Category: Summer

Just An Ordinary Life

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No doubt she’s disappointed.

Such a disgrace I turned out to be.

Not a policy-maker
Or tech-savvy entrepreneur.
Nothing of note.

I gave birth three times
and sent three
tall, kind people 
into the world

I offered words of consolation
I planted sunflowers
I listened

Elected official?
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist?
Cutting-edge thought-leader?
MD, PhD, CEO?
Oscar, Emmy, Tony? 
Nobel? 
Anything?

I closed my mother’s eyes
when she died
and again, my father’s

I made no fortune
no headlines
nothing went viral

I sang and danced
for no one

I remembered
I noticed
I breathed

Just an ordinary life
filled with extraordinary love.

How disappointing.
~Mary Poindexter McLaughlin “Alma Mater”

Parents can hold unreasonable expectations of success for their children; they tend to reflect their own deficiencies or failures.
After all, we want our kids to make the world a better place
than it was for us.

Yet no academic degree, no bank account, no notoriety or award
can match living an ordinary life filled with extraordinary love.

And yes, I am disappointed in myself – not because of the unmet expectations of my parents – I checked off all the boxes they hoped I would achieve in my younger years, but I couldn’t match the extraordinary love they showed me.

The older me tended to withhold myself emotionally from them as they grew frailer, fearing their weaknesses would someday become my own.

I could have been more compassionate in their final years, rather than taking on the more professional role of the doctor-daughter – physically present but too distracted and stretched with competing responsibilities.

That is something I cannot undo now except to pray for forgiveness for how my own inner struggles made those years harder than they needed to be.

My husband and I birthed three tall kind people who we love and have sent into the world. I pray for them what I wish I had understood when I was sent into the world by my parents: living their ordinary life of extraordinary love is more important than anything else they set out to do.

I rejoice as I see them foster such love for their spouses and their children and their communities: remembering, noticing and breathing life into each new day.

Seeing that as the years go by, I keep planting my sunflowers, slowly letting go of my own disappointment in myself.

Daylight Stakes Its Claim

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I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
~Robert Creeley “The Flower”

…forests giving way
to open meadow where deep snow
lingers and finally relents, uncovering
acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche
white — daylight restaking its earthly claim.
Every season swallows someone — 
~Kevin Craft from “For the Climbers”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
~William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

In early July, up in the alpine meadows of the Cascade mountains grow delicate avalanche lilies pushing through icy crust as the snow melt completes. Though brief in their blooming, they are harbingers of long summer daylight, a reminder the painful darkness of winter is behind us, as well as bound to come again too soon.

I am swallowed by each season.

The lilies, bursting through waning snow, become a bit of heaven on earth. Despite the bleak chill of winter, they fight to rise triumphant each year, an eternal promise of a some-day never-ending summer.

Prickly, Yet Tender-Hearted

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The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable, 

She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.
~Pablo Neruda from “Ode to an Artichoke”

She bore only the heart,
Worked at the stem with her
Fingers, pulling it to her,
And into her, like a cord.
She would sustain him,
Would cover his heart.
The hairy needles
And the bigger leaves,
These she licked into shape,
Tipping each with its point.
He is the mud-flower,
The thorny hugger.
~James McMichael “The Artichoke”

I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father’s garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.
~Diane Lockwood from “The First Artichoke”

I first encountered a globe artichoke in my first week at college in California. I’d never seen one before, much less dismantled and actually eaten one.  The California natives around me in the dining hall were astonished my worldview had never before included artichoke leaves and heart. After all, the University was only an hour away from the artichoke capital of the world, Watsonville, where the motto for the annual artichoke festival was “Thistle Be Fun!”

My frame of reference growing up on a farm was that thistle-looking plants were noxious weeds and needed to be chopped down before going to seed and reproducing even more noxious weeds. This spiny looking bud that was about to bloom a purple thistle flower looked highly suspicious to me and not to be trusted.

But then someone showed me how to peel off a leaf, dip the base in mayonnaise or lemon garlic butter and scrape off the soft part with my teeth. 

Noxious? Not even close. 
Absolutely delicious! 
Prickly protects the tasty.

The circumferential peeling of leaves one by one leads deeper to softer petals and fewer prickles, with the flavor becoming less subtle and more distinct. Once the leaves are all off, there lies uncovered at the base a heart to be scooped out.  The round meaty heart is the point of all this effort. 

It is the gold in the buried treasure chest, the pot at the end of the rainbow. It takes work to reach it, but it never disappoints.

How to mentally get past the plainness and prickles? 
How to recognize what appears so undesirable as something to preserve and nurture?  

There are so many times in my day I walk right past such people or opportunities as not worth the trouble.  Sometimes I myself am the one with the prickles, protective as they seem to me yet announcing caution to others, not to be trusted.

How could anyone know the tender heart that dwells within unless we gently, graciously, gratefully peel the prickles away?

Preserving the Sweetness

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photo by Joel DeWaard

How beautiful the things are that you did not notice before!
A few sweetclover plants
Along the road to Bellingham,
Culvert ends poking out of driveways,
Wooden corncribs, slowly falling,
What no one loves, no one rushes towards or shouts about,
What lives like the new moon,
And the wind
Blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.
~Robert Bly from “Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life”

culvert

“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
~Maxine Kumin “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins”

The Robert Bly poem reminds me to see in a new way
as I travel the road to Bellingham, Washington
(not Bly’s Bellingham, Minnesota).

My eyes scan for the unnoticed and unremarkable,
along these rural byways I traveled decades to work,
now only to meetings or shopping –
when feeling the need to wander and wonder.

Forty years ago in my twice-daily
hour-long Seattle traffic commute to reach my clinic,
I could only pay attention to the cars around me,
blinkered to all else happening.

Since moving north to Whatcom County,
I try to notice what small things
I might keep handy in my memory for another day,
like a jar of canned peaches in our root cellar,
just so I won’t forget,
ready to pull them off the shelf someday
so I might share
their sweetness with someone else.

morning113157
photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. 
…to get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way
that takes nothing for granted. 
Everything is phenomenal;
everything is incredible;
never treat life casually.
To be spiritual is to be amazed.
~Abraham Joshua Hershel

photo by Harry Rodenberger
photo by Harry Rodenberger
groundcover

As If in Prayer

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His long teeth on her withers,
her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild.
Her long teeth on his withers,
his oiled-teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild.
Their shadows’ chiasmus will fleck and fill with flies,
the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth.
From ear-flick to tail-switch, they stand in one body.
No luck is as boundless as theirs.
~Jane Hirshfield “The Love of Aged Horses”

Two horses
lean in the field
clasped against each other as if in prayer,
grooming each other’s manes the way
my thumb strokes the back of my thumb.

Together, tall, conductive
around them, fenced lightning,
above, a promise of more rain to come,
the force of faith condensing, cumulative—

A wave tries to return to the river what it has been given, futile.

Two swans, only ever as far apart as palms, a wingspan,
float by shore, sucking up silt, throats rippling,
taking in something as vast as the sea in small sips.

If, on cold nights,
before bed,
I pray for something as simple as the warmth of my hands—
~Ace Chu “Dear” from The Hopper

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.   
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me   
And nuzzled my left hand.   
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
~James Wright “A Blessing”

May we easily find one another’s itches, just as we know our own.
May we greet all visitors with a gentle and humble welcome.
May we bow our heads together when in need of community.
May we clasp hands in prayer to God, warming each other’s hands
when the world is feeling far too cold.


Lyrics:
Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night. ​​​​​​​​
(Mark Twain left this poem on his daughter’s tombstone)

The Melt and Flow of Cut Grass

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had 
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
~Philip Larkin “Cut Grass” from The Complete Poems

June is the month when grass grows exponentially, taking over all open spaces and every nook and cranny

Light and wind work magic on a field of flowing tall grass. The blades of the mower lay it to the ground in green streams that course up and down the slopes. It lies orderly in stoneless cemetery rows.

Farmer’s fields are lined with rows of mown grass, a precious commodity to be harvested for the livestock to eat the rest of the year. Some of the green is bagged up like big marshmallows for easy storage and some put in silos for later in the winter.

The shorn grass is critical to the life of the animals we raise.

What was once waving and bowing to the wind is cut and crushed:
no longer bending but bent,
no longer flowing but flown,
no longer growing but mown.

At summer’s pace, while the clouds saunter overhead, grasses are stored as fodder for the beasts of the farm on those cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.

It will melt in their mouths. As we watch them chew, we’ll remember overflowing abundance of those summer days in June.

Flare Up Like A Flame

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God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Go the the Limits of Your Longing” from Book of Hours

…you mustn’t be frightened …
if a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen;
if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows,
moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness,
any misery, any depression, since after all
you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
~Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

We were made for difficult times such as these:
we feel things deeply,
our joys and awe and fears ~
so much so we can feel swept away.

Feelings are not the final say
yet they both motivate and immobilize us.

God has told us to be His Light in the shadows;
we will find Him if we long for Him.

Though we may feel lost,
wandering, uncertain, hopeless
He takes us by the hand and leads us through.

Grab hold and hang on tight.

A Perfect World of Moments

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The evening comes slowly over us,
over the cardinal and the wren still
feeding, over the swallows suddenly
swooping to snatch up mosquitoes

over the marsh where the green
sedge lately has a tawny tinge
over two yearlings bending long
necks to nibble hillock bushes

finally separate from their doe
mother. A late hawk is circling
against the sky streaked lavender.
The breeze has quieted, vanished

into leaves that still stir a bit
like a cat turning round before
sleep. Distantly a car passes
and is gone. Night gradually

unrolls from the east where
the ocean slides up and down
the sand leaving seaweed tassels:
a perfect world for moments.
~Marge Piercy “June 15th, 8pm” from Made in Detroit

So many fleeting moments pass by me,
a shower of raindrops disappearing into a stream —
I can’t capture and hold them.
They run through my fingers like water,
leaving behind a damp residue of remembrance.

Yet each a moment of perfection,
even as I lose my grasp on it.
Perhaps a written word or recorded photo,
elusive as the relentless flow of time itself.

A moment gifted by God,
a moment breathed,
a moment observed,
a moment vanished,
lived fully, yet never to come again.

A Witness to Dawn

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My heart is like a little bird
That sits and sings for very gladness.
Sorrow is some forgotten word,
And so, except in rhyme, is sadness.

The world is very fair to me—
Such azure skies, such golden weather,
I’m like a long caged bird set free,
My heart is lighter than a feather.

I rise rejoicing in my life;
I live with love for God and neighbor;
My days flow on unmarred by strife,
And sweetened by my pleasant labor.

Oh youth! oh spring! oh happy days,
Ye are so passing sweet, and tender,
And while the fleeting season stays,
I’ll revel care-free, in its splendor.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox “Joy”

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms
and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray

I believe in Christianity
as I believe that the sun has risen:
not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more…
~from Les Miserable

I wasn’t the only one watching the light emerging over the foothills this morning. A bird sitting atop our barn’s weathervane greeted this morning’s dawn, a silent witness, along with me.

I thought we might face the new day together, both preparing ourselves for whatever might come our way.

Yet he flew away, leaving me behind to face it on my own.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
~Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend April 1885

Great Day in the Morning

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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

Beyond Mágdalen and by the Bridge,
on a place called there the Plain,
In Summer, in a burst of summertime
Following falls and falls of rain,
When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;
. . . . . . . .
The motion of that man’s heart is fine
Whom want could not make píne, píne
That struggling should not sear him, a gift should cheer him
Like that poor pocket of pence, poor pence of mine.
. . . . . . . .
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Cheery Beggar”

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late…

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
~John Donne from “The Sun Rising”

My father, when he was surprised
or suddenly impressed, would blurt
“Great day in the morning,” as though
a revelation had struck him.
The figure of his speech would seem
to claim some large event appeared
at hand, if not already here;
a mighty day or luminous age
was flinging wide its doors as world
on world revealed their wonders in
the rapturous morning, always new,
beginning as the now took hold.
~Robert Morgan “Great Day in the Morning” from Terroir

Every time I open my eyes
as dawn streams through the window,
as I listen for the voice of yet another morning
while the sun rises to warm the world –

I am reminded how precious is this moment
~this “great day in the morning” ~
how intensely grateful I am
for each breath and each heartbeat
gifted to me, a cheery beggar

We are created to experience this realization:
we are, everyone of us, beloved.

We are meant to wonder breathless at this burst of summer,
to keep watch for each new dawn,
waiting to see what will happen next.