… I too spend my days grazing, feasting on every green moment till darkness calls, and with the others I walk away into the night, swinging the little tin bell of my name. ~Ted Kooser “A Birthday Poem”
1970
1978
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ~Mary Oliver from “Sometimes” from Red Bird
I am astonished living through nearly seven decades, sometimes amazed by joy and sometimes by sorrow. I hope to see much more before I’m done, to keep trying in my own way to tell about it.
I am grateful, so very grateful to live out these years learning: how love can heal, how tears are dried, and most astonishing of all, why God came here to carry us home.
I wait for you In the grassland Where small lilies bloom. On the corners of the field, The rainbow shows up. 小百合さく 小草がなかに 君まてば 野末にほいて 虹あらはれぬ ~Yosano Akiko Tanka Poem (1878-1942)
Who loves the rain And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow through the storm; And at his hearth-fire keep me warm; Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise, Who loves the rain, And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes. ~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow
For Dan’s 70th birthday…
In this journey together, we inhabit each other, however long may be the road we travel; you have become the air I breathe, refreshing, renewing, restoring~~ you are that necessary to me, and that beloved.
Each year, as we grow older together: grayer, softer, gentler with ourselves, each other, and the world.
I pause, on this day you were born, to thank God yet again for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise our three amazing children, and now our grandchildren, walking life together with faith and hope and dreams.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have…
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing- your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of a night of blowing snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life thirty years ago today when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her. She is now married to her true love Brian–another gift sent from the Lord; we know you will be awesome parents when your turn comes!
The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number.
But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. ~Billy Collins “On Turning Ten”
Dear Ben,
You were born thirty-four years ago today on a gray and drizzly mid-November day.
November is often like that–there are times during this darkening month when we’re never really certain we’ll see the sun again. The sky is gray, the mountain is all but invisible behind the clouds, the air hangs heavy with mist. The woods and fields are all shadowy. Morning light starts late and the evening takes over early.
You changed November for us that day. You brought sunshine to our lives as if you were born with light under your skin. You smiled almost from the first day, always responding, always watching, ready to engage with your new family. You were a delight from that first moment we saw you and have been a light in our lives and so many other lives ever since, no matter where you have gone and what you have done over these four decades.
Then you married another bright light and now you shine together, raising your precious sons in God’s Light.
We know you discovered long ago, even before you turned ten, that when you fall on the sidewalks of life, you bleed. And you know sadness and have wounds aplenty. Yet you love others like no one else, and keep going in hope, with longing for our Lord. Even your scars shine with intention.
Gray and drizzle is your favorite kind of weather because you were born to it–you’ve always loved the misty fog, the chill winds, the hunkering down and waiting for brighter days to come even though you now live where the sun shines almost every day.
November 15 was and still is, a brighter day because of you.
At dusk, everything blurs and softens.
From here out over the long valley,
the fields and hills pull up
the first slight sheets of evening,
as, over the next hour,
heavier, darker ones will follow.
Quieted roads, predictable deer
browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s
herd of heifers, the kitchen lights
starting in many windows. On horseback
I take it in, neither visitor
nor intruder, but kin passing, closer
and closer to night, its cold streams
rising in the sugarbush and hollow.
Half-aloud, I say to the horse,
or myself, or whoever: let fire not come
to this house, nor that barn,
nor lightning strike the cattle.
Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights
of the rooms convey what they seem to.And who is to say it is useless
or foolish to ride out in the falling light
alone, wishing, or praying,
for particular good to particular beings,
on one small road in a huge world?
The horse bears me along, like grace,making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. For up, out of
the inscrutable earth, have come my body
and the separate body of the mare:
flawed and aching and wronged. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?~Linda McCarriston, "Riding Out at Evening"
photo by Emily Vander Haak
On this, my 68th birthday, I pray for the world as if I am carried by the grace of a horse who bears not only me but all burdens as well. I am a bird who embraces the air that lifts its wings, tenderly holding to its breast the weeping world.
I have seen much goodness in seven decades, sometimes through tears of sorrow; I hope to see much more before I’m done.
I am grateful, so very grateful to have lived these years learning how love can heal, how tears are dried, and how the only thing that lasts forever is God’s covenant to carry us with grace through it all.
photo by Brandon Dielemanphoto by Brandon Dieleman
video of juvenile bald eagle by Peter Tamminga (down the road from our farm)
Whilst the world is weeping, let us do our bit. We have the time to sympathise, to listen and to sit. No needless thoughts, of the things we cannot do. But appreciate all the good bits and look at them anew.
The warmth and comfort of our homes, the food we have to eat. The family and friends we have, although we cannot meet. The village that we live in, and the community we share. So precious to us right now, so sit and think and care.
Whilst the world is full of sadness, anxiety and pain, It’s hard to imagine our lives ever carefree again. But nothing lasts forever, the clouds will always clear. Let’s heal the world with love, so the sunshine can appear. ~Sandra Rickman “Whilst the World is Weeping”
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Who loves the rain And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow through the storm; And at his hearth-fire keep me warm; Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise, Who loves the rain, And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes. ~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace
Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day that comes, young, to disappear forever, and yet remain unaging in the mind. Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away. ~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”
On this day you were born, I thank God yet again for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise three amazing children, and walk this journey together with pulse and breath and dreams.
The boy you were became the man you are: so blessed by God, needed by your family, church and community.
You give yourself away every day with such grace, loved by your children and grandchildren.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have.
In this journey together, we inhabit each other, however long may be the road we travel; you have become the air I breathe, refreshing, renewing, restoring~~ you are that necessary to me, and that beloved.
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God.
May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night twenty nine years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. So a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let loose your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing, and when your students love you as their teacher, knowing you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of blowing snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a snow and wind storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her. She is now married to her true love Brian who is another gift sent from the Lord; someday their hope for parenthood will come true for them as well.
Today is my mother’s birthday, but she’s not here to celebrate by opening a flowery card or looking calmly out a window.
If my mother were alive, she’d be 114 years old, and I am guessing neither of us would be enjoying her birthday very much.
Mother, I would love to see you again to take you shopping or to sit in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea, but it wouldn’t be the same at 114.
And I’m no prize either, almost 20 years older than the last time you saw me sitting by your deathbed. Some days, I look worse than yesterday’s oatmeal.
It must have been frigid that morning in the hour just before dawn on your first December 1st at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.
Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you. ~Billy Collins from “December 1”
December 1st is not my mother’s birthday but it was her death day thirteen years ago.
Yet it felt a bit like a birth.
The call came from the care center about 5:30 AM on the Monday after Thanksgiving on a frozen morning: the nurse gently said her breathing had changed, it wasn’t long now until she’d be gone.
My daughter and I quickly dressed and went out into bleak darkness to make the ten minute drive to where she lay. Mom had been wearily existing since a femur fracture 9 months earlier on a cruel April 1st morning. Everything changed for her at 87 years of being active at home. It was the beginning of the end for her, unable to care for herself at home.
These nine months had been her gestation time to transition to a new life. It occurred to me as I drove – she was about to be born in her long-awaited yet long-feared transition to death.
Her room was darkened except for the multicolored lights on the table top artificial Christmas tree I had brought her a few days earlier. It cast colorful shadows onto the walls and the white bedspread on her hospital bed. It even made her look like she had color to her cheeks where there actually was none.
There was no one home.
She had already left, flown away while we drove the few miles to come to her. There was no reaching her now. Her skin was cooling, her face hollowed by the lack of effort, her body stilled and sunken.
I could not weep at that point – it was time for her to leave us behind. She was so very tired, so very weary, so very ready for heaven. And I, weary too, felt much like yesterday’s oatmeal, something she actually very much loved during her life, cooking up a big batch a couple times a week, enough to last several days.
I knew, seeing what was left of her there in that bed, Mom was no longer settling for yesterday’s oatmeal and no longer homeless. I knew she now she was present for a feast, would never suffer insomnia again, would no longer be fearful of dying, that her cheeks would be forever full of color.
I knew she had a new beginning: the glory of rebirth thanks to her Savior who had gently taken her by the hand to a land where joy would never end.
Happy Birthday, Mom. Happy December 1st Birthday to you.
I’ll fly away, oh glory I’ll fly away in the morning When I die hallelujah by and by I’ll fly away
God makes us happy as only children can be happy. God wants to always be with us, wherever we may be – in our sin, in our suffering and death. We are no longer alone; God is with us. We are no longer homeless; a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Some bright morning when this life is over I’ll fly away To that home on God’s celestial shore I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away, oh glory I’ll fly away in the morning When I die hallelujah by and by I’ll fly away
When the shadows of this life have gone I’ll fly away Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly I’ll fly away
Oh how glad and happy when we meet I’ll fly away No more cold iron shackles on my feet I’ll fly away
Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away To a land where joys will never end I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away in the morning When I die hallelujah by and by I’ll fly away I’ll fly away ~Albert Brumley
This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
A book of beauty in words and photography, available to order here:
You are alive. It needn’t have been so. It wasn’t so once, and will not be forever. But it is so now.
And what is it like: to be alive in this one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a day of it and see. Take any day and LIVE IT. Nobody claims that it will be entirely painless, but no matter.
It is your birthday and there are many presents to open. The world is to be opened. It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again.
When I was very young, I would trace my finger over the long scar that curved along the front of my mother’s neck and ask her what happened. She would tell me her thyroid gland had been overworking so she had to have it removed before I was born. That’s all she had to say about that and I never thought to ask more. Somehow I knew, just as my knowing my father would not talk about his experience as a Marine in WWII, my mother was hiding more than her big scar under high collars or a pearl necklace.
Hers was a deeper scar I couldn’t see or touch.
However, my older sister – about five at the time – remembers my mother’s illness. Mom was a little over thirty when her hands began to tremble, her pulse raced and she was irritable with trouble sleeping. My parents were hoping for a second child, but unable to get pregnant. Once her doctor diagnosed thyrotoxicosis , Mom had the option to try a new medication that had been recently developed – propylthiouracil – meant to suppress the function of overactive thyroid glands.
It didn’t work for her and she felt worse. It caused more side effects and my mother’s symptoms grew so severe, she was unable to leave her bedroom due to severe anxiety and paranoia made worse by insomnia. My paternal grandmother came to help since my father needed to continue to work to support the family but there was little that could be done other than sedation to ease my mother’s symptoms. My sister recalls not seeing Mom for days, unnerved by the wailing she heard from the bedroom. From her description, I now wonder if Mom was experiencing the beginning of thyroid “storm” (extremely high thyroid levels) which is potentially life-threatening with severe physical and emotional side effects.
After Mom was hospitalized and her entire thyroid was removed, she was placed on thyroid hormone supplements to take daily for the rest of her life. It took months for her to recover and feel somewhat normal again. Her eventual hormonal stability resolved her infertility as well as most of her other symptoms. She remained chronically anxious and had heart palpitations and insomnia the rest of her life, like a residual stain on her sense of well-being, although she lived another 55 years. The trauma of how her illness affected my dad and sister was never fully resolved. They all suffered. I can understand why those months remained as hidden as my mom’s surgical scar.
I was born about two years later – the second baby they never expected could happen. My brother was born 20 months after me.
From my family’s suffering came the solace of new life.
So I nearly wasn’t.
I’m reminded on each birthday: I needn’t have been here yet by the grace of God I am. I need to BE ALIVE and LIVE THIS DAY because it will never be again.
This is a truth for us all to cling to.
Each day is a gift to be opened and savored. Each day a first day, a last day, a great day – a birthday of amazing grace.
A new book from Barnstorming is available to order here:
Who loves the rain And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow through the storm; And at his hearth-fire keep me warm; Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise, Who loves the rain, And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes. ~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. ~Margaret Atwood from “Variation on the Word Sleep”
For Dan’s birthday…
In this journey together, we inhabit each other, however long may be the road we travel; you have become the air I breathe, refreshing, renewing, restoring~~ you are that necessary to me, and that beloved.
Each year, as we grow older together: grayer, softer, gentler with ourselves, each other and the world.
I pause, on this day you were born, to thank God yet again for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise three amazing children, and walk this journey together with pulse and breath and dreams.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have…
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