Category: Rural Life

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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New Autumn Photo Notecards from Barnstorming

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The photos above are some of my new Autumn series Barnstorming notecards, available only by donation to this blog.

Your financial support at any level makes a difference to keep this ad-free blog a daily offering.

For each donation of $50, I’ll send four in the mail as a thank-you gift from me. I’ll send all eight for donations of $100 or more.

Please email your mailing address to emilypgibson@gmail.com when you make your donation below.

If you prefer to send a check in the mail to support Barnstorming,
email me at emilypgibson@gmail.com and I’ll send you our mailing address.

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So Plum-Tuckered

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plum8162

Sometimes it’s not about
seeking, but of receiving,
the way a plum takes in light,
an inner ripening that cracks
its perfect purple skin,
and sweetness, an amber rivulet,
crusts along the gash.
~Lois Parker Edstrom from “The Lesson of Plums”

plumrain

And somehow <she> thrived anyway–the blossom of our family,
like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps
into an invisible vein of nurture
and bears radiant bushels of plums
while the trees around it merely go on living.
~Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams

silverplums

There is a plum tree on our farm that is so plain and unassuming much of the year that I nearly forget that it is there.  It is a bit off by itself away from the other fruit trees; I have to make a point of paying attention to it, otherwise it just blends into the background.

Despite not being noticed or having any special care, this tree thrives.  In the spring it is one of the first to bud out into a cloud of white blossoms with a faint sweet scent. Every summer it is a coin toss whether it will decide to bear fruit or not. Some years–not at all, not a single plum. Other years, like this one, it is positively glowing with plum harvest– each a golden oval with a pink blush. 

Some years, these plums might be extraordinarily honey-flavored and juicy, a pleasure to eat right off the tree if you don’t mind getting past a bitter skin and an even more bitter pit inside. Other years, like this one, the plums are so beautiful and appear so mouth-watering, but have extraordinarily sour, mouth-puckering flesh. Not even the birds are bothering with them.

This is beauty with a bite — bitterness posing as a gift of sweetness. This tree seems to grin when it sees puckering taking place all around it, as if a commentary on the state of political reality in our country right now.

So if the old term “tucker” is a word describing a great down-home meal, then being “plum-tuckered” describes this paradox of bitter-sweet. We can only pray: when there is so much bitter in this life, may the sweet overwhelm and overcome.

plum8161
plums2017

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For the Children…

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If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it,
it is a sin.
James 4:17

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light
~Gary Snyder “For the Children” from Turtle Island.

After another school/church massacre;
how can there be nothing new to say?

We’ve learned nothing about keeping weapons
out of the hands of people bent on destruction –
taking themselves out after taking others with them.

To our children and grandchildren:
as a society, we have failed to keep you out of harm’s way
by failing to control the harm of modern weapons
in the wrong hands.

How can we be forgiven over and over
as shootings happen again and again.
Maybe we didn’t pull the trigger,
but we allowed someone else to.

Together, we share the responsibility
for each and every death that has happened,
and more bound to happen on our watch.

And that is a heavy burden to bear.

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An Evening Stroll

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You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
~ Dr. Seuss

You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.

The high leaves like my mother’s lips
Forever trembling, unable to decide,
For there’s a bit of wind,
And it’s like hearing voices,
Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,
A huge dark mouth we can all fit in
Suddenly covered by a hand.

Everything quiet.

The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.
The night birds like children
Who won’t come to dinner.
Lost children in the darkening woods.
~Charles Simic from “Evening Walk” in The Voice at 3 A.M.”

I wonder about the trees.

My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
~Robert Frost from “The Sound of Trees”

The voice of the trees urges me to move my feet
while they stay rooted in place.

I am propelled forward by winds that
strip away leaves, bend branches.

Tempted to simply stand and watch their motion,
instead I walk among the rooted ones, grateful for my legs.

They clap their hands and wave as I pass by.

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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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Like An Old Song With Minor Variations

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Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside cafe
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
~George Bilgere “August” from The Good Kiss

I don’t recognize the back of my own hands – surely they belong to someone else.

How is it possible for my hands to now look like my mother’s did?

It’s only possible now that I’ve lived many summers.
Yet I’m not quite dried up like an old leaf. At least not yet.

This dry spell is over; this morning there is magic in the sound and smell of rain.
Like the old song:
“The bright blessed day
The dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world…”

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An Itsy-Bitsy Life

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There is always an enormous temptation in all of life
to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends
and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral,
simply to step aside from the gaps
where the creeks and winds pour down, saying,
I never merited this grace, quite rightly,
and then to sulk along the rest of your days
on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. 

The world is wilder than that in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright.

We are making hay
when we should be making whoopee;
we are raising tomatoes
when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Other than a few exceptional circumstances in my life,
I have always played it safe:
living an itsy-bitsy life being a down-home, don’t rock the boat,
work hard and live-a-quiet-life kind of person,
growing hay and tomatoes and a few other things…

My grandparents lived that way, my parents lived that way.
I feel like it is bound in the twists and turns of my DNA.

I do know a thing or two about sulking on the edge of rage,
lost in a morass of seething bitterness about the state of the world.  Yet if I were honest about it, the discontent I feel is all about me, always about me.

I want to have accomplished more to deserve taking up space in my days on earth. But that’s a problem we all have, isn’t it?

We’re unworthy of such unmerited grace as has been shown to us, raising us from the holes we dig for ourselves. 
It is such a pure Gift I wait for,
borne out of God’s radical sacrifice
deserving from me a life of radical gratitude,
even when I choose to live it out a little quietly,
making hay and raising tomatoes.

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When Cousins Come to Visit…

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The cousins are coming!
Cousins, cousins. Here come the boys.
Bedlam, mayhem, noise, noise, noise.
Blow up the air mattresses, hide the breakable toys.
Cousins, cousins. Here come the boys.
~John Forster and Tom Chapin “Cousins”

photo of a windy day — photo by Danyale Tamminga
photo of a windy day — photo by Nate Lovegren

When I was growing up, I got to see my cousins maybe once a year but never lived near extended family. It was always an exciting day when the cousins were coming for a visit, or we went to see them. Now as adults, I have sadly lost touch with several of them.

I’m particularly envious of the close relationships between ten cousins growing up on the same farm just down the road from us- essentially they live interchangeably between one house or the other. What a great way to grow up, with two families who will take you in whenever you want a change in scenery or siblings. If you are fighting with a brother or sister, you can hopefully find compatible cousins a few hundred yards away.

Now we have six grandchildren living far from one another. This week they are able to play altogether in the same room in our ordinarily quiet and boring home —-at times it is mayhem and noise noise noise, but wonderful happy giggles and games abound.

It is a perfect time to treasure these family ties between our grandchildren creating as much bedlam and mayhem as possible!

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Resolving to Grow Again

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Through sere trees and beheaded
grasses the slow rain falls.
Hay fills the barn; only the rake
and one empty wagon are left
in the field. In the ditches
goldenrod bends to the ground.
Even at noon the house is dark.
In my room under the eaves
I hear the steady benevolence
of water washing dust
raised by the haying
from porch and car and garden
chair. We are shorn
and purified, as if tonsured.
The grass resolves to grow again,
receiving the rain to that end,
but my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.
~Jane Kenyon “August Rain, After Haying” from Collected Poems

August arrives in the dark

we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it…

but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself
~W.S. Merwin from “Nocturne II” from The Shadow of Sirius

A long-awaited August rain arrives in the night
and like the ground and plants,
I look skyward
letting the clouds weep on me,
cleansing me of dust.

Will I restore like the
brown and dying blade of grass,
turning green and lush in a matter of days?

Is there enough benevolence from the sky
to cleanse and settle my grime,
yielding yet more harvest? 

I thirst for what I cannot name. 
The mystery is, when I’m drenched,
thirst and dust settled,
I’m aching for more.

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