…and there was once, oh wonderful, a new horse in the pasture, a tall, slim being–a neighbor was keeping her there– and she put her face against my face, put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets, against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me, to see who I was, a long quiet minute–minutes– then she stamped her feet and whisked tail and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back. She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough. ~Mary Oliver from “The Poet Goes to Indiana”
photo by Lea Gibson
photo by Emily Vander Haak
Our farm has had many nuzzling muzzles here over the years–
Pink noses, gray noses, nondescript not-sure-what-color noses, noses that have white stripes, diamonds, hearts, triangles, or absolutely no marks at all.
Hot breath that exudes warm grassy fragrance better than any pricey perfume, lips softer than the most elegant velvet.
Noses that reach out in greeting to: blow, sniff, caress, push, search, breathe me in and breathe for me, to see who I am, or who I will become,
smudge my face and shower snot.
I guess I’m just good enough to be blessed by a nuzzling baptism of grace.
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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How can I feel so warm Here in the dead center of January? I can Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is The only life I have. ~James Wright from “A Winter Daybreak above Vence”
to the northwestto the north
To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before. Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day. ~A.E. Houseman from “How Clear, How Lovely Bright”
to the northeastto the eastto the southeast
It was like a church to me. I entered it on soft foot, Breath held like a cap in the hand. It was quiet. What God there was made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In a movement of the wind over grass. There were no prayers said. But stillness Of the heart’s passions — that was praise Enough; and the mind’s cession Of its kingdom. I walked on, Simple and poor, while the air crumbled And broke on me generously as bread. ~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”
to the southto the southwest
So welcome in the dead center of January: a surround-sunset experience on our farm – 360 degrees of evolving color and patterns, streaks and swirls, gradation and gradual decline.
All is silent. No bird song, no wind, no spoken prayer. Yet communion takes place with the air breaking and feeding me like manna from heaven.
Witnessing the light bleeding out all around me:
I will squander my days no more, treasuring each as sheer gift. I will seek to serve my God, church, family, friends, and community. I will be warmed on this chilly winter day even as it descends to darkness, knowing light and hope will return.
to the westto the westto the west
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I have left my wife at the airport, flying out to help our daughter whose baby will not eat. And I am driving on to Kent to hear some poets read tonight.
I don’t know what to do with myself when she leaves me like this. An old friend has decided to end our friendship. Another is breaking it off with his wife.
I don’t know what to say to any of this-Life’s hard. And I say it aloud to myself, Living is hard, and drive further into the darkness, my headlights only going so far.
I sense my own tense breath, this fear we call stress, making it something else, hiding from all that is real.
As I glide past Twin Lakes, flat bodies of water under stars, I hold the wheel gently, slowing my body to the road, and know again that this is just living, not a trauma nor dying, but a lingering pain reminding us that we are alive. ~Larry Smith “Following the Road” from A River Remains
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. ~Frederich Buechner from Wishful Thinking
You get out of bed, wash and dress; eat breakfast, say goodbye and go away never maybe, to return for all you know, to work, talk, lust, pray, dawdle and do, and at the end of the day, if your luck holds, you come home again, home again. Then night again. Bed. The little death of sleep, sleep of death. Morning, afternoon, evening— the hours of the day, of any day, of your day and my day. The alphabet of grace. If there is a God who speaks anywhere, surely he speaks here: through waking up and working, through going away and coming back again, through people you read and books you meet, through falling asleep in the dark. Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking. ~Frederich Buechner from “The Alphabet of Grace
Our six year old grandson, hoping to calm his older sister’s melt-down: “Life is life – it’ll be okay tomorrow…“
So tomorrow – move forward to leave a mark on a new day after tonight’s erasing rest.
No matter what took place this day, no matter the misgivings, no matter what should have been left unsaid, no matter how hard the heart, no matter the lingering pain, there is another day to make it right.
Forgiveness finds a foothold in the dark, when eyelids close, thoughts quietly open, voices hush in prayers of praise, petition and gratitude.
And so now simply sleep on it knowing his grace abounds in blameless dreams.
Morning will come awash in new light, another chance freely given.
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The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm: And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept. ~Robert Frost “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”
Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County – courtesy of Tayler RaeThe field of my childhood farm (1954-59) with the red barn visible on the right. The house was destroyed by fire in the mid-60s but the barn was sparedphoto by Harry Rodenberger
My family sold our first farm in East Stanwood, Washington, when my father took a job working for the state in Olympia, moving to supervising high school agriculture teachers rather than being an ag teacher himself.
It was a difficult transition for us all: we moved to a smaller home and a few acres, selling the large two story house, a huge hay barn and chicken coop as well as fields and a woods where our dairy cows had grazed.
Only a few years later, that old farmhouse burned down but the rest of the buildings were spared. It passed through a few hands and when we had occasion to drive by, we were dismayed to see how nature was taking over the place. The barn still stood but unused it was weathering and withering. Windows were broken, birds flew in and out, the former flower garden had grown wild and unruly.
This was the place I was conceived, where I learned to walk and talk, developing a love for wandering in the fields among the farm animals we depended upon. I remember as a child of four sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the sunrise rising over the woods and making the misty fields turn golden.
This land returned to its essence before the ground was ever plowed or buildings were constructed. It no longer belonged to our family (as if it ever did) but it forever belongs to our memories.
I am overly prone to nostalgia, dwelling more on what has been than what is now or what I hope is to come. It is easy to weep over the losses when time and circumstances reap something unrecognizable.
I may weep, but nature does not. The sun continues to rise over the fields, the birds continue to build nests, the lilacs grow taller with outrageous blooms, and each day ends with a promise of another to come.
So I must dwell on what lies ahead, not what has perished in the ashes.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
Tell me, where is the road I can call my own That I left, that I lost So long ago? All these years I have wandered Oh, when will I know There’s a way, there’s a road That will lead me home After wind, after rain When the dark is done As I wake from a dream In the gold of day Through the air there’s a calling From far away There’s a voice I can hear That will lead me home Rise up, follow me Come away, is the call With the love in your heart As the only song There is no such beauty As where you belong Rise up, follow me I will lead you home
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Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. ~ Linda Hoganfrom Solar Storms
Wet stones from the middle path. A shard of green heartwood ripped by the big storm from the oak’s broken, heavy limb. And we all have scar stories.
Which say more than wound stories. Wound stories tell how we were injured. Scar stories tell how we heal. ~Liza Hyatt,”What I Carry Home With Me” from Wayfaring
between the rosebuds and the thorns the pine tree branches with their needles and kitty claws
my hands are always bleeding
and turning up scars that cry, “I’m alive, I feel it. I feel it all” and then falling back into whispers while my body heals itself one more time ~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water
…see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest –
And when two people have loved each other, see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. ~Jane Hirshfield from “For What Binds Us”
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth, artist
photo by Nate Gibson
In winter, we are stripped naked as the bare trees right now; our skin and bones reveal the scars, broken branches, and healed fractures of previous winter windstorms. We no longer have anything to hide behind or among, as our defects are plain to see.
Our whole story is a mystery untold, impossible to conceal.
Scars come in various sizes and shapes, some hidden, some quite obvious to all. How they are inflicted also varies–some accidental, others therapeutic, and too many intentional.
The most insidious are the ones so internal, no one can see or know they are there. Sometimes we aren’t aware of them ourselves – only something unreachable is still hurting at times.
Most often, they are simply the scars of living in a hazardous world – on farm animals, healing into a tough scar of leathery “proud flesh”.
Yet, none of them are as deep and wide as scars accepted on our behalf, nor as wondrous as the Love that oozed from them, nor as amazing as the Grace that abounds to this day because of the promise they represent. These are scars from the Word made Flesh, a proud flesh that won’t give way, lasting forever.
Though I am abundantly flawed with pocks and scars, I am reminded each winter of my renewal. There are hints of new growth to come when the frost abates and the sap thaws.
Indeed, I am prepared to wait an eternity, if necessary, to understand the rest of the story.
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Twenty years ago My generation learned To be afraid of mud. We watched its vileness grow, Deeper and deeper churned From earth, spirit, and blood.
From earth, sweet-smelling enough As moorland, field, and coast; Firm beneath the corn, Noble to the plough; Purified by frost Every winter morn.
From blood, the invisible river Pulsing from the hearts Of patient man and beast: The healer and life-giver; The union of parts; The meaning of the feast.
From spirit, which is man In triumphant mood, Conquerer of fears, Alchemist of pain Changing bad to good; Master of the spheres.
Earth, the king of space, Blood, the king of time, Spirit, their lord and god, All tumbled from their place, All trodden into slime, All mingled into mud. ~Richard Thomas Church “Mud” written in the 1930s
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. ~E. E. Cummings from “In Just”
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. ~Marge Piercy from “To Be of Use” from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
Several weeks of rain along with dismal headlines can take its toll in a variety of ways on the human psyche; the bleakness seeps into my brain, making my gray matter much grayer than usual. Everything slows down to a crawl and climbing out of bed to another dark day requires commitment and effort.
Managing barn chores and horses on days like these is a challenge. Despite years of effort to create well drained paddocks with great footing, there is no such thing when the ground is super saturated from unrelenting inches of rain, and when the barn and paddocks are unfortunately placed on the downside of a hill.
Every bare inch of ground has become mud soup with more water pouring off the hill every moment.
Mud in all its glory rivals ice for navigation hazard. Yesterday it was a boot magnet as I tried carefully to make my way with a load of hay to a bit drier area in a paddock, and found with one step that my boot had decided to remain mired in the muck and my foot was waving bootless in the air trying to decide whether to land in the squishy stuff or go back to the relative safety of the stuck boot. Standing there on one foot, with a load of hay in my arms, I’m sure I looked even more absurd than I felt at the moment, and at least I gave comic relief to people driving by.
I won’t say how I figured my way out, but it did require doing laundry later.
I remember years ago when my daughter was about 5 years old, I was busy with chores as she was exploring a similar muddy paddock and I realized I hadn’t seen her for a few minutes and I went looking. There she stood, wailing, with one stocking foot in the mud, an empty boot stuck up to its top, and her other boot so mired, she couldn’t move without abandoning it too. By the time I got her extracted, we were both laughing muddy messes.
More laundry.
The Haflinger horses are not averse to the mud if they are hungry enough. They’ll hesitate momentarily before they dive in to reach their meal but dive in they do. Those clean blonde legs and white tails are only a memory from last summer. Even their bellies are flecked with brown now. Later, back in the barn, as the mud dries, it curries off in chunks and I start to see my golden horses revealed again, but it seems they and I will never be truly clean again.
What lures me into the mud, enticing me deeper in muck that covers and coats me so thoroughly that it feels I’ll never be clean again? Whatever I want so badly that I’m willing to get hopelessly dirty to reach it, once there, it has become tainted by the mud as well, and is never as good as I had hoped.
I become hopelessly mired and stuck, sinking deeper by the minute. Reading the daily headlines only makes it worse.
Rescue comes from an outreached hand with strength greater than my own. Cleansing may be merely skin deep, only to last until my next dive into the mud, or it can be thorough and lasting–a sort of future “mud protective coating” so to speak. I can choose how dirty to get and how dirty to stay and how clean I want to be.
I think the whole world needs to do laundry daily.
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-three years ago, but still no labor came as it should.
Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried to drive to the hospital, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came by tractor to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow.
Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. Your heart beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if only God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm sent from God and we were dug out from a drift: I celebrate whenever I hear your voice – your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of the night God sent drifting snow.
My annual retelling of a most remarkable day:: Thirty-three years ago today, our daughter Lea Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
Thanks to that blizzard, Lea is a school teacher, serves the youth ministry in her church, and will soon receive her Masters in School Counseling.
She is married to her true love Brian– he also is a blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
The Lord wanted her in this world: May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts…
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I thank you, each of you, who visit this page with your hearts open to the ever-changing seasons. Your encouragement and support keeps me looking for beauty in words and images to share each day.
Here’s to another year passed by and yet another to come, full of rich blessings yet to be discovered…
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. ~J.R.R. Tolkienfrom The Hobbit
These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. ~Richard Wilbur from “Year’s End”
In a dark time, the eye begins to see… ~Theodore Roethke from “In a Dark Time”
How much can come, how much can go When the December moon is bright, What worlds of play we’ll never know Sleeping away the cold white night After a fall of snow. – May Sarton, from December Moon
Previous collections of “Best of Barnstorming” photos:
Whatever harm I may have done In all my life in all your wide creation If I cannot repair it I beg you to repair it,
And then there are all the wounded The poor the deaf the lonely and the old Whom I have roughly dismissed As if I were not one of them. Where I have wronged them by it And cannot make amends I ask you To comfort them to overflowing,
And where there are lives I may have withered around me, Or lives of strangers far or near That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity, And if I cannot find them Or have no way to serve them,
Remember them. I beg you to remember them
When winter is over And all your unimaginable promises Burst into song on death’s bare branches. ~Anne Porter “A Short Testament” from Living Things.
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God. ~Corrie ten Boom from Clippings from My Notebook
Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next. ~Frederick Buechnerfrom Beyond Words
While this end of the year’s darkness lingers, beginning too early and lasting too late, I find myself hiding in my own wintry soul, knowing I have too often failed to do what is needed when it is needed.
I tend to look inward when I need to focus outside myself. I muffle my ears to stifle supplicating voices. I turn away rather than meet a stranger’s gaze.
I appeal to our known God when facing the unknown: He knows my darkness needs His Light. He unimaginably promises buds of hope and warmth and color and fruit will arise from my barest branches.
He brings me forth out of hiding, to be impossibly transformed.
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