Category: windstorm

Bring to Light the Mystery: Blown Away

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Like a storm
of hornets, the
little white planets
layer and relayer
as they whip around
in their high orbits,
getting more and
more dense before
they crash against
our crust. A maelstrom
of ferocious little
fists and punches,
so hard to believe
once it’s past.
~Kay Ryan “Hailstorm”

Several years ago, a brief and unexpected Palm Sunday storm blew through with gusts of southerly winds, thunder, horizontal rain and noisy hale. I had left the north/south center aisle doors wide open after morning chores, so the storm also blew through the barn. Hay, empty buckets, horse halters and cat food were strewn about. The Haflinger horses stood wide-eyed and fretful in their stalls as the hail on the metal roof hammered away.

Once I got the doors closed and secured, all was soon made right. The horses relaxed and got back to their meals and things felt normal again.

Today, Holy Monday morning, all seems calm but nevertheless, somewhat beaten up. The barn is still there, the roof still on, the horses where they belong and all seems to be as it was before the barnstorming wind. Or so it might appear.

This wind heralds another storm beginning this week that hits with such force that I’m knocked off my feet, blown away, and left bruised and breathless. No latches, locks, or barricades are strong enough to protect me from what will come over the next few days.

Yesterday he rode in on a donkey softly, humbly, and wept at what he knew must come.

Today, he overturns the tables in his fury.

Tomorrow he describes the destruction that is to happen, yet no one understands.

Wednesday, a woman boldly anoints him with precious oil, as preparation, ignoring his disciples’ rebukes.

On Thursday, he kneels before his friends, pours water over their dusty feet, presides over a simple meal, and later, abandoned, sweats blood in agonized prayer.

By Friday, all culminates in a most perfect storm, transforming everything in its path, leaving nothing untouched, the curtain torn, the veil removed.

The silence on Saturday is deafening.

Next Sunday, the Son rises, sheds his shroud and neatly folds what is no longer needed. He is nearly unrecognizable in his glory.

He calls my name, my heart burns within me at his words and I can never be the same again.

I am, once again and always, barnstormed to the depths of my soul. Doors flung open wide, my roof pulled off, everything of no consequence blown away and now replaced, renewed and reconciled.

May it be done this week as he has said, again and yet again, year after year, life after life.

another barnstorming

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

1. Courage, my soul, and let us journey on,
Tho’ the night is dark, it won’t be very long.
Thanks be to God, the morning light appears,
And the storm is passing over, Hallelujah!

Chorus: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The storm is passing over, Hallelujah!

2. Billows rolling high, and thunder shakes the ground,
Lightnings flash, and tempest all around,
Jesus walks the sea and calms the angry waves,
And the storm is passing over, Hallelujah! [Chorus]

3. The stars have disappeared, and distant lights are dim,
My soul is filled with fears, the seas are breaking in.
I hear the Master cry, “Be not afraid, ’tis I,”
And the storm is passing over, Hallelujah!
[Chorus]

4. Soon we shall reach the distant shining shore,
Free from all the storms, we’ll rest forevermore.
Safe within the veil, we’ll furl the riven sail,
And the storm will all be over, Hallelujah! [Chorus]

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Bring to Light the Mystery: Her Wounds to be Healed

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The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out in the sun,
After frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die. 
~Ted Hughes from “ A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light Was Like.

This year, spring has been emerging early from an exceptionally warm and un-snowy winter, yet blizzard conditions last night closed the Cascade mountain passes with high winds causing extensive power outages in the Puget Sound region.

Our hilltop farm was spared overnight – we are grateful for light and heat this morning.

Up until now, all growing things have been several weeks ahead of the usual budding/blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape suddenly turns from monochrome to technicolor with a soundtrack going from forlorn to glorious.

Like most folks, I too yearn for spring to commence, tapping my foot impatiently as if I’m personally owed an extravagant seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant. 

We wait for the Great Physician’s announcement that His patient survived winter once again:
“I’m happy to say the Earth is alive and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too addled by last night’s windstorm for you to expect much from her just yet.”

As we celebrate her imminent healing, we are reassured His Creation is still very much alive- we rejoice in this temporary home of ours.
A promising prognosis for this patient coming out of the fog of winter:
she lives, she breathes, she thrives, to bloom and sing with everything she’s got.
So soon, so will I.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

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Come and See: Asking Unanswerable Questions

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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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Another Year of Leaping Winds

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walnutoctober2017
walnuthull5
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My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood – an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything.

What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.
~Mary Oliver from “The Black Walnut Tree” from Twelve Moons

frontyard1
april2frontyard
photo by Dan Gibson
walnuthulls2

We bought this old farm thirty-five years ago:
the Lawrence family’s “Walnut Hill Farm” –
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a grandfather’s suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees thrived for nearly a century on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves
and prodigious in fruit.

The first year we were here,
a windstorm took one tree down.
A neighbor offered
to mill the twisted trunk for shares.
The fallen tree became planks
of fine grained chocolate-hued lumber.

This old tree is the back facing of our oak door cupboards,
a daily reminder of a legacy left behind~
sturdy even if imperfect,
still beautiful to the eye and the heart.

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blackwalnut

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Lamenting Leaves Scattered in Ruin

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October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
~Siegfried Sassoon “Autumn” (about his time in the trenches in WWI)

Over more than a century,
we have learned little
about how to resolve
the bellows of outraged men.

The fruitless harvest of battle,
counting up each violent death,
as warships gather
for unsanctioned war games.

Lament the tossing and blowing of lives
like October leaves, in a show of force
as transient and arbitrary as the wind,
merely to make a fruitless point…

to what end are the feuds of angry men?

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Hushed October Morning

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O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
~Robert Frost from “October”

After yesterday’s travel through curtains of heavy rainfall,
we abandoned plans to meet with family across state
for today’s memorial service, so returned home,
defeated, weary with sadness.

October is enough reminder of mortality,
with winds stripping trees to bare bones,
birds flocking and vacating,
bright leaves reduced to rusting dust.

This morning, the rain suspended,
its gray curtain pulled back briefly
to view what awaits beyond the haze:
this luminous brilliance, radiance, promise.

Slow down to look. Slow down to live. Slow.

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A Solemn Ache

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A day is nothing if not a disappearing act
held fast by ropes of sunlight and breeze until rain comes
or a tree coughs to shake night along;

then there are the shadows that feel like yesterday’s distance
but become only apparitions when we haul them into light
or move beyond their pull—

I wish for mornings, still, days full of violets—
and the beautiful clouds, where in their always-
disappearing, their solemn ache, I find poems.
~Sarah Etlinger “Evanescence (with Clouds)” from The Weather Gods

I look for poems everywhere,
even in colorless misty mornings,
chill and stormy winds,
humid breathless afternoons.

It is as if a Poet is saying to me:
I feel this ache today.
You too?

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Preparing Their Buds

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All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
~William Carlos Williams “Winter Trees”

Winter – a quiet, still time for trees,
a time for preparation for new attire,
a time for root-stretching and branch-reaching.

Unless there are windstorms
Unless there is frozen rain
Unless there is heavy burden of snowfall

A tree might be taken unawares in the night,
branches breaking like popping gunshots,
as if innocent prey is hunted.

Remnants lie waiting on the ground,
unaware of their brokenness,
still budding, hopeful for yet another spring.

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An Empty Mailbox

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Dear Daughter,
Your father and I wish to commend you
on the wisdom of your choices
and the flawless conduct of your life

Dear Poet!
Where is the full-length manuscript
you promised us? Your check is waiting
The presses are ready
and the bookstores are clamoring for delivery

Dear Patient:
The results of your blood tests reveal
that your problem stems from
a diet dangerously low
in pizza and chocolate

Dear Mom,
You were right about everything
and I was an idiot not to listen
~Rhina Espaillat from “Undelivered Mail”

I never thought we’d end up
Living this far north, love.
Cold blue heaven over our heads,
Quarter moon like chalk on a slate.

This week it’s the art of subtraction
And further erasure that we study.
O the many blanks to ponder
Before the night overtakes us once more
On this lonely stretch of road
Unplowed since this morning;
Mittens raised against the sudden
Blinding gust of wind and snow,
But the mailbox empty. I had to stick
My bare hand all the way in
To make sure this is where we live.

The wonder of it! We retraced our steps
Homeward lit by the same fuel
As the snow glinting in the gloom
Of the early nightfall.
~ Charles Simic “Rural Delivery” from Selected Poems: 1963-1983

In snowy winter weather, our mailbox ends up in the middle of a huge drift from the blowing northeast wind. The box sits at the peak of the highest hill on our rural road, so the mail carrier can have a clear view of who is coming and going when they stop to put our mail inside.

The blowing snow also stops right here on our hill; no mail can be delivered. So, either my husband digs out the access to the mailbox or we choose to wait for the melt and thaw, and allow our mailbox to languish unopened for as long as it takes.

An empty mailbox is a lonely thing.

Junk mail isn’t the answer any more than junk food nourishes the body. These days, personal letters in the mailbox are few and far between. And even rarer are those heart-felt letters which are hand-written, lovingly stamped to be gratefully read and treasured.

When you write such letters to me, I delight as they fill my heart and my lonely mailbox – especially so on a dark, chilly winter night…

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Whatever the Sky Might Bring

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When it snows, he stands
at the back door or wanders
around the house to each
window in turn and
watches the weather
like a lover. O farm boy,
I waited years
for you to look at me
that way. Now we’re old
enough to stop waiting
for random looks or touches
or words, so I find myself
watching you watching
the weather, and we wait
together to discover
whatever the sky might bring.
~Patricia Traxler “Weather Man”

My farm boy does still look at me that way,
wondering if today will bring
frost,
damaging hail,
a wind storm,
a blizzard,

maybe fog or mist,
or soft lazy snowflakes,
a scorcher,
or a deluge.

I reassure him as best I can,
because he knows me so well
in our many years together:

today, like most other days
will be partly cloudy with a snow shower or two
and occasional sun breaks.

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