The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within. ~William C. Bryant from “Among the Trees”
The sun was everywhere yesterday, thawing the frost layer on the metal roof of the barn to the point of seeping through the cracks, splattering with drops inside like taking an indoor shower during chores. I kept my hood on while I cleaned stalls, all the while trying to dodge the dripping.
The sun rays are trying to burst through our layers to activate Vitamin D thirsty skin, and there is actual warmth on our cheeks as we look up, squinting at the unaccustomed brightness.
At last, oh at last — after months of gray misty drizzle. It may be only a tease and not the real thing. Rain is back today and sub-freezing temperatures are forecast again over the next week.
Even so, the soil is feeling seduced. The snowdrop sprouts have thrust through the frozen ground and crocus are peeking out hopefully on our side of the crust rather than staying tentative and hidden down under.
This brief glimpse of spring was worth waiting for, even if winter breaks loose again for a few weeks and plunges us back into doldrums and gloom. If only a peek, it is still promise of a coming renewal and rebirth.
Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain, Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain; Love lives again, that with the dead has been: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain, Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again, Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green. ~ John Macleod Campbell Crum – two stanzas from “Now the Green Blade Riseth”
…times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter– it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.
Our inward winters take many forms–failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them–protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance–we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in winter, the most dismaying season of all. ~Parker Palmer from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Why did “Let It Go” from the Disney movie “Frozen” resonate as a universal pop anthem some ten years ago?
Maybe we needed the call to emerge from our dormancy, to reach out in our God-given ability to overcome challenges, despite everything the outward and inward winters blow at us.
I trust, from all I’ve learned in His Word — I have only gone underground temporarily and will soon emerge restored in renewal.
The cold never bothered me anyway? Yes, of course it did, but it is not the end of my story.
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Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting better at chasing my mind back to the moment
so I can see the spiderwebs making hammocks the color of the moon. My son tries to photograph a rainbow outside the car window. It’s impossible,
of course, this wonder, the trying to hold it. But I do what I can. I’ve stopped waiting to enjoy the cinnamon tea. I take deeper breaths and listen
to the flutter of strings floating down from café speakers. I don’t want to be a pilgrim of memory anymore. I want to pop the champagne and salute
this now, and this one with soft brie, dried apricots, and the sunset celebration another anniversary of light while I eat fists of grapes the same shade
and sweetness of night. Congratulations, Time. Look at you and your gorgeous minutes full of everything. Three cheers for the temp agency that hired this
particular day, these particular clouds, this set of honking geese migrating through it. I want to be better at being alive, so I’ve been picturing my heart
as a fox—which means wild and nocturnal, not terrorizing the neighbor’s chickens. My love says most equations in quantum field theory give infinity
as an answer, which is not meaningful because all infinities are the same. In that case, let’s stop reaching so hard for it. I’ll take this infinity’s morning where
my son and I confused falling leaves for monarchs. Every time we thought we saw a butterfly, it was just a leaf with the gentlest falling. We laughed at
every mistake, and he said, That was a beautiful confusion. Sometimes when the moment doesn’t offer a praying mantis on the porch or a charismatic sky,
I imagine my heart is my son’s face, and I am back in love with the day, its astonishments like hot-air balloons, and the daily present of power lines strung
with starlings like dozens of music notes. Let me be more bound to my living in each moment, be held by this hum, that cloud, this breath, that shroud. ~Traci Brimhall “This Beautiful Confusion” from Love Prodigal
Some Monday mornings, my mind is going in a thousand different directions. So I follow, knowing there will never be another Monday morning quite like this one. I hope there will be a few hundred more Monday mornings to come.
I want to be better at being alive, noticing, remembering, connecting, and grateful to be breathing.
Perhaps you are here because — you do too…
our sons – 1990
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Twenty years ago My generation learned To be afraid of mud. We watched its vileness grow, Deeper and deeper churned From earth, spirit, and blood.
From earth, sweet-smelling enough As moorland, field, and coast; Firm beneath the corn, Noble to the plough; Purified by frost Every winter morn.
From blood, the invisible river Pulsing from the hearts Of patient man and beast: The healer and life-giver; The union of parts; The meaning of the feast.
From spirit, which is man In triumphant mood, Conquerer of fears, Alchemist of pain Changing bad to good; Master of the spheres.
Earth, the king of space, Blood, the king of time, Spirit, their lord and god, All tumbled from their place, All trodden into slime, All mingled into mud. ~Richard Thomas Church “Mud” written in the 1930s
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. ~E. E. Cummings from “In Just”
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. ~Marge Piercy from “To Be of Use” from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
Several weeks of rain along with dismal headlines can take its toll in a variety of ways on the human psyche; the bleakness seeps into my brain, making my gray matter much grayer than usual. Everything slows down to a crawl and climbing out of bed to another dark day requires commitment and effort.
Managing barn chores and horses on days like these is a challenge. Despite years of effort to create well drained paddocks with great footing, there is no such thing when the ground is super saturated from unrelenting inches of rain, and when the barn and paddocks are unfortunately placed on the downside of a hill.
Every bare inch of ground has become mud soup with more water pouring off the hill every moment.
Mud in all its glory rivals ice for navigation hazard. Yesterday it was a boot magnet as I tried carefully to make my way with a load of hay to a bit drier area in a paddock, and found with one step that my boot had decided to remain mired in the muck and my foot was waving bootless in the air trying to decide whether to land in the squishy stuff or go back to the relative safety of the stuck boot. Standing there on one foot, with a load of hay in my arms, I’m sure I looked even more absurd than I felt at the moment, and at least I gave comic relief to people driving by.
I won’t say how I figured my way out, but it did require doing laundry later.
I remember years ago when my daughter was about 5 years old, I was busy with chores as she was exploring a similar muddy paddock and I realized I hadn’t seen her for a few minutes and I went looking. There she stood, wailing, with one stocking foot in the mud, an empty boot stuck up to its top, and her other boot so mired, she couldn’t move without abandoning it too. By the time I got her extracted, we were both laughing muddy messes.
More laundry.
The Haflinger horses are not averse to the mud if they are hungry enough. They’ll hesitate momentarily before they dive in to reach their meal but dive in they do. Those clean blonde legs and white tails are only a memory from last summer. Even their bellies are flecked with brown now. Later, back in the barn, as the mud dries, it curries off in chunks and I start to see my golden horses revealed again, but it seems they and I will never be truly clean again.
What lures me into the mud, enticing me deeper in muck that covers and coats me so thoroughly that it feels I’ll never be clean again? Whatever I want so badly that I’m willing to get hopelessly dirty to reach it, once there, it has become tainted by the mud as well, and is never as good as I had hoped.
I become hopelessly mired and stuck, sinking deeper by the minute. Reading the daily headlines only makes it worse.
Rescue comes from an outreached hand with strength greater than my own. Cleansing may be merely skin deep, only to last until my next dive into the mud, or it can be thorough and lasting–a sort of future “mud protective coating” so to speak. I can choose how dirty to get and how dirty to stay and how clean I want to be.
I think the whole world needs to do laundry daily.
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-three years ago, but still no labor came as it should.
Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried to drive to the hospital, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came by tractor to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow.
Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. Your heart beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if only God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm sent from God and we were dug out from a drift: I celebrate whenever I hear your voice – your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of the night God sent drifting snow.
My annual retelling of a most remarkable day:: Thirty-three years ago today, our daughter Lea Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
Thanks to that blizzard, Lea is a school teacher, serves the youth ministry in her church, and will soon receive her Masters in School Counseling.
She is married to her true love Brian– he also is a blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
The Lord wanted her in this world: May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts…
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Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”
Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. John 3: 1-15
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.”
It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.
As though he shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question.Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round?
Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that. ~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed
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
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. ~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life? ~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” ~Mary Oliver from Long Life
Some days, it is impossible to be a silent observer of the world. I ask so many unanswerable questions.
When the wind and rain pulls down nearly every leaf, the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, there can be no complacency in witnessing life in progress.
It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries. Nothing remains as it was. And neither do we.
And yet here I am, alive. Awed. Born to be a witness to all this. Called to comment. Dying to hear a response.
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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December rains have arrived in torrents in the Pacific Northwest, swept in with widespread regional floods and wind, leaving a mess of sorrow and silt in its wake.
There is still much to be thankful for despite the powerlessness, pain of loss and effort of recovery. December is a frequent reminder of our fragility and need for shelter from the storms of life.
Blown off course, swept away, drenched to the marrow, pining for the light lost until solstice, we hunker down in place, burrowing in for a dark wet winter.
It is coming, this veil of tears. It is coming, these night winds blowing away our shield and protection. It is coming, these rushing waters, taking us nowhere we wish to go. It is coming, this new moon forgetting how to shine.
Even so. Our Light arrived powered from within, ignited and irrepressible, fueled by an overflowing abundance of gentle loving and tender mercies.
Love spills like a flood from His broken Incarnate Heart, promising the world a rainbow of undeserved Grace.
AI image created for this post
My 2025 Advent theme: On the threshold between day and night
On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord— with no distinction between day and night. When evening comes, there will be light. Zechariah 14:6-7
So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid. ~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
Lyrics: Could’ve come like a mighty storm with all the strength of a hurricane You could’ve come like a forest fire with the power of heaven in your flame
But you came like a winter snow quiet and soft and slow Falling from the sky in the night to the earth below
Could’ve swept in like a tidal wave or an ocean to ravish our hearts You could have come through like a roaring flood to wipe away the things we’ve scarred
No, your voice wasn’t in a bush burning No, your voice wasn’t in a rushing wind It was still, it was small, it was hidden by Audrey Assad
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Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land. ~Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not, are starting to move inside. The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind. The pup comes in from the yard for a nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture. And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink. I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me in the morning, well fed and quite dead. He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse.
From nibbling to nibbled. It is a tough world, inside and out.
Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year. Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.
I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests. The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity. I admit I’m much too large, inept, and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s abode through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.
After all, I am just another creature in the same boat. There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this frayed and beautiful, complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am. I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life, not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.
So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture. Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.
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There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him.He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. John 1:6-13
God, Who made the sun, also made the moon. The moon does not take away from the brilliance of the sun. The moon would be only a burnt-out cinder floating in the immensity of space were it not for the sun. All its light is reflected from the sun. On dark nights we are grateful for the moon; when we see it shining, we know there must be a sun. So in this dark night of the world when men turn their backs on Him Who is the Light of the World, we … await the sunrise. ~Archbishop Fulton Sheenfrom The World’s First Love
John the Baptist was clear: he was a witness to the True Light Jesus, not the light himself.
He reflected the origin of light, like the moon reflects the sun.
We are naturally wary of prophets, not knowing who to believe and who leads us astray. God warns us about false prophets, yet we have difficulty discerning truth, so turn our backs to it, missing the Light.
Instead, when I see moonlight, I try to remember the message of John the Baptist: seeing the moon glow reminds me the Sun is the true origin of Light. And so as God’s children, we are to reflect the Light as well, bearing witness in the darkness.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. At the beginning of each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
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On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop and look wounded by the rain.
Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here. A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrella
from behind the counter and surrender it to you like a sword at your knighting.
Unlike New Englanders, she’ll never ask you to describe it, never ask what day you came in,
she’s intimate with rain and its appointments. Look positively reunited with this black umbrella
and proceed to Belltown and Pike Place. Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.
Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,
meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella, the one you will lose on purpose at the day’s end
so you can go the way you came into the world, wet looking. ~Rick Agran “Black Umbrellas” from Crow Milk
rainy day from a Starbucks shop in Edinburgh ScotlandPike Street Market in Seattleanywhere today in western Washington
Anyone using an umbrella in the Pacific Northwest must have come from somewhere else where rain drenches. In the northwest, we have at least 5 kinds of gray drizzle, none of which usually requires an umbrella.
This is embarrassing, but in my archive of over 20,000 photos, there is not one umbrella. I don’t even own one, having lived here for over 70 years.
We’re all about hooded jackets or going bare-headed if necessary.
Don’t ask me why, but it is a stubborn cultural “I’m a native” thing and umbrellas seem like too much of a bother, a sign of weakness.
I appreciated my visits to Japan which can have torrential but brief rainstorms, and almost every shop had a bucket of umbrellas at the door that you could “borrow” and then drop off at your next stop. No keeping track. Very civilized.
But not here.
I think Washingtonians just like to be rebaptized, over and over… Maybe that’s why.
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