Tag: Autumn

Flowers of the Sad, Human Mind

September 26, 2026 barnstormingblog1 Comment

In the high woods that crest our hills,
Upon a steep, rough slope of forest ground,
Where few flowers grow, sweet blooms today I found
Of the Autumn Crocus, blowing pale and fair.
Dim falls the sunlight there;
And a mild fragrance the lone thicket fills.

Languidly curved, the long white stems
Their purple flowers’ gold treasure scarce display:
Lost were their leaves since in the distant spring,

Their February sisters showed so gay.
Roses of June, ye too have followed fleet!
Forsaken now, and shaded as by thought,
As by the human shade of thought and dreams,
They bloom ‘mid the dark wood, whose air has wrought
With what soft nights and mornings of still dew!
Into their slender petals that clear hue,
Like paleness in fresh cheeks; a thing
On earth, I vowed, ne’er grew
More delicately pure, more shyly sweet.

Child of the pensive autumn woods!
So lovely, though thou dwell obscure and lone,
And though thy flush and gaiety be gone;
Say, among flowers of the sad, human mind,
Where shall I ever find
So rare a grace? in what shy solitudes?
~Robert Laurence Binyon “Autumn Crocus”

The late September emergence
of autumn crocus is always sudden,
rising up near the equinox
in the shade of spent peony bushes.

These rare blooms:
tall, tender, bold, and frail,
their incubation triggered by retreating light from above,
unlike their springtime cousins emerging through melting snow.

The autumn crocus waits with thoughtful temerity,
summoned forth from the soil
to remind us the end of summer
is not the end of them or us.

A luminous gift of hope and beauty
borne from a humble bulb;
plain and only soil-adorned.

Slowly unfurling on a pale leggy stem,
the tender lavender petals peel back
to reveal golden crowns of saffron,
brazenly blooming when all else is dying back.

Vulnerable to blustery wind and heavy rains,
they easily wilt, crushed, deeply bruised purple –
under the Sun’s reflection made manifest;
returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.

Yet we know – they remind us:
they (and we) will rise again.

…we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. . . It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
C.S. Lewis from God in the Dock

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An Unforgettable Fury of Light

September 24, 2026 barnstormingblog2 Comments

You can
die for it-
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
~Mary Oliver “Sunrise”

Over the years, I have not missed many early autumn sunrises – most I have not recorded as they are often gray and rainy.

This particular day of September – the 24th – has been a treasure trove of color and cloud patterns and light for the last 12 years. Today I share these with you in their variety and beauty.

Every day, let us watch the sun rise with its light under our eyelashes – the fire of happiness illuminating us all as morning breaks open, like the First Day.

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Balancing on a Broken World

September 23, 2026September 23, 2026 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”

There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.

Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience).
~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones

Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying
today might be a day of healing between peoples,
when the barbarous becomes beautiful
and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?

A day of
no drone missiles being launched,
no threats of annihilation and winner takes all,
no one gunned down in the street,
no vehicles used as weapons,
no harsh and angry words spoken,
no child misused,
no one sold into slavery,
no one overdosing, abandoned,
homeless and starving.

Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks
to watch the clouds
to praise the heavens
to see the leaves turn color
to take out this one day and taste it
and find that it is good,
then put it away for self-keeping
to share when and if I find someone else
as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,

so as to balance myself somehow
in the beauty of this world while
teetering on its brokenness?

I am not the only one.
I know I am not…

Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh

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If Only I Would Keep Aware…

September 22, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.
Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.
I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago
I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.
~Wendell Berry “The Sorrel Filly”

I am reminded at summer’s end —
when it is already dark and chores not done yet,
and horses waiting to be fed —
of the value of decades of moments spent
with long-lashed eyes, wind-swept manes, and velvet muzzles.

True, it appears to others to be time and money wasted.
But for a farmer like me, sometimes deaf and blind
to what is in front of me every day,
not all valuables are preserved
in a lock box or a bank account.

Golden treasure can have
four hooves, a tail, a rumbling greeting
asking if I’d somehow gotten lost
since I’m a little later than usual
and they were a bit concerned I’d forgotten them.

If only I would keep aware,
remember where my home is,
how easy it is to wander from the path
that somehow always leads me back here.

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Autumn Begins to be Inferred

September 14, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud,
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.
~Emily Dickinson from “Summer Begins to Have the Look”

The passing of the summer fills again
my heart with strange sweet sorrow, and I find
the very moments precious in my palm.
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shone, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,
who charges me to see all lovely things…
~Jane Tyson Clement from “The Passing of Summer”

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets — Crows — and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming —
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.
~Emily Dickinson “September’s Baccalaureate”

There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”

Summer now is waning and wistful;
it has the look of packing up, and moving on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder.

Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds with a hint of spit from the sky as I gaze upward to see (and smell) the change.

A decent rain is long overdue yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time. Though we are in need of a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, berries to pick before they mold on the vine, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick.

I’m not quite ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.

The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes.

There is no negotiation possible. I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer has left off. Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues.

The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

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This Failing Light

September 10, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Day after day, day after still day,
The summer has begun to pass away.
Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,
And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.
The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,
And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,
The swallows sit in rows along the wires.
Berry and grape appear among the flowers
Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,
And cricket now begins to hum the hours
Remaining to the passion’s slow procession
Down from the high place and the golden session
Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,
Now frames the long and solemn afternoons
Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.
We reach the place unripe, and made to know
As with a sudden knowledge that we go
Away forever, all hope of return
Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-
ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound
Of apples dropping on the dry ground.
~Howard Nemerov “Summer’s Elegy” from Collected Poems

As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both ways,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and out of sight
No one for hours has set a foot outdoors
So much as to take care of evening chores.
The inmates may be lonely women-folk.
I want to tell them that with all this smoke
They prudently are spinning their cocoon
And anchoring it to an earth and moon
From which no winter gale can hope to blow it,—
Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.
~Robert Frost “The Cocoon”

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth’s green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.
~Wendell Berry “The Summer Ends” from A Timbered Choir.

I too regret the closed cocoon,
so seemingly safe at the time —
once launched before being ready,
there is no returning.

In this fading, failing light, I feel undone,
weepy at harvest, gathering urgently,
not wanting anything to go to waste,
trying to memorialize it all as it changes.

I part again from you, Summer –
your gifts seemed endless
until you yourself ended –
a reminder that someday,
so must I.

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An Acceptance of Decline

September 3, 2026 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
~Wendell Berry “September 2”

And when I rise, let me rise
Like a bird, joyfully.
And when I fall, let me fall,
Like a leaf, gracefully, without regret.
And when I stand, let me stand,
Like a tree, strong and tall.
And when I lie, let me lie,
Like a lake, peacefully, calm and still.
And when I work, let me work,
Like a bee, wholeheartedly.
And when I play, let me play,
Like a breeze, fresh and cool, light and clear.
~adapted from Wendell Berry’s “When I Rise” in The Mad Farmer Poems

The thistles, rooted out, throng in again;
The single regal rose is mobbed by weeds;
The plums, the pears, the ripening apples, rain
In the sun; and past summer plants new seeds.

Here, or there, these common yearly things
Repeat, repeat, and gardens do not range:
Yet thistles, roses, fruit trees, birds, and stings
Come to an end, and the church bells sound a change.

These many soft declensions of the day,
So hard to take to heart, bear life away.
~Dunstan Thompson from “Passage” from Here At Last Is Love

This end-of-summer winding down,
a descent into shorter days and longer nights,
this preparation for autumn austerity,
reminds me to accept my own slow decline ~
an emptying husk
once so full of fruit and seed,
now clinging to what is left of me ~
still filled with the joys, the tears, the eyes
of a brimming-over heart.

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A Time Less Bold

August 24, 2026August 28, 2026 barnstormingblog2 Comments

Would you believe I’ve been looking
for rain, here, with few days remaining
in this fleeting season of summer?
Our days are numbered that we might
share with the sun in a clear blue sky
and the hours growing warmer,
and I have kept an eye out for the clouds.
Only I wish for the conditions and doubt
that might send us all deep inside
our dark homes to sleep and read and pray
in preparation for the coming colder days.
Would you believe that the sight
of slate gray spanning horizon to zenith
and down is one I am quite taken with?
~David K. Wheeler “The Cold Season” from Contingency Plans

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
~Philip Larkin “Mother, Summer, I”

Summer grass aches and whispers.

It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours
out wishes to the overhead stars.

The rain hears; the rain answers; the rain is slow
coming; the rain wets the face of the grass.
~Carl Sandberg “Summer Grass”

August rushes by like desert rainfall,
A flood of frenzied upheaval,
Expected,
But still catching me unprepared.
Like a match flame
Bursting on the scene,
Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.
Like a dream
Of moon and dark barely recalled,
A moment,
Shadows caught in a blink.
Like a quick kiss;
One wishes for more
But it suddenly turns to leave,
Dragging summer away.
– Elizabeth Maua Taylor “August”

The endless clear skies of August
now broken with exuberant clouds,
rain falling in warm gusts,
leaves landing on browned ground.

This summer ended up being simply too much –
an excess of everything bright and beautiful,
meant to make us joyful,
yet bold and exhausting in its riches.

From endless hours of daylight,
to high rising temperatures and wildfires,
to palettes of smoke-filled landscapes
to fruitfulness and abundant blooms.

While summer always fills a void
after enduring cold spare dark days
the rest of the year,
I still depend on autumn returning.

I welcome darkening times back,
knowing how much I miss
those drear twilight months of longing
for the overwhelming fullness of summer.

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An Advent Threshold: For the Growing Grey

December 19, 2025 barnstormingblog2 Comments

Autumn
Was certainly not winter, scholars say,
When holy habitation broke the chill
Of hearth-felt separation, icy still,
The love of life in man that Christmas day.
Was autumn, rather, if seasons speak true;
When green retreats from sight’s still ling’ring gaze,
And creeping cold numbs sense in sundry ways,
While settling silence speaks of solitude.
Hope happens when conditions are as these;
Comes finally lock-armed with death and sin,
When deep’ning dark demands its full display.
Then fallen nature driven to her knees
Flames russet, auburn, orange fierce from within,
And brush burns brighter for the growing grey.
~David Baird “Autumn”

We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us.

We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.

The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Watch for the Light

The shepherds were sore afraid. So why aren’t we?

The scholars say Christ was most likely born in the autumn of the year ~ so fitting, as our reds and oranges fade fast to grey as we descend into this wintering world on the threshold of dying, crying out for resuscitation.

Murderous frosts and falling snow have wilted down all that was flush with life and we become desperate for hope for renewal.

And so this babe has come like a refiner’s fire to lay claim to us and we feel the heat of His embrace – in the middle of the chill, in the middle of our dying – no matter what time of year.

He finds us in our liminal moment of transition.

Hope happens when conditions are as these…

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

1. Father, enthroned on high—―Holy, holy!
Ancient eternal Light—hear our prayer.

REFRAIN
Come, O Redeemer, come;
grant us mercy.
Come, O Redeemer, come;
grant us peace.

2. Lord, save us from the dark of our striving,
faithless, troubled hearts weighed down. REFRAIN

3. Look now upon our need; Lord, be with us.
Heal us and make us free from our sin. REFRAIN

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