Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. ~Siegried Sassoon “Everyone Sang”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me. ~Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers”
When it feels like the world is rent in two, and the gulf into which we topple too wide and dark to climb without help, we can look to the sky and see the birds’ stitching and hear their wordless singing, the careful caring line of connection pulling us out of a hopeless hole, startled and grateful to be made whole. Hope borne on feathered wings: may we fly threaded and knitted to one another, singing.
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Once only when the summer was nearly over and my own hair had been white as the day’s clouds for more years than I was counting I looked across the garden at evening Paula was still weeding around flowers that open after dark and I looked up to the clear sky and saw the new moon and at that moment from behind me a band of dark birds and then another after it flying in silence long curving wings hardly moving the plovers just in from the sea and the flight clear from Alaska half their weight gone to get them home but home now arriving without a sound as it rose to meet them ~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning
In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.
There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.
Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.
The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.
Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud. Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress. Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. ~Madeleine L’Engle
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A butterfly dancing in the sunlight, A bird singing to his mate, The whispering pines, The restless sea, The gigantic mountains, A stately tree, The rain upon the roof, The sun at early dawn, A boy with rod and hook, The babble of a shady brook, A woman with her smiling babe, A man whose eyes are kind and wise, Youth that is eager and unafraid— When all is said, I do love best A little home where love abides, And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest. ~Scottie McKenzie Frasier “The Things I Love”
When all is said and done, I love best the people who bring kindness, peace and rest to the little house we call home.
It is enough and everything.
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O! for a horse with wings! ~William Shakespeare from Cymbeline
photo by Bette Vander Haakphoto by Bette Vander Haak
Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses. ~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew
photo by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak
One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses. ~Dale Carnegie
photo by Bette Vander Haak
When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; ~William Shakespeare from Henry V
We all need someone along for the ride with us, blessing us with their company — a precious friend who has our back and scratches it wonderfully – helping to keep the biting flies away by gobbling them up.
It is symbiosis at its best: a relationship built on mutual trust and helpfulness. In exchange for relief from annoying insects that a tail can’t flick off, a Haflinger horse serves up bugs on a smorgasbord landing platform located safely above farm cats and marauding coyotes.
Thanks to their perpetual full meal deals, these cowbirds do leave generous “deposits” behind that need to be brushed off at the end of the day. Like any good friendship, tidying up the little messes left behind is a small price to pay for the bliss of companionable comradeship.
We’re buds after all – best forever friends, trotting the air while the earth sings along.
And this is exactly what friends are for: one provides the feast while the other provides the wings, even if things get messy.
Be winged. Be fed. Cleaning up together.
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Something is calling to me from the corners of fields, where the leftover fence wire suns its loose coils, and stones thrown out of the furrow sleep in warm litters; where the gray faces of old No Hunting signs mutter into the wind, and dry horse tanks spout fountains of sunflowers; where a moth flutters in from the pasture, harried by sparrows, and alights on a post, so sure of its life that it peacefully opens its wings. ~Ted Kooser “In the Corners of Fields” from Flying at Night.
I am a visitor here, even though we’ve lived here for more than 30 years.
There is something to be discovered in the field each day if I make an effort to look and listen.
My Merlin app on my phone tells me the birds I hear around me. A photo of a wildflower or weed is identified by Google. The jet flight tracks overhead are pinpointed by another app saying who is flying where.
Yet I’m placed right here by my Maker. He knows where I am at all times, the words I write, the thoughts I pray.
I try to be at peace in these turbulent times: to be sure of this life I’m given, to be sure to Whom I belong, to simply open my wings to the light, to be ready to fly when my time comes.
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For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke
Every poem of death should start with my mother’s love for birds. Finches and waxwings her favorites, though she wasn’t one to quibble; an eagle dragging a carp across the sky would do.
There are worse things than being dead. You might be swallowed by the daily minutia of the great mundane, to be spit up years later wondering where your life has gone.
But loving something can save you: the way finches stack a feeder, meddle in each other’s business until a woodpecker crashes in, littering surrounding shrubs with wings.
Last summer my wife found a hummingbird on Mount Pisgah. Its emerald wings trembled as its feet tried to grasp her fingers. A ranger said that their lives are so short anyway. What a curious reply, I thought, but later reconsidered. Perhaps any time being a hummingbird is enough. ~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”
That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm when I hid in the wisteria and watched hummingbirds. I thought the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats was the honeyed blood of flowers. They would stick their piercing beaks into a crown of petals until their heads disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings, and the breathing I heard was the thin, moving stems of wisteria. That night, my face pressed against the window, I looked out into the dark where the moon drowned in the willows by the pond. My heart, bloodstone, turned. That long night, the farm, those jeweled birds, all these gone years. The horses standing quiet and huge in the moon-crossing blackness. ~Joseph Stroud “First Song”
Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing. From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.
The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.
There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.
Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.
How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt, once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion, lying stilled and silenced as if simply dropped from the sky, a wee bit of fluff and stardust.
Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree. And so it is the way of things…
We are here and gone. Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded. …but not forgotten.
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I wasn’t paying enough attention when my bird feeders ran out of suet and seed this week. My little feathered buddies fly up to the feeders by our kitchen window and poke around the empty trays, glance disparagingly in my direction, then fly away disheartened.
Although there is no free lunch today, knowing me as they do, they trust it will replenish. They will keep an eye out from a distance, will return to feast, especially the doves who have chosen to nest nearby, so are constantly cleaning up what the other birds leave behind.
I am no birder; I don’t go out looking for birds like the serious people of the birding community who keep a careful list of all they see or hear. I don’t even track every species visiting my humble offerings here on the farm nor do I recognize the frequent visitors as individuals. I just enjoy watching so many diverse sizes, colors and types coming together in one place to feast in relative peace and cooperation.
So unlike my own kind.
I’m happy to host such grateful creatures — even the innovative, voracious and athletic squirrel thieves.
This is my visual and tangible reminder that the good Lord provides, and I, in my own little way, can help.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Each night, an owl cries out from the redwoods. He calls, and I call back. I call, and he answers. We share the same bright moon, the same shadows, and the same fate. The possibility of discussion is limitless; we have no secrets. This morning I discovered an owl pellet by the front door—a wad of fur, and a jumble of femurs and little ribs—oracle bones, easy to decipher. ~Gary Young [Each night, an owl cries out from the redwoods.]
Once again a child asks me suddenly What is a poem?, And once again I find myself riffing freely and happily Without the slightest scholarly expertise or knowledge; But I am entranced by how poems can hint and suggest And point toward things deeper than words. A poem is An owl feather, I say. It’s not the owl—but it intimates Owlness, see what I mean? You imagine the owl, owls, Silent flight, razors for fingers, a wriggle of mouse tail Slurped up right quick like the last strand of angel hair, A startle of moonlight, a fox watching from the thicket, All that from a feather. It’s like an owl is in the feather. A poem is a small thing with all manner of bigger in it. Poor poems only have a writer in them, but better ones Have way more in them than the writer knew or knows About. This poem, for example, amazingly has owls in It—who knew we’d see a flurry of owls this afternoon? ~Brian Doyle, “A Flurry of Owls”
Once in awhile I walk into our big hay barn to retrieve a few barn owl feathers and owl pellets.
They were left behind, waiting for a poem to hide within.
The barn owls stay tucked invisibly in the rafters until dusk and hunger lures them to the hunt, swooping outside to capture both moonlight and mice to be coughed up in pellets of fur and bones.
These feathers, dropped like so many random snowflakes, carry within them the glint and glow of the moon.
A reminder: what we leave behind matters, whether it be feather or fur or a wee dry skeleton, a shell of who we once were yet are no longer.
We leave more than shadow.
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Yesterday it was still January and I drove home and the roads were wet and the fields were wet and a palette knife had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill. A splashed white van appeared from a side road then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life, only my car tyres swishing the lying water, and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines. ~Kerry Hardie “Acceptance”
For some time I thought there was time and that there would always be time for what I had a mind to do and what I could imagine going back to and finding it as I had found it the first time but by this time I do not know what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less there is the sound of rain at night arriving unknown in the leaves once without before or after then I hear the thrush waking at daybreak singing the new song ~W.S.Merwin “The New Song” from The Moon Before Morning, 2014
I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. ~Thomas Hardy “The Darkling Thrush”
I need reminding that what I offer up from my own heart predicts what I receive there.
If I’m grumbling and falling apart like a dying vine instead of a vibrant green tree~~~ coming up empty and hollow with discouragement, entangled in the soppy cobwebs and mildew of worry, only grumbling and grousing~~~ then no singing bird will come.
It is so much better to nurture the singers of joy and gladness with a heart budding with grace and gratitude, anticipatory and expectant.
I’ve swept my welcome mat; it is out and waiting. The symphony can begin any time now…
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All winter the blue heron slept among the horses. I do not know the custom of herons, do not know if the solitary habit is their way, or if he listened for some missing one— not knowing even that was what he did— in the blowing sounds in the dark, I know that hope is the hardest love we carry. He slept with his long neck folded, like a letter put away. ~Jane Hirshfield “Hope and Love” from The Lives of the Heart
Whenever we noticed her standing in the stream, still as a branch in dead air, we would grab our binoculars, watch her watching, her eye fixed on the water slowly making its own way around stumps, over a boulder, under some leaves matted against a fallen log. She seemed to appear, stand, peer, then lift one leg, stretch it, let a foot quietly settle into the mud then pull up her other foot, settle it, and stare again, each step tendered, an ideogram at the end of a calligrapher’s brush. Every time she arrived, we watched until, as if she had suddenly heard a call in the sky, she would bend her knees, raise her wide wings, and lift into the welcome grace of the air, her legs extending back behind her, wings rising and falling elegant under the clouds: For more than a week now we have not seen her. We watch the sky, hoping to catch her great feathered cross moving above the trees. ~Jack Ridl “The Heron” from Practicing to Walk like a Heron
Things: simply lasting, then failing to last: water, a blue heron’s eye, and the light passing between them: into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen. ~Jane Kenyon, from “Things”in Collected Poems
I know what it is like to feel out of step with those around me, an alien in my own land – like a heron among Haflinger horses.
At times I wonder if I belong at all as I watch the choices others make.
I grew up this way, missing a connection I found only rarely, never quite fitting in, a solitary kid becoming a solitary adult. The aloneness bothered me, but not in a “I’ve-got-to-become-like-them” kind of way.
I went my own way, never losing hope.
Somehow misfits find each other. Through the grace and acceptance of others, I found a soul mate and community. Even so, there are times when the old feeling of not-quite-belonging creeps in and I wonder whether I’ll be a misfit all the way to the cemetery, placed in the wrong plot in the wrong graveyard, forgotten altogether.
We disparate creatures are made to be connected, sometimes with those who look and think and act like us, or more often with those who are something completely different. I’ll keep on the lookout for my fellow misfits, just in case there are others out there looking for company along this journey of grace we’re on.
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