.
You are comfortable in this spot
so full of grace and being
that it sparkles like jewels
spilled on water.

~Tom Hennen “From a Country Overlooked”, from Darkness Sticks to Everything

There are some God’s creatures I struggle to love –
fleas, chiggers, mosquitoes, ticks, slugs, yellow jackets among them. Also poisonous snakes, spiders and scorpions come to mind.
And then there are pathogenic bacteria, parasites and viruses…

It is not their fault I struggle to find their value –
only God knows why He made them as He did.

What I have learned over 7 decades is to try to look for beauty wherever I am.

To listen to the breezes and the birds, to look for how the light plays with leaves and water and how it is all created to help us feel at home for the time we are here.

Yet, this is an imperfect world where beauty doesn’t provide shelter to those with their basic needs unfulfilled – where there is no comfort, no safety, no hope.

God, deliver us from being too comfortable when others suffer.
Help us feel Your love to pass on to those in need.
Help us to know how to make a difference for them.
We know that makes a difference to You.

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Feeling Them Resting There

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still.
I went over to the graveyard beside the church
and found them under the old cedars…
I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there,

but I did…

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated
with presences and absences,
presences of absences,
the living and the dead.
The world as it is

would always be a reminder
of the world that was,
and of the world that is to come.
~Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

In great deeds, something abides. 
On great fields, something stays. 
Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; 
but spirits linger, 

to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. 

And reverent men and women from afar, 
and generations that know us not and that we know not of, 
heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, 
to ponder and dream; and lo!

the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, 
and the power of the vision pass into their souls. 


This is the great reward of service. 
To live, far out and on, in the life of others;
this is the mystery of the Christ,

–to give life’s best for such high sake
that it shall be found again unto life eternal.

~Major-General Joshua Chamberlain, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 1889

A box of over 700 letters, exchanged between my parents from late 1941 to mid-1945, sat unopened for six decades.

I started reading. I felt them resting in those inked words.

My parents barely knew each other before marrying quickly on Christmas Eve 1942 – the haste due to the uncertain future for a newly trained Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. They only had a few weeks together before she returned home to her rural teaching position and he readied himself to be shipped out for the island battles to come.

They had no idea they would not see each other for another 30+ months or even see each other again at all. They had no idea their marriage would fall apart 35 years later and they would reunite a decade after the divorce for five more years together before Dad died of cancer at age 73.

A presence of absence: the letters do contain the long-gone but still-familiar voices of my parents, but they are the words and worries of youngsters of 20 and 21, barely prepared for the horrors to come from war and interminable waiting. When he was fighting battles on Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, no letters or news would be received for a month or more, otherwise they tried to write each other daily, though with minimal news to share due to military censorship. They speak mostly of their desire for a normal life together rather than a routine centered on mailbox, pen and paper and waiting – lots and lots of waiting.

I’m not sure what I hoped to find in these letters. Perhaps I hoped for flowery romantic whisperings and the poetry of longing and loneliness. Instead I am reading plain spoken words from two people who somehow made it through those awful years to make my sister and brother and myself possible.

Our inheritance is contained in this musty box of words bereft of poetry. But decades later my heart is moved by these letters – I carefully refold them back into their envelopes and replace them gently back in order. A six cent airmail stamp – in fact hundreds and hundreds of them – was a worthwhile investment in the future, not only for themselves and their family to come, but for generations of U.S. citizens who tend to take their freedom for granted.

Thank you, Dad and Mom, for the early years together you gave up to make today possible for us and the generations to follow.

I hear the mountain birds
The sound of rivers singing
A song I’ve often heard
It flows through me now
So clear and so loud
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

It’s carried in the air
The breeze of early morning
I see the land so fair
My heart opens wide
There’s sadness inside
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

This is no foreign sky
I see no foreign light
But far away am I
From some peaceful land
I’m longing to stand
A hand in my hand
…forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home
~Lori Barth and Philippe Rombi “I’m Dreaming of Home”

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Just Can’t Help It…

For half-an-hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper….
words in which the soul’s blood pours out, 

like the body’s blood from a wound.
He writes secretly this mad diary,
all his passion and longing,

his dark and dreadful gratitude to God,
his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves in his head;
the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it)
at the sacred intoxication of existence…

~G.K. Chesterton in a letter to his fiancé

When I was six or seven years old, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.

Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

It is that simple.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Because the world is full of ugly things, we need the Sabbath to feed our soul with beauty.

~Tim Keller

I just can’t help the joy of simply being alive.

I can grouse with the best of them about the state of the world and our country’s current political mess and you name it… 

I know better than to grumble. I’ve seen where negative thoughts lead and I can feel them aching in my bones when I steep myself in it. The sky is grayer, the clouds are thicker, the night is darker–on and on to its overwhelming suffocating conclusion.

I don’t ever want to feel so impoverished that finding a penny or admiring a flower doesn’t make my day better.

I have the privilege to choose joy rather than bathe in the bleak. Some live with so much suffering, joy is out of reach – in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Myanmar, and elsewhere.

Like an opportunistic cat finding that one ray of sun in the darkness and melting into it, I can absorb and equip myself to become radiant as well.

I’m not putting on a “happy face” — instead joy adopts me, holds me close in the tough times and won’t abandon me. Though at times joy may dip temporarily behind a cloud and the rain will fall, I know the sun is there even when I can’t see or feel it.

Today, on this Sabbath, joy is mine to choose because joy has chosen me, this morning and every morning.

I just can’t help it.

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Drilling Away

The woodpecker keeps returning
to drill the house wall.
Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another.
There is nothing good to eat there:
he has found in the house
a resonant billboard to post his intentions,
his voluble strength as provider.
But where is the female he drums for? Where?
I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding,
the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

~Jane Hirshfield “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning”

A woodpecker once,
A sort of a dunce,
And who as a warbler not much of a siren,
Passed by many trees
Where he might have with ease
Bored out a nice hole to his hunger appease,
For a lofty church steeple made out of sheet iron.

He whetted his bill,
And then with good-will
And a thrumpty-thrum-thrum he started to bore,
Nor let up until
The end of his bill
Was worn off so much that it gave him a chill
And the back of his bobber began to get sore.

A black bird and wren,
A rooster and hen,
A crow and a sparrow were watching him drill,
And squinted one eye
At his birdship so high,
So far from the earth that he looked like a fly
And wondered how long he could work with good-will.

When his bobber gave out
He gave a faint shout
To the crowd that was watching him down on the ground,
And said, Come up here
Where the air is so clear
And lend me a hand, for a worm is so near
Whenever I peck I can hear his faint sound.

Then the blackbird and wren
And the sparrow and hen
And the crow that were watching him, called from below
And said, “Silly Goose,
Your work’s of no use,
You might drill in that iron until your head’s loose.
You have no more sense than some men that we know.”

~Ed Blair “The Foolish Woodpecker”

Piliated woodpecker

A bold piliated woodpecker in Rockport, Massachusetts made the news last week about his destructive rampage through that community, cracking mirrors and windows on vehicles. He is attacking his reflection as a potential competitor.

He’s been nicknamed the “piliated pillager.” His aggressive attitude and bright topknot of unruly feathers is reminiscent of another public figure who won’t be stopped from destroying things.

We have a variety of these little fellows here on the farm. One would think the loud rat-a-tats emanating from trees and buildings would be due to similar bold and fearless birds. Yet our woodpeckers tend to be visitors seldom-seen yet most-audible. They project a loud and noisy presence to the ear but prefer to be invisible to the eye.

I guess they don’t want us witnessing their repetitive self-induced head trauma

These noisy birds are a reminder of how some people hammer away on social media, often using lots of capital letters. They desperately want to be heard and acknowledged, wanting their opinions to resonate and reverberate for all to hear.

Whenever I hear an insistent pecking echoing from on high, I try to spot the offending and ornery woodpecker who is claiming dominance over the airwaves and his intended targets. There is no question he has once again succeeded in getting my attention, even if my sole reaction is to shake my head at his utter foolishness — he has no more sense than some men I know…

Flicker
Downy woodpecker

“If only, if only, ” the woodpecker sighs
The bark on the trees was as soft as the skies…
~from the story “Holes”

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A Choice of Light or Darkness

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.
~G. K. Chesterton, on his death bed

God is going to invade, all right:
but what is the good of saying you are on His side then,
when you see the whole natural universe melting away
like a dream and something else –
something it never entered your head to conceive –

comes crashing in;
something so beautiful to some of us
and so terrible to others that

none of us will have any choice left?

For this time it will be God without disguise;
something so overwhelming that it will strike
either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.


It will be too late then to choose your side.

There is no use saying you choose to lie down
when it has become impossible to stand up.
That will not be the time for choosing:
it will be the time when we discover

which side we really have chosen,
whether we realized it before or not.


Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.
~C.S. Lewis  – from Mere Christianity

darkhedges2

…our hands have always been able to heal as much as harm. 
…since the dawn of humanity, each of us contains three people—
the angel, the demon, and the one who decides which we will obey.
~Billy Coffey

aprileveninglight5

It shouldn’t take plunging into a profound darkness,
swallowed in a pit of sadness and sorrow
to experience God’s immense capacity for love and compassion,
but that is when our need for light and forgiveness is greatest.

It should not take sin and suffering to remind us
life is precious and worthy of our protection,
no matter how tempted we are to choose otherwise.

We are created,
from the beginning,
in the beginning,
with the capacity to choose sides between darkness and light.

We choose too often to remain cloaked in darkness.

Our God chooses to shine the light of His Creation,
to conquer our darkness through illuminating grace,
dispersing our shadows, suffering the deepest darkness on our behalf
to guarantee we are eternally worthy of His loving protection.

How then will we choose when He so clearly chooses us?

plumlane

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Simply Lost

Perhaps she came down for the apples,
or was flushed out by the saws powering
the far woods, or was simply lost,
or was crossing one open space for an
other.

She was a figure approaching, a presence
outside a kitchen window, framed
by the leafless apple trees, the stiff blueberry bushes,
the after-harvest corn, the just-before-rain sky,

a shape only narrow bones could hold,
turning its full face upward, head tilted to one side, as if to speak.

I want my life back.

Morning settles around her like a silver coat.
Rustling branches, hooves in flight.

~Philip Terman “Deer Descending”

Who among us does not feel this?

Everything changing faster than we can respond:
loss of jobs,
research halting mid-study,
inconsistency abounds,
families shattered,
uncertainty prevails.

What happened to
of the people,
by the people,
for the people
rather than dictated by just a few

We are so lost,
how to find our way back
to caring for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable
with a spirit of commitment, compassion and sacrifice.

For God alone – no one else – remains our strength and shield.
Lost and afraid, we want our lives back.

We need His Refuge where we may rest.
We seek Sanctuary from this darkness,
to once again awaken hopeful to a new morning.

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Rummaging Among Clouds

The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky—
So many white clouds—and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the boughs and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls. …
Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears….
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.

~Katherine Mansfield “Very Early Spring”

You might say that clouds have no nationality
Being flags of no country, flaunting their innocent neutrality
Across frontiers, ignorant of boundaries;
But these clouds are clearly foreign, such an exotic clutter
Against the blue cloth of the sky
I want to rummage among them, I want to turn them over
With eager fingers, I want to bargain
For this one or that one, I want to haggle and dicker
Over the prices, and I want to see my clouds wrapped up
In sheets of old newspapers, and give them away
To young girls to pin in their hair
Or tuck them, glossy as gardenias, behind an ear,
Or stretch one out to the length of a lacy shawl
And toss it over a shoulder, or around a waist.
~Constance Urdang “Clouds”

Our farm sits about 9 miles from an international border. The sky and clouds are oblivious to the line drawn by two governments, and don’t bother to stop at the border stations controlling access of humans across that line.

The clouds are free to go where they please, so they do, while we watch. They are both a foreign and domestic cloud of witnesses to our earthbound follies and foolishness.

No passports or IDs, no being pulled into “secondary” for more intensive searches and questioning, no being “turned back” not allowed across, no deportations.

They simply float and glide where the breezes take them, assuming whatever shape, identity or characteristics they wish.

What a beautiful day in the neighborhood if one happens to be a cloud or a cloud of witnesses…

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