A wind has blown the rain away
and blown the sky away
and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.
I think, I too,
have known autumn too long.
~e.e. cummings
No matter how stripped down I feel~
how “autumned” I’ve become:
defenseless, uncovered, barren,
soaked through by the rains
and chilled by the winds of the coming winter
I once was ablaze, alive, vibrant,
burning with color and passion,
and will be again.
Autumn is never the end of my story.
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
~Robert Frost “My November Guest”
November,
this month of deepening darkening,
transforms itself
to a recounting of gratitude
of daily thanksgiving and blessings~~
it is good to dwell on our gifts,
even so,
it is right to invite Sorrow
to sit in silence with us,
her tears blending with ours.
These dark-dwelled days
of bare stripped branches
feed our growing need
for the covering grace,
the shrouding
of His coming Light.
In the high woods that crest our hills,
Upon a steep, rough slope of forest ground,
Where few flowers grow, sweet blooms to–day I found
Of the Autumn Crocus, blowing pale and fair.
Dim falls the sunlight there;
And a mild fragrance the lone thicket fills.
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 from “Autumn Crocus”
Whether mid-winter or early autumn
the crocus are unexpected,
surprising even to the observant.
Hidden potential beneath the surface,
an incubation readily triggered
by advancing or retreating light from above.
Waiting with temerity,
to be called forth from earthly grime
and granted reprieve from indefinite interment.
A luminous gift of hope and beauty
borne from a humble bulb;
plain and only dirt adorned.
Summoned, the deep lavender harbinger rises
from sleeping frosted ground in February
or from spent topsoil, exhausted in October.
These bold blossoms do not pause
for snow and ice nor hesitate to pierce through
a musty carpet of fallen leaves.
They break free to surge skyward
cloaked in tightly bound brilliance,
spaced strategically to be deployed against the darkness.
Slowly unfurling, the tender petals peel to reveal golden crowns,
royally renouncing the chill of winter’s beginning and end,
staying brazenly alive when little else is.
In the end, they painfully wilt, deeply bruised and purple
under the Sun’s reflection made manifest;
returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.
Yet they 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
Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor
offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.
It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods
flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—
their beauty delicate
but commonplace.
When I took for granted
that the world would remain
as it was, and I
would remain with it.
~Linda Pastan “Elegy”
The inevitable change of the seasons, as portrayed by the branches of our aging pink dogwood tree, is a reminder nothing stays the same.
Like this old tree, I lean over more, I have a few bare branches with no leaves, I have my share of broken limbs, I have my share of blight and curl.
Yet each stage and transition has its own beauty: a breathtaking depth of color flourishes on what once was bare.
Nothing is to be taken for granted. Nothing remains as it was.
Especially me. Oh, especially me.
The sun-dipped isle was suddenly a sheep
Lost and stupid, a dense wet tremulous fleece.
~George Mackay Brown “Fog” from The Weather Bestiary
When I was young, fog felt oppressive,
as mournful as the fog horns sounding continually in the nearby bay.
Now in sixty years later
I appreciate fog for slowing me down
when life compels me to rush too fast.
When forced to take time,
I begin to notice what I missed before:
clouds descend to hug and kiss the ground
to bejewel everything they touch.
The dead and dying
become glorious in subtle beauty,
the farm all gossamer garland and transparent pearls.
It’s easy to love a deer
But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees
Love the puddle of lukewarm water
From last week’s rain.
Leave the mountains alone for now.
Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines.
People are lined up to admire them.
Get close to the things that slide away in the dark.
Be grateful even for the boredom
That sometimes seems to involve the whole world.
Think of the frost
That will crack our bones eventually.
~Tom Hennen “Love for Other Things”
O it is easy to love the beautiful things of God’s creation~
we drive long hours to stand in awe,
gaping at mountains and valleys and waterfalls
and kaleidoscopes of color
but if God needs a slug or snail or bug enough to create those
and allows drought and mud and frost and ice storms and hurricanes
then I guess, if He chooses,
He could look at me and say
I need one of you too.
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?
~Samuel Coleridge “What if you slept”
This mountain, this strange and beautiful Shuksan flower that appears suddenly as we round a corner on the hour drive up the Mt. Baker Highway: this mountain has one foot on earth and one foot in heaven – a thin place if there ever was one.
The only way to approach is in awed silence, as if entering the door of a grand cathedral. Those who are there speak in hushed tones if they speak at all.
Today Mt Shuksan wears autumn lightly about its shoulders as a multi-faceted cloak, barely anticipating the heavy snow coat to descend in the next two weeks.
I hold this mountain tight in my fist, wanting to turn it this way and that, breathe in its fragrance, bring it home with me and never let go.
Ah, what then?
Home is not nearly big enough for heaven to dwell. I must content myself with this visit to the thin edge, peering through the open door, and waiting until invited to come inside.
Let there be not only the roses,
Not only the buds of the day,
But the noon and the hour that discloses
The full flower torn away:
Not only the bliss and the sweet
When the sun is soft and low,
But the weary aching of feet
Tired out by the harrow and hoe:
Not only the gazing and sighing
Where the heather stands thick on the moor,
But the lonely watch and the crying,
With hunger awake at the door:
Not only the wonder of reaping
The fruit that hangs red on the bough,
But the strain and the stagger of creeping
In the brown wake of the plough.
Let this be the way that I go,
And the life that I try,
My feet being firm in the field,
And my heart in the sky.
~Philip Britts from Water at the Roots
Within each day of each life
hides the joy of discovery
despite the weariness.
The truth of it is:
a hunger and ache consume me
if I don’t seek out and harvest beauty
growing in each moment.
Though my boots are dusty
and my steps less sure,
the life I try on each day
is the certainty of a heart in bloom.
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
August has been particularly wearing on so many folks this year, aging us beyond recognition after weeks of smoke-filled horizons. Those whose forests and homes have burned have nothing but cinders to return to. My concerns are mere in comparison, as the ash sent forth from such destruction is only irritant and inconvenience, rather than the residue of lost life.
Yet no one thrives in a world of fire and ash as we go gray as the sky, as if we have lived one summer too many.
I dream of what was: green and lush foliage and cool rains with the occasional welcome glimpse of a yellow, rather than red, sun.
Color the gray away to thwart the inevitable? Not this woman. I await a different beauty, even if only in my dreams…
A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin
black legs and their needle-nail toes across
the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist
at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato.
Although blind at night, she nevertheless
fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry
on one side of the path, links it to a limb
of shining sumac opposite, latches the scaffold
to ground stone and brace of rooted grasses.
And the structure takes dimension.
Skittering upside down across and around,
she hooks the hooks, knots the widening
spirals, the tightened radii, orbs and hubs,
bridges and bridgeheads. We can never hear
the music she makes as she plucks her silk
strings with all the toes and spurs and tarsal
tufts of her eight legs at once. She performs
the reading of her soul.
She expands the sky, her completed grid
a gamble, a ploy played on the night. The silk
is still, translucent and aerial, hanging in a glint
of half-moon. The work is her heart strung
on its tethers, ravenous, abiding.
~Pattiann Rogers from “Hail, Spirit”
I too often feel stretched between several points as well.
I attach to important touch points and I weave between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll connect with or what I’ll leave behind.
Sometimes what I create is beautifully delicate and functional.
Sometimes it is blurry and out of focus.
The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays.
But it was once something. That’s all that matters.
Barnstorming 