It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address. ~Thomas R. Smith “Trust” from Waking Before Dawn
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. ~C.S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces
I always have lots of questions when I’m uncertain about a decision. I carefully consider whether I should do this or do that, go here or go there, say something or remain silent.
My questions become a prayer seeking clarity – how? why? and what if?
Before the face of God, these questions fall away.
We who worry are not trusting a Creator who is ever-present in His care for us, even when we may think He is not listening. He knows where we are headed, even if we’re unsure of the destination ourselves.
He makes sure we get there. We’ll be delivered to the right place at the right time.
I must trust Him. He’s on it.
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Do you have hope for the future? someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, or what looking back half the time it seems we could so easily have been, or ought… The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will become something we can bear. And I too, and my children, so I hope, will recall as not too heavy the tug of those albatrosses I sadly placed upon their tender necks. Hope for the past, yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage, and it brings strange peace that itself passes into past, easier to bear because you said it, rather casually, as snow went on falling in Vermont years ago. ~David Ray “Thanks, Robert Frost” from Music of Time
I have yet to meet someone who lives without regrets about their past.
Each of us has things we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, which we wish we could change. It can weigh heavily as guilt, or shame, or a depressing burden to be carried through life.
Yet even the past can be redeemed. There can be transformation over time. I do believe this.
This is why I spend time every day gathering up the stuff that stinks from our barn, piling it high outside where it no longer can offend. It’s not gone, but I trust God, in His divine design, to change it, in time, to something productive and fruitful and helpful to grow the future.
So when I feel overwhelmed by the past, I humbly pile up my regrets. I can confess them , apologize for them when possible and find courage to face them. I can’t change what happened, or the hurt caused, but I can allow myself to be changed in order to flourish.
In time, in God’s providence, there can be wondrous results.
There is a worthwhile podcast conversation about this poem on “Growing Edge” between poets Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer.
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January’s drop-down menu leaves everything to the imagination: splotch the ice, splice the light, remake the spirit…
Just get on with it, doing what you have to do with the gray palette that lies to hand. The sun’s coming soon.
A future, then, of warmth and runoff, and old faces surprised to see us. A cache of love, I’d call it, opened up, vernal, refreshed. ~Sidney Burris “Runoff”
photo of hair ice taken by Laura Reifel
When the calendar finally reaches this last day of January, resplendent in its grayest pallor, I have to realize there are six weeks of winter yet ahead.
This past month, nature offered many options on the drop-down menu. Take your pick: soupy foggy mornings, drizzly mid-days, crisp northeast winds with sub-zero wind chill, unexpected snow dumps with icy rain, balmy southerlies with flooding, too many soggy soppy puddly evenings.
Every once in awhile there was a special on the menu: icy spikes on grass blades, frozen droplets on birch branches, hair ice on wood, crystallized weeds like jewelry in the sun, a pink flannel blanket sunrise, an ocean-of-orange sunset.
I realize January’s gray palette is merely preparation for what comes next. There is Love cached away, and as spring is slowly revealed, it will not let me go.
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White cat Winter prowls the farm, tiptoes soft through withered corn, creeps along low walls of stone, falls asleep beside the barn. ~Tony Johnson “White Cat Winter”
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder. Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum. The cat stretching her black body from the pillow. The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture. Then laps the bowl clean. Then wants to go out into the world where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn, then sits, perfectly still, in the grass. I watch her a little while, thinking: what more could I do with wild words? I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her. I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me. ~Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems
Cat, if you go outdoors, you must walk in the snow. You will come back with little white shoes on your feet, little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet. Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go. See how the flames are leaping and hissing low, I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite, so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet – stay with me, Cat. Outdoors the wild winds blow.
Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night, strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore, and more than cats move, lit by our eyes green light, on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar – Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might, and things that are yet to be done. Open the door! ~Elizabeth Coatsworth“On a Night of Snow”
I know folks who worry about our farm cats’ well-being during the recent harsh winter weather. Our farm cats don’t know what it is like to live in a house, and certainly know nothing about the use of kitty litter boxes. They are independent souls, used to being on outdoor patrol and never question the conditions of their employment to manage all aspects of vermin control.
The cats own the barns, pure and simple. This is not a matter for debate among the farm dogs (who also live in the barns during very cold weather) or from the horses, or from us farmers who come and go doing the feeding and watering and cleaning. We all bow down to the cats’ supremacy. Four farm cats distribute themselves among several buildings according to who they like and who they don’t like and then settle in for the duration. They scoot in and out as they please as we open and close the big barn doors against the chill winds and happily lap up whatever treats we bring them.
So please don’t worry. Our cats and other critters are doing just fine this winter. It’s the two humans here who are creakier while we navigate the snow and ice and must bundle up head to toe to face the northeast wind.
As wonderful as farm living can be, it is always more challenging in the winter, especially since it is up to us to supply our own treats…
photo by Nate Gibson
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Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. ~Malcolm Muggeridge
I’ve banked nothing, or everything. Every day the chores need doing again. Early in the morning, I clean the horse barn with a manure fork. Every morning, it feels as though it could be the day beforeor a year ago or a year before that. With every pass, I give the fork one final upward flick to keep the manure from falling out, and every day I remember where I learned to do that and from whom. Time all but stops.
But then I dump the cart on the compost pile. I bring out the tractor and turn the pile, once every three or four days. The bucket bites and lifts, and steam comes billowing out of the heap. It’s my assurance that time is really moving forward, decomposing us all in the process. ~Verlyn Klinkenborg from More Scenes from the Rural Life
He <the professor> asked what I made of the other Oxford students so I told him: They were okay, but they were all very similar… they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.
He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru.
He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny. ~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life (how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)
It is done by us all, as God disposes, from the least cast of worm to what must have been in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are. I think these things each morning with shovel and rake, drawing the risen brown buns toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were, or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed to take a serviceable form, as putty does, so as to lift out entire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope, I think of the angle of repose the manure pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick the redelivered grain, how inky-cap coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then be moved to make way for the next and next. However much we stain the world, spatter it with our leavings, make stenches, defile the great formal oceans with what leaks down, trundling off today’s last barrow-full, I honor shit for saying: We go on. ~Maxine Kumin “The Excrement Poem”
For well over thirty years, my husband and I have spent over an hour a day shoveling manure out of numerous horse stalls and I’m a better person for it. Wintertime chores are always a character-building experience. It feels like everything, myself included, is in a process of decomposition.
Everyone should spend time simply mucking out every day; I think the world would generally be a better place. I enlist any young person who happens to visit our farm as an object lesson in better living through composting the stinky stuff in our lives.
Wheeled to a mountainous pile in our barnyard, our daily collection of manure happily composts year round, becoming rich fertilizer in a matter of months through a crucible-like heating process of organic chemistry, bacteria and earthworms. Nothing mankind has achieved quite matches the drama of useless and basically disgusting stuff transforming into the essential elements needed for productive growth and survival. This is a metaphor I can <ahem> happily muck about in.
I’m in awe, every day, at being part of this process — in many ways a far more tangible improvement to the state of the world than anything else I manage to accomplish every day. The horses, major contributors that they are, act underwhelmed by my enthusiasm. I guess some miracles are relative, depending on one’s perspective, but if the horses understood that the grass they contentedly eat in the pasture, or the hay they munch on during the winter months, was grown thanks to their carefully recycled waste products, they might be more impressed.
Their nonchalance about the daily mucking routine is understandable. If they are outside, they probably don’t notice their beds are clean when they return to the stalls at night. If they are inside during the heavy rain and frozen winter days, they feel duty-bound to be in our faces as we move about their stall, toting a pitchfork and pushing a wheelbarrow. I’m a source of constant amusement as they nose my jacket pockets for treats that I never carry, as they beg for scratches on their unreachable itchy spots, and as they attempt to overturn an almost full load, just to see balls of manure roll to all corners of the stall like breaking a rack of billiard balls in a game of pool.
Wally, our former stallion, now gelded, discovered a way to make my life easier rather than complicating it. He hauled a rubber tub into his stall from his paddock, by tossing it into the air with his teeth and throwing it, and it finally settled against one wall. Then he began to consistently pile his manure, with precise aim, right in the tub. I didn’t ask him to do this. It had never occurred to me. I hadn’t even thought it was possible for a horse to house train himself. But there it is, proof that some horses prefer neat and tidy rather than the whirlwind eggbeater approach to manure distribution. After a day of his manure pile plopping, it is actually too heavy for me to pick up and dump into the wheelbarrow all in one tub load, but it takes 1/4 of the time to clean his stall than the others, and he spares all this bedding.
What a guy. He provides me unending inspiration in how to keep my own personal muck concentrated rather than spattering it about, contaminating the rest of the world.
Now, once I teach him to put the seat back down when he’s done, he’s welcome to move into the house.
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What heart could have thought you?— Past our devisal (O filigree petal!) Fashioned so purely, Fragilely, surely, From what Paradisal Imagineless metal, Too costly for cost? Who hammered you, wrought you, From argentine vapour?— “God was my shaper. Passing surmisal, He hammered, He wrought me, From curled silver vapour, To lust of His mind;— Thou could’st not have thought me! So purely, so palely, Tinily, surely, Mightily, frailly, Insculped and embossed, With His hammer of wind, And His graver of frost.“ ~Francis Thompson “To a Snowflake”
photo by Alexay Kljatov, pbs.org
photo by Alexay Kljatov, pbs.org
I wish one could press snowflakes in a book like flowers. ~James Schuyler from “February 13, 1975” in Collected Poems
Each snowflake falls alone, settling in together to create sculptures in communal effort. And each is created as a singular masterpiece itself.
We too, as the created, are like each snowflake. Together we change the world, sometimes for better, too often for worse. But each of us have come from heaven uniquely designed and purposed, preciously shaped, hammered, wrought and preserved for eternity through God’s loving sacrifice.
Without God embossed on our surface, we would melt into oblivion between the pages of history.
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It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they’re supposed to be. I’ve been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window? ~Pat Schneider “The Patience of Ordinary Things”
…leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love. ~Carl Sandburg from “At a Window”
Everything looks a little different when framed by a window, especially in the winter when protected from the weather. I am set apart, looking out, rather than immersed within the icy snowy landscape myself.
With that separation, I feel as though I could be looking at the past, the present or the future.
It is not unlike being in an art museum, walking past masterpieces that offer a framed view into another time and place, populated with people I don’t know and will never meet.
So I go to the windows, moving through the house and peering out at the life that awaits beyond the frame. But rather than simply admire the view, protected as I am from the chill wind, I find the courage to walk out the door into whatever awaits beyond the glass.
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Low clouds hang on the mountain. The forest is filled with fog. A short distance away the Giant trees recede and grow Dim. Two hundred paces and They are invisible. All Day the fog curdles and drifts. The cries of the birds are loud. They sound frightened and cold. Hour By hour it grows colder. Just before sunset the clouds Drop down the mountainside. Long Shreds and tatters of fog flow Swiftly away between the Trees. Now the valley below Is filled with clouds like clotted Cream and over them the sun Sets, yellow in a sky full Of purple feathers. After dark A wind rises and breaks branches From the trees and howls in the Treetops and then suddenly Is still. Late at night I wake And look out of the tent. The Clouds are rushing across the Sky and through them is tumbling The thin waning moon. Later All is quiet except for A faint whispering. I look Out. Great flakes of wet snow are Falling. Snowflakes are falling Into the dark flames of the Dying fire. In the morning the Pine boughs are sagging with snow, And the dogwood blossoms are Frozen, and the tender young Purple and citron oak leaves. ~Kenneth Rexroth “Snow” from The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Snow and then freezing rain fell for hours yesterday so we remain cloaked and iced and drifted this morning
~we appear more pristine than we are_
Underneath this chilly blanket we’re barely presentable, sleep-deprived, wrinkled and worn, all mud and mildew beneath.
~yet a thaw is coming~
Spring will rise from its snowy bed, lit from an inner fire that never burns out.
Through clouds like ashes from a burning bush, we turn aside to see God’s glory; our eyes carefully covered from the bright glaze of snow and ice.
We feel His flash of life as He passes by.
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If day after day I was caught inside this muffle and hush
I would notice how birches move with a lovely hum of spirits,
how falling snow is a privacy warm as the space for sleeping,
how radiant snow is a dream like leaving behind the body
and rising into that luminous place where sometimes you meet
the people you’ve lost. How silver branches scrawl their names
in tangled script against the white. How the curves and cheekbones
of all my loved ones appear in the polished marble of drifts. ~Kirsten Dierking “Shoveling Snow” from Northern Oracle.
These sub-zero January nights linger long, beginning early and lasting late. I find myself stuck in an insistent winter, pushing through the snowdrifts.
A wintry soul can be a cold and empty place.
I appeal to my Creator who knows my struggle. He asks me to keep my promises because He keeps His promises. His buds of hope and light and warmth still grace my bare branches.
He brings me out of the dark, into the freshness of a snowy dawn, to finish what He brought me here to do.
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Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, its white flag waving over everything, the landscape vanished, not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness, and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered, schools and libraries buried, the post office lost under the noiseless drift, the paths of trains softly blocked, the world fallen under this falling.
In a while, I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water, and the dog will porpoise through the drifts, and I will shake a laden branch sending a cold shower down on us both.
But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house, a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow. I will make a pot of tea and listen to the plastic radio on the counter, as glad as anyone to hear the news
that the Kiddie Corner School is closed, the Ding-Dong School, closed. the All Aboard Children’s School, closed, the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, along with—some will be delighted to hear—
the Toadstool School, the Little School, Little Sparrows Nursery School, Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.
So this is where the children hide all day, These are the nests where they letter and draw, where they put on their bright miniature jackets, all darting and climbing and sliding, all but the few girls whispering by the fence.
And now I am listening hard in the grandiose silence of the snow, trying to hear what those three girls are plotting, what riot is afoot, which small queen is about to be brought down. ~Billy Collins “Snow Day”
Two posts in one day! This winter storm deserves documentation…
Thanks to a snow day here in the Pacific Northwest, everyone is grounded and homebound except the hungry birds who have completely cleaned out my seed and suet supply. They stare at me accusingly through the window so I have tossed them a loaf of sourdough bread to pick away at.
Some would say that retirement seems like a snow day everyday and they aren’t too far wrong. The difference is that usually I’m not slogging through drifting snow to get to my barn chores so my work is a little more onerous on days like this. I don’t mind too much if it is only a day or two.
So we’re hunkered down for the duration. Here’s hoping you are safe and warm and enjoying the view wherever you may be on this wintry day.
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. ~Robert Frost “Dust of Snow”
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