Category: Winter

Rather Than Taking Time, Time Takes You…

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And so you have a life that you are living only now,
now and now and now,
gone before you can speak of it,
and you must be thankful for living day by day,
moment by moment …
a life in the breath and pulse
and living light of the present…
~Wendell Berry from Hannah Coulter

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time.
Let it be.
Unto us, so much is given.
We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge
from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life.
Each time life required me to take a new step
into unknown spiritual territory,
I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others–
Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too,
out of an awareness that my deepest vocation
is to be a witness to the glimpses of God
I have been allowed to catch.
~Henri Nouwen from Reaching Out

…there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time,
the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls,
figures of speech budding and blossoming,
articulation drifting like spent petals
onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk,
letting time get the better of us.
_Just taking our time_, as we say.
That is, letting time take us.
~Patricia Hampl from Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime 

I would recognize myself in my patients, one after another after another. They sat at the edge of their seat, struggling to hold back a flood from brimming eyes, fingers gripping the arms of the chair, legs jiggling. Each moment, each breath, each rapid heart beat overwhelmed by panic-filled questions: will there be another breath?  must there be another breath? Must this life go on like this in fear of what the next moment will bring?

The only thing more frightening than the unknown is the fear that the next moment could be worse than the last. Sadly, this is a tragic waste of precious time, a lack of recognition of a moment just passed that will never be retrieved and relived.  

There is only fear of the next and the next so that the now and now and now is lost forever.

Worry and angst is more contagious than the flu.
I washed my hands of it throughout the clinic day.
I wished a simple vaccination could protect us all from unnamed fears.

I wanted to say to them as well as myself:
Stop to rest within this moment in time.
Stop and stop and stop.
Stop fearing the gift of each breath.

Simply be.

I wanted to say:
this moment in time is yours alone.
Don’t let time take it from you;
instead, take time for
weeping and sharing
and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it.
Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that flow
and stop holding them back.

Just be, as uncomfortable as it is –
and be blessed–
in the now and now and now.

Be swept along on the current of time;
now winter bare-branched, to be soon
unfurling, budding,
eventually blossoming.

Time takes us there. So let’s take time.

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The Dwindles

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

Over the years, the most common search term bringing new readers to my Barnstorming blog is “dwindled dawn.”

I had written about Emily Dickinson’s “dwindles” on a number of occasions – missing a house full of our three children, who have their own homes with families. Yet I had not felt afflicted with a serious case of dwindles myself until the ongoing isolation during COVID-time.

I was clearly not the only one. “Dwindles” spread across the globe during the pandemic more quickly than the virus.

There really isn’t a pill that works well for dwindling. One of the most effective treatments is breaking bread with friends and family all in the same room, at the same table, playing games, lingering over conversation or singing together in harmony.

Just being together becomes the ultimate cure for dwindles.

Maybe experiencing friend and family deficiency during the pandemic helped us all understand how crucial we are to one another. It’s high time to replenish the reservoir so we don’t dwindle away to nothing.

If you are visiting these words for the first time because you too searched for “dwindled dawn” — welcome to Barnstorming. We can stave off the dwindles by joining together each day for encouragement and a bit of beauty.

Because mornings without you all diminishes me.
I just want you to know.

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A Tuesday in January

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Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem
written about something
important
or special
that’s gonna happen
or already did.
Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.

Like what?! Lamont asks.
He’s all slouched down in his seat.
I don’t feel like writing about no occasion.

How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says.
What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain’t
June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact,
he says, it’s January and it’s snowing.

Then his voice gets real low and he says
And when it’s January and all cold like this
feels like June’s a long, long ways away.

The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus.
Some of the kids are nodding.

Outside the sky looks like it’s made out of metal
and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes
and coming underneath them too.

Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that’s
an occasion.
But she looks a little bit sad when she says it
Like she’s sorry she ever brought the whole
occasional poem thing up.

I was gonna write about Mama’s funeral
but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth
zapped all the ideas from my head.

I guess them arguing
on a Tuesday in January’s an occasion
So I guess this is an occasional poem.
~Jacqueline Woodson from “Occasional Poem”

I like these cold, gray winter days.  Days like these let you savor a bad mood.
–  Bill Watterson in Calvin and Hobbes

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”

Now one year later after the occasion of an inauguration,
most of us wish things could be different than they are~
nothing feels right, rights feel like nothing,
we’re more than out of sorts, grumpy, in a bad mood –
we’re all sadly angry and angrily sad.

And we thought the pandemic was bad.

But moral decay at the highest level
is doing more damage than any virus did.
We’ve allowed politics to sow and reproduce
discord, distrust, discouragement
into our very beings.

There is no vaccine
for this aching of the heart.

An infection of the spirit
will far outlast any pandemic virus
by spreading to future generations,
eroding trust as we allow justice to decay,
as human bonds break,
withering our faith and our hope
that our country can survive anything.

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Surrounded By a Winter Sunset

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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”

sunset1131812
to the northwest
sunset1131816
to 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”

sunset1131816
to the northeast
sunset1131810
to the east
sunset1131814
to 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”

sunset113188
to the south
sunset1131811
to 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.

sunset113181
to the west
sunset113182
to the west
sunset113171
to the west
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A Lingering Pain

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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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Dwelling in Possibility

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I pocketed them that day
the tour guide was not looking.

I nodded to myself that she
would not mind for me to hold

in my palm and carry home
such Possibility.
~Andrea Potos “Three Acorns from Emily’s Yard”

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
~Emily Dickinson

When I dwell in Emily D’s poetic possibilities,
full of mysterious capitalizations,
inscrutable dashes and sideways rhymes,
I feel blinded, get easily lost,
stumbling over this and that,
and end up wondering where she is leading me
and how far I’m willing to go.

Yet she tells me

– This –
to get my attention, hold it fast,
to look up and out, beyond, and into forever.

-This-
is what I must do when I read her carefully chosen words and dashes

-This-
is what I ask of a reader who opens my own words here

-This-
is dwelling in possibility for a moment or an eternity,
all eyes and windows and doors wide open
to grasp a glimpse of Paradise.

-This-
is our hands holding the seeds of potential for the future,
to gather, to embrace, to pray,
to prepare us for Whatever it is which Comes Next…

-This-
we do it together…

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Come and See: A Door Opened to the Light

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For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
John 3:16-21

The issue is now clear.
It is between light and darkness
and everyone must choose his side.
G.K. Chesterton (on his deathbed)

The world hides God from us,
or we hide ourselves from God,
or for reasons of his own
God hides himself from us,
but however you account for it,
he is often more conspicuous by his absence than by his presence,
and his absence is much of what we labor under
and are heavy laden by.
Just as sacramental theology speaks
of a doctrine of the Real Presence,
maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence
because absence can be sacramental, too,
a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting.
~Frederick Buechner from Telling the Truth

…my faith has weathered in a holy way;
it’s larger, gentler, especially as I have learned
to bear the needs of others,
to pour myself out at least a little bit like God does for me.
In that offering, I’ve learned a lot
about God’s quiet, ever-present nourishment.
A larger, patient acceptance has come to me.
I haven’t found every answer,
I still ‘want’ so much more of God than I have,
and yet, I also have learned to live
with the holy hunger that is the groaning
of God’s Spirit within me as I wait
for the full coming of the Kingdom.⁣
~Sarah Clarkson reflecting on Buechner’s quote above

Lord Jesus, You are my righteousness, I am your sin.
You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours.
You became what you were not,
that I might become what I was not.
~Martin Luther

…faith is keeping Christ before our eyes —
Christ incarnate, Christ in his ministry,
Christ giving his life on the cross for us —
beholding in Christ the very heart of God poured out in love.
John points to Jesus and says
this is what God is like;
this is God’s heart for us.
~Pastor Nathan Chambers paraphrasing John Calvin

Choosing to step through the opened door into the light is not like choosing sides on teams in grade school, numbering off one-two-one-two until everyone knows which side they stand on – the weak and the strong thrown together by random chance.

It is not like an explosive election year where choosing sides means aligning with a political candidate with whom I vehemently disagree so as to avoid supporting the even worse opponent.

This is not like a Lincoln-Douglas debate tournament where I might represent one viewpoint for the first round, and then be asked to represent the opposite viewpoint in the second half.

This is a choice of where I would rather be: in the light of God’s love and presence, or hiding from Him in the shadows.

And it isn’t only my choice,
but it is being chosen,
just as I am,
my weakness and sin and darkness
taken on by Christ’s enormous love
so that I might become
what I was not before.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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How We Heal

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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 Hogan from 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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In the Mud and Muck

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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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Our Hopes, Such As They Are

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A year has come to us as though out of hiding
It has arrived from an unknown distance
From beyond the visions of the old
Everyone waited for it by the wrong roads
And it is hard for us now to be sure it is here…
~W. S. Merwin from “Early January” from  The Lice 

When once the New Year came to earth,
To claim his realm by right of birth,
A forest knight, the gallant oak,
Upon the pathway threw his cloak.
The garment green, now turned to brown,
Upon the bare earth fluttered down
And o’er the velvet to his throne
The New Year walked unto his own.

Then gave the New Year a decree
To every bush and forest tree
That every growing, blooming thing
Should hail the mighty oak as king.
Yea, more, he made the king of trees
A ruler of the running seas,
In ships to bear from shore to shore
The earth’s discovered treasures o’er.

Then called he Springtime to his side,
Old Winter’s pink-limbed, blushing bride,
And bade her weave a regal cloak
To cover new the gallant oak.
And so she wove a gown of green,
The richest earth had ever seen,
And garbed anew the mighty tree
With emblem of his majesty.
~Douglas Malloch “The Gallant Oak”

I was cold and leaned against the big oak tree
as if it were my mother wearing a rough apron
of bark, her upraised arms warning of danger.
Through those boughs and leaves I saw
dark patches of sky. I thought a brooding
witch waited to catch me up from under
branches and take me, careening on her broom,
to her home in the jaundiced moon.
I looked to the roof of mom and dad’s house
and wondered if the paisley couch patterns
would change during the day. My brother peeked
from a window and waved. When the bus came,
I pawed away from the trunk, fumbled,
and took my first step toward not returning.
~Dante Di Stefano “With a Coat”

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
~W.S. Merwin “To the New Year”, from Collected Poems 1996-2011

My hopes for this new year, such as they are,
are uneasy-
untouched, yet still possible.

I wonder if I am walking down the wrong pathway.
I wonder if what I thought would be new, remains in hiding.

“we’ve wandered many the weary foot since long, long ago.“
(Auld Lang Syne)

I have taken the first step this past week,
and then another and another,
along this unknown road to the future.
Perhaps I’ll find you walking along this way;
you too may be feeling a bit lost.

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