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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The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain — They are with us like a disease: They worry the heart, they work the brain, As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane, And savage the helpless trees. What does it profit a man to know These tattered and tumbling skies A million stately stars will show, And the ruining grace of the after-glow And the rush of the wild sunrise? ~William Ernest Henley from “The Rain and the Wind”
The rain to the wind said, ‘You push and I’ll pelt.’ They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged – though not dead. I know how the flowers felt. ~Robert Frost “Lodged”
A heavy rain darkened a sodden gray dawn when suddenly unbidden, gusts ripped loose remaining leaves and sent them spinning, swirling earthbound in yellow clouds.
The battering of rain and wind leaves no doubt this is a day of decision – we are resigned to our fate.
I hunker down in the turbulence, tattered and tumbling, and wait for a clear night to empty itself into a fragile crystalline dawn.
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The maple leaves abscond with summer’s green rain on such little stems connecting to spring’s essence, summer twigs’ foliage, the company of the living.
But now they shrug off their red-gold existence as if they’d never inhabited the verdure of the undead, drifting to a ground hardened by sudden frost. ~Donna Pucciani “One Minute”
I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key…Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.
And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from outer space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes, I will think two maple keys. If I am maple key falling, at least I can twirl. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
If only there were living words as plentiful as the maple keys that twirl from each branch, words that release us from our dry roots, ready to unlock life’s secrets, unlatch and push ajar the doors to heavy hearts.
Who can ever be ready to go from vibrant and alive, colorful and mobile, to dropped and still?
The reality of another spent season is a slug to the gut. Time is passing. I’m wasting time. There is no stopping it without stopping me.
Let’s dwell in the company of the living until we fall away together.
Live well, fellow leaves and we’ll let go together: swaying to a fitful wind, giving a gentle shrug and drifting, easing into settling down when the time comes.
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Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day. ~Emily Brontë “Fall, Leaves, Fall”
It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. ~Emily Brontë from Wuthering Heights
The loudest crows cawing over the tops of the oaks call me to autumn already, and though my back is to the window,
I know the sky must be a gray wuthering, and the curlews are crying. The wind must be moaning as it goes sweeping across heath and moors and the spikes of purple heather thousands of miles away from where my body sits; yet
I avoid watching sad movies and will close a book that is clearly heading for a weepy ending.
I don’t need to wrap myself around things that hurt when there is enough sadness and pain in the world already. Deep emotion sticks to me like velcro, even when I know the tragedy is not my own. I take it on as if it is.
As a result, the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights is not my cup of tea. I suffered through the book as well as the movie versions. It is grim with wild, destructive passions that only lead to more sorrow. I become immersed in those desperately gray “wuthering” scenes feeling the sharp thorns of the words I read that end up drawing blood from me.
But most suffering is not at all fictional. When I become aware of tragedy happening far away, when the hurricane leaves behind terrible devastation or bombs and bullets rip communities to shreds, even though there is little I can physically do to help, I can’t turn away and not look. I can’t close the book that makes me sad and uncomfortable.
I too must feel the hurt, embracing the thorns rather than avoiding them.
Jesus did just that, taking it all upon Himself. He never turned away and still, now, today, He is pierced, bloodied for our sake.
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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~Teilhard de Chardin from “The Evolution of Chastity,” in Toward the Future, 1936
May I not forget~ the energy of love is harnessed through the One who was born Man:
Yet was God
come down to our side to help us master (not the wind or waves or tides or gravity) but instead forgive our (unruly, wild, stubborn) selves in His Name.
And we are energized by the power of His Love…
Once the fire of His Spirit is within us, it can never be extinguished.
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Unless the eye catch fire, Then God will not be seen. Unless the ear catch fire Then God will not be heard. Unless the tongue catch fire Then God will not be named. Unless the heart catch fire, Then God will not be loved. Unless the mind catch fire, Then God will not be known. ~William Blake from “Pentecost”
The cows munched or stirred or were still. I was at home and lonely, both in good measure. Until the sudden angel affrighted me––light effacing my feeble beam, a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying: but the cows as before were calm, and nothing was burning, nothing but I, as that hand of fire touched my lips and scorched by tongue and pulled by voice into the ring of the dance. ~Denise Levertov from “Caedmon” inBreathing the Water
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs… ~Czeslaw Milosz from “Veni Creator” inSelected and Last Poems
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”
I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. ~Acts 2:19-21 The Holy Spirit Comes At Pentecost
Today, when we feel we are without hope, when faith feels frail, when love seems distant…
We wait, stilled, for the moment we are lit afire~ the Living God chose us to be seen, heard, named, loved, known.
God forever burning in our hearts in this moment and for a lifetime.
As through a long-abandoned half-standing house only someone lost could find,
which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams, its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,
seems both ghost of the life that happened there and living spirit of this wasted place,
wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood that is open enough to receive it,
shatter me God into my thousand sounds.
~Christian Wiman “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”from Every Riven Thing
the same abandoned school house near Rapalje, Montana a few years later, this photo by Joel DeWaard
May I, though sagging and gray, perilously leaning, be porous enough to allow life’s gusts to blow through me without pushing me over in a heap.
The wind may fill my every crack, crevice, and defect, causing me to sing out.
Someday, when I do shatter, toppling over into pieces into the ground, it will be amidst a mosaic of praises.
photo by Joel DeWaard
‘I am not a prophet. I am a farmer; the land has been my livelihood since my youth.’ If someone asks, ‘What are these wounds on your body?’ they will answer, ‘The wounds I was given at the house of my friends.’ Zechariah 13: 5-6
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:5
photo by Joel DeWaard
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address. ~Thomas R. Smith “Trust” from Waking Before Dawn
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
I always have lots of questions when I’m uncertain about a decision. I carefully consider whether I should do this or do that, go here or go there, say something or remain silent.
My questions become a prayer seeking clarity – how? why? and what if?
Before the face of God, these questions fall away.
We who worry are not trusting a Creator who is ever-present in His care for us, even when we may think He is not listening. He knows where we are headed, even if we’re unsure of the destination ourselves.
He makes sure we get there. We’ll be delivered to the right place at the right time.
I must trust Him. He’s on it.
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The cold has the philosophical value of reminding men that the universe does not love us…cold is our ancient companion. To return back indoors after exposure to the bitter, inimical, implacable cold is to experience gratitude for the shelters of civilization, for the islands of warmth that life creates. ~John Updike from “The Cold”in Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. ~Robert Frost “Fire and Ice“
One day, the scientists tell us, every star in the universe will burn out, the galaxies gradually blackening until
The last light flares and falls returning all to darkness where it will remain until the end of what we have come
to think of as time. But even in the dark, time would go on, bold in its black cloak, no shade, no shadow,
only the onward motion of movement, which is what time, if it exists at all, really is: the absence of reversal, the sheer
impossibility of that final fire dying into itself, dragging the day deep into what it no longer is,
bowing only to rise into the other, into a shining the heavens were commanded to host, the entire
always poised between the gravity of upward and downward, like the energy of a star itself constantly balanced between
its weight straining to crush its core and the heat of that same core heaving it outward, as though what destroys
redeems, what collapses also radiates, not unlike this life, Love, which we are traveling through at such
an astonishing speed, entire galaxies racing past, universes, it as if we are watching time itself drift
into the cosmos, like a spinning wall of images alrealdy gone, and I realize most of what we know
we can’t see, like the birdsong overheard or the women in China building iPhones or the men picking
strawberries in the early dawn or even sleeping sons in the other room who will wake up and ask
for their light sabers. Death will come for us so fast we will never be able to outrun it,
no matter how fast we travel or how heavily we arm ourselves against the invisible,
which is what I’m thinking, Love, even though the iron in the blood that keeps you alive was born from a hard
star-death somewhere in the past that is also the future, and what I mean is to say that I am so lucky
to be living with you in this brief moment of light before everything goes dark. ~Dean Rader“Still Life with Gratitude”
This week has been a good reminder of our helplessness and need for one another in the face of single digit temperatures with sub-zero windchills.
This is the kind of cold that tries men’s souls and frail bodies. This is “kill the bugs and the allergens” cold tries to balance out the ecosystem as well as our internal emotional and physical thermostats.
Chill like this descends unbidden from the Arctic, blasting through the thickest layers of clothing, sneaking through drafty doors and windows, and freezing pipes not left dripping. It leaves no one untouched and unbitten with universal freezer burn.
A bitter cold snap ensures even the most determined unhoused “living in the woods” individualists must become companionable or freeze to death, necessitating temporary shelter indoors with others for survival.
It sometimes means forced companionship with those we would ordinarily avoid, with whom we have little in common, with whom we disagree and even quarrel, with whom sharing a hug or snuggling for warmth would be unimaginable.
Our whole nation is in just such a temperamental and political cold snap today, so terribly and bitterly divided. If we don’t come in out of the cold, we each will perish alone. It is time to be grateful we have each other during these difficult times, ancient and uneasy companions that we are.
At least we might generate some heat by civilly discussing the issues we all face. The risk is letting disagreements get so out of control that nothing is left but smoke and ashes from the incineration.
Somewhere there must be middle ground: perhaps we can share sanctuary from the bitter cold through the warmth of a mutually well-tended and companionable hearth.
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I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish- ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them.
I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake, of peering into the dark,hoping to find an image of a self as yet unborn.
Let plainness enter the eye, plainness like the table on which nothing is set, like a table that is not yet even a table. ~Mark Strand “Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon” from Almost Invisible
I’m only 24 hours into a week-long winter northeaster blow with sub-zero windchills. Already I want to hang up my Carhartts and retire my Muck Boots and toss my work gloves for a warmer easier life somewhere else.
This is just plain hard being a farmer. I feel like I’m losing my bona fides as a tough-as-nails rural person.
Nothing that entrances me about living on a farm in temperate weather is remotely attractive now. Windstorms like this mean I worry our power will go out, the generator won’t work, the water will freeze up and we’ll fall and break bones … and, and, and…
So many fourth dimensional worries, whining, and weariness to spare.
What I seem to forget is that the generations of tough people I descend from made it through far worse than this. They didn’t do it as a hobby, like us; it was their livelihood. Trees were felled and sawed to become tables and furniture and fences and roofs and walls of houses and barns. Animals gave milk and meat and fields yielded grain and hay and gardens and orchards grew enough to store for winter food.
A few days of winter misery is a small price to pay for that kind of sustainability.
Let the plainness of the past inspire the plain hard work needed today and over the next few days.
It is worth doing it without complaining because it is the plain hard work needed. It always has been.
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