Tag: breath

Let the Evening Come

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Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us 
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

photo by Josh Scholten

We resist nightfall in our lives. We fear the dark.

I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment with the energy I feel with the dawn. But I know that the forward momentum of time inevitably will wind me down to twilight.

I thought of this poem today as many of us struggle with newly elected leadership, uncertain what it means for us short-term and long-term.

We are not alone in our need to catch our breath and be still.
Each of us is created in the image of God, no matter how we disagree. 

So let evening come, as it will – there is no stopping it –
our lungs filled with the breath of God, our Creator.

We will not be left comfortless.

Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.
~Robert Frost from “Acceptance”

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Company of the Living

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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.

Just Checking…

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Heavy dreams—my hand
on your back to feel you breathe.
Night a blood orange.
~Emily Patterson “haiku at 4:11 AM“

At times I need to check if you are still with me –
breathing so quietly in your dreaming.

I have to lay a hand on your back to be sure.

Then I can fall to sleep, easing back
into the suspended dream I left, now sighing
lulled and lambent…

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Thoughts We Cannot Say

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A hundred thousand birds salute the day:–
        One solitary bird salutes the night:
Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away,
        And tunes our weary watches to delight;
It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say,
        To know and sing them, and to set them right;
Until we feel once more that May is May,
        And hope some buds may bloom without a blight.
This solitary bird outweighs, outvies,
        The hundred thousand merry-making birds
Whose innocent warblings yet might make us wise
Would we but follow when they bid us rise,
        Would we but set their notes of praise to words
And launch our hearts up with them to the skies.
~Christina Rossetti “A Hundred Thousand Birds”

photo by Harry Rodenberger

Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled—but only saints
take flight…
But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.
~Denise Levertov from “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being” from The Stream and the Sapphire

As if reluctant to let go the setting sun last night,
one lone bird still sang a twilight song,
long after the others fell asleep,
their heads tucked neatly under their wings.

This lone bird had not yet finished with the day,
breathing in and out its plaintive melody,
articulating my thoughts I could not say.

And before a hint of light this May morning,
I am swept from my dreams
by a full chorus singing from the same perch,
no longer a lone voice, but hundreds.

My day is launched by the warbling songs,
but I cannot forget twilight’s one reluctant bird
who fought the impending darkness using only its voice.

I too fight back the darkness with what I write here,
if I can keep it at bay:
inhaling, exhaling, encompassed in Breath.
I want to sing out light to Light and live light in Light.

No darkness here.

I hear a bird chirping, up in the sky
I’d like to be free like that spread my wings so high I
see the river flowing water running by
I’d like to be that river, see what I might find

I feel the wind a blowin’, slowly changing time
I’d like to be that wind, I’d swirl and the shape sky
I smell the flowers blooming, opening for spring
I’d like to be those flowers, open to everything

I feel the seasons change, the leaves, the snow and sun
I’d like to be those seasons, made up and undone
I taste the living earth, the seeds that grow within
I’d like to be that earth, a home where life begins

I see the moon a risin’, reaching into night
I’d like to be that moon, a knowing glowing light
I know the silence as the world begins to wake
I’d like to be that silence as the morning breaks

He doesn’t know the world at all
Who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out.
He doesn’t know what birds know best
Nor what I sing about, Nor what I sing about, Nor what sing about:
That the world is full of loveliness.

When dew-drops sparkle in the grass
And earth is aflood with morning light. light
A blackbird sings upon a bush
To greet the dawning after night,
the dawning after night,
the dawning after night.
Then I know how fine it is to live.

Hey, try to open your heart to beauty;
Go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if tears obscure your way
You’ll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.
~Paul Read

Ye Winged Seraphs Fly: Standing Ready

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Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close
   emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,
   had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—
   innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful
   face.
~Walt Whitman “The First Dandelion”

As the days warm and lengthen, the grass
is getting happy almost overnight.
Under my window the first star of spring
opens its eye on the front lawn. Yellow
as butter, it is only one. But it is one,
and in the nature of things, and like
the multiple asterisks seeding the night sky,
it will flourish and take over every
grassy bank in town. I long to be prolific
as the dandelion, spinning pale parachutes
of words, claiming new territory by
the power of fluff. The stars in their courses
have bloomed an unending glory
across the heavens, but here in my yard
a local constellation prepares to launch
multiple, short-lived, radiant coronas
to proclaim the new-sprung season.
~Luci Shaw “Dandelion”

This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals, and has reached its crowning stage of dying – the delicate seed-globe must break up now – it gives and gives till it has nothing left.

The hour of this new dying is clearly defined to the dandelion globe:  it is marked by detachment.  There is no sense of wrenching:  it stands ready, holding up its little life, not knowing when or where or how the wind that bloweth where it listeth may carry it away.

It holds itself no longer for its own keeping, only as something to be given; a breath does the rest…
~Lillias Trotter from  “Parables of the Cross”

It is spring: soon a field of new dandelions will stand ready in full-puff; their seeds detach as I walk through, flying to their next life.

My own readiness feels very much like the peak of labor in childbirth,
a moment feeling as if time has stopped –
an inevitability that one can never go back to the way things were.

This “crowning” of the new life as it emerges means the surrender and emptying of the old life.

So, like the dandelion, I turn my face full on to the breeze, giving and releasing, until I have nothing left.

Only then – only then – is there a moment of detachment,
a flying to whatever is next,
leading me to eternity.

Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means.
2 Corinthians 8:11

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

Fill Vast Eternity: Being and Breath

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With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
~Emily Bronte from “No Coward Soul is Mine” The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte

There is nothing else apart from God,
There is nothing apart from His Breath and Being.

Not even death sets us apart
in the already, but not yet.

Why then do we struggle to know Him
and to be known?

Our DNA pulses His image~
our very atoms designed to celebrate and worship Him.

So let us listen for a change,
to our atoms blossoming richly
with the Breath of His Spirit.

It’s time already.

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! 
As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  
And with that he breathed on them and said,
“Receive the Holy Spirit…”
John 20: 21-22

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

Breathing on the Window

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Dark mornings staying dark
longer, another autumn

come, and the body one
day poorer yet,

from restless sleep I wake
early now to note

how the pale disk of moon
caves to its own defeat,

cold as yesterday’s fish
left over in the pan,

or miserly as a sliver
of dried soap in a dish.

Oh for a sparkling froth
of cloud, a little heat

from the sun! I shiver
at the window where I plant

one perfect moon-round breath,
as I liked to do as a girl

against the filthy glass
of the yellow school bus

laboring up the hill,
not thinking what I meant

but passionate, as if
I were kissing my own life.
~Mary Jo Salter “Moon-Breath” from The Surveyors

At times, I’m amazed at the heat of my own breath.
Forming a cloudy mist on a cold day,
a round fog on the mirror or window,
a warming of ungloved fingers.

This breath that I was given at my beginning
is a gift I rarely think about,
a gift I take for granted.

Nightly, as the moon honors the sun,
reflecting its glory like a faint echo,
I treasure the heat and heart
of that first gift of breath so long ago.

Soli deo Gloria.

Having the Strength to Ask

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Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
~Keetje Kuipers “Prayer”

How is it possible 64 years have flown by and I still need the same story to be told to me again? 

Long ago the 5-year old me had a sudden terrifying revelation that I would someday cease to walk this earth. Now a nearly 70-year old me is more intimidated at the head-long rush of the days-months-years than at the inevitable end to come. The world hurtles through space and time at a pace that leaves me breathless. Indeed, I have been flung at times, bruised and weary from all the hurry and hubbub.

I want to find the strength to ask God to begin telling the reassuring story again, starting right where we left off. I know I will be blown away again – blown by God’s breath that loves, fills and nurtures with a generous promise both hopeful and fulfilled.

Utterly blown away by what comes next.

If only the five year old me could have known.

The Stillness of a Feather

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Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.

…I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
~Mary Oliver from “Today” from A Thousand Mornings

Some days warrant stillness.
On this Sabbath day of rest,
I seek to be quiet as a feather,
silently in place, listening.

Maybe, to hear each other breathe again.
Surely, to hear the Word and breath of God.

A funny thing about feathers:
alone, each one is merely fluff and air.
Together — feathers become lift and power,
with strength and will to soar
beyond the tether of
gravity’s pull on our flawed humanity
to return back to dust.

As quiet as a feather,
joined and united, one overlapping another,
we can rise above and fly
as far as life and breath can take us.

May peace be still.

Dawn on our Darkness: Older Than Eternity, Now New

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When, in the cavern darkness, the child
first opened his mouth (even before
his eyes widened to see the supple world
his lungs had breathed into being),
could he have known that breathing
trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs
as it brushes in and out through flesh
to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating,
tramping the crossroads of the brain
like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and
invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes
and toenails? Did he have any idea it
would take all his breath to speak in stories
that would change the world?
~Luci Shaw “Breath” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest…
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so light it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
~Luci Shaw “Mary’s Song” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.
~Madeleine L’Engle “After Annunciation” from A Cry Like A Bell

He who has come to men
dwells where we cannot tell
nor sight reveal him,
until the hour has struck
when the small heart does break
with hunger for him;

those who do merit least,
those whom no tongue does praise
the first to know him,
and on the face of the earth
the poorest village street
blossoming for him.
~Jane Tyson Clement from Watch for the Light

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee, from “From Blossoms” from Rose.

To think that the original Breath stirring the dust into man led to this moment?

This mystery of God becoming human, growing within woman, feeding from her breast, being wounded and bleeding to save the one who delivered him, emptying himself completely to deliver all of us as newborns, sliding slippery into our new life, a new existence, a transformed heaven and earth.

So we gasp for breath, our nostrils no longer breathing dust, but filled with the fragrance of forgiveness and grace.

Through His sacrifice, we too impossibly blossom, bursting forth into bloom.

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”