O God, early in the morning I cry to you. Help me to pray And to concentrate my thoughts on you; I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness, But with you there is light; I am lonely, but you do not leave me; I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help; I am restless, but with you there is peace. In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways, But you know the way for me…. Restore me to liberty, And enable me to live now That I may answer before you and before men. Lord whatever this day may bring, Your name be praised. Amen ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer “Prayer”
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. ~Wendell Berry “To Know the Dark”from Soul Food – Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. ~Mary Oliver “The Uses of Sorrow”
In the beginning, God did not banish the darkness. He balanced it with His illuminating Light. Fallen as we are, we search blindly for Him in the dark, where we need Him most. And He is there.
We are promised this: “and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light… Revelation 22:5.
Darkness is not yet banished. But it is overcome. Whatever this day may bring, we have a lit pathway leading us home.
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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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First day of February, and in the far corner of the yard the Adirondack chair, blown over by the wind at Christmas, is still on its back, the snow too deep for me to traipse out and right it, the ice too sheer to risk slamming these old bones to the ground.
In April I will walk out across the warming grass, and right the chair as if there had never been anything to stop me in the first place, listening for the buzz of hummingbirds which reminds me of how fast things are capable of moving. ~John Stanizzi “Ascension”
photo by Josh Scholten
I want to believe we’ve already had our winter and now it’s done. Turning the calendar to February, I hope we’ll begin a gradual warming trend to spring.
For a few days in January, I had the constant challenge of finding safe footing when surfaces were snow and ice-covered; I certainly didn’t want to add to the burden of the local orthopedists who were busy putting together broken arms and legs and dislocated joints from too many unscheduled landings.
Despite what the calendar says, sometimes winter is never quite done with us. I know in my head that winter is not forever — February will wrap up its short stay of 29 days and once again I will move about with ease without worrying about iced-over frosty walkways. But my heart is not so easily convinced as I become more risk-averse, worrying about fractures.
So my heart and head and aging bones need reminding: Those who traipse on slick surfaces will always risk being broken. Those who have fallen will be righted and put together again. Those who suffer regret are forgiven even when pain is not easily forgotten. And time moves quickly on, despite our efforts to hold on to now; my old bones and tender heart are healed when and if I still can be of use to others.
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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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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 was there made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In 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”
A strange empty day. I did not feel well, lay around…. I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever. Tonight I do feel in a state of grace, limbered up, less strained. ~May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude (January 18, 1971 entry)
Once in your life you pass Through a place so pure It becomes tainted even By your regard, a space Of trees and air where Dusk comes as perfect ripeness. Here the only sounds are Sighs of rain and snow, Small rustlings of plants As they unwrap in twilight. This is where you will go At last when coldness comes. It is something you realize When you first see it, But instantly forget. At the end of your life You remember and dwell in Its faultless light forever. ~Paul Zimmer “The Place” from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited
My family members and I have had weeks of feeling just on the verge of conquering the latest viral upper respiratory illness, but then would find ourselves welcoming the next cold as if it were a long lost friend.
I’m discouraged by ongoing fatigue and need for isolation that has accompanied these illnesses, due to our persistent sneezes and coughs.
All this has forced me to rest, take a breath and feel lucky to be alive, even if feeling unwell. I know too many folks who are dealing with much greater burdens.
Indeed, this morning brought a moment of grace for me. I witnessed manna falling from the sky.
Often times a sunrise is as plain and gray as I am, but at times, it is fire lit from above and beneath, igniting and transforming the sky, completely overwhelming me.
I was swept away, transfixed by colors and swirls and shadows, forever grateful to be fed by such heavenly bread broken over my head.
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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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O lovely apple! beautifully and completely rotten hardly a contour marred–
perhaps a little shrivelled at the top but that aside perfect in every detail! O lovely
apple! what a deep and suffusing brown mantles that unspoiled surface! No one
has moved you since I placed you on the porch rail a month ago to ripen.
No one. No one! ~William Carlos Williams “Perfection”
When a newspaper posed the question, “What’s Wrong with the World?” the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response:
“Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton.“
That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus. ~Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God
I am what’s wrong with the world and so are you.
Not one of us escapes the rottenness that lies not-so-deep beneath our shiny surface. We are full of wormholes, inviting the worms of the world to eat us alive.
One look at the news headlines of the day is enough mar the most perfect surface. No one moves to save us from our over-ripening fate; we sit untouched, withering and shriveling.
We are the problem and the problem is us.
We need rescue by a Savior who is the one good apple among a barrel of contagiously bad apples. We are so tainted, it takes Someone who truly is Perfect to transform us from the inside out, from worm-holes back to wholeness and on to holiness.
May we fall to our knees, grateful, that Christ, who is the Leader of all in His Kingdom, will grant us a grace and sanctuary and perfection we emphatically don’t deserve.
May He retrieve us before the worms (or the hornets) do. We are in this together.
We have met the enemy and he is us. ~Walt Kelly (in the words of Pogo)
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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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