Tag: change

I Sit Beside the Fire and Think…

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I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door
~J.R.R. Tolkien “Bilbo’s Song”

The lengthening days make me greedy
for the transformation to come;
I’m watching the sky change by the hour,
brown winter fields
greening from warming rains,
buds forming, the ground yielding to new shoots.

Still I hunker down,
waiting for winter to give up and move on.
These quiet nights
by the fire restore me as I listen
for visitors at the door,
for those returning feet,
for the joy of our spending time together
rebuilding dreams and memories.

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Keeping Watch in the New Year

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The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. 
~G.K.Chesterton “A Chesterton Calendar”

All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”

On this New Year’s Day, I resolve to adopt better coping skills based on observing my horses’ adaptation to change.

As a horse keeper, I know how important a predictable routine is to my animals. They thrive on a schedule, with meal times at the same time every day and familiar people feeding and handling them. But it doesn’t always work out to keep things comfortably identical day to day.

Some days I have to feed early before the sun is up, so I’m flipping lights on in the barn when it is still night outside. The horses blink in their adjustment to the sudden light, leaping up from their shavings beds to shake off the sawdust remnants that cling to their coats. Some days I don’t get out to the barn quite when I’m expected, and I can hear them bouncing their empty water buckets and knocking the sides of their stalls with their hoofs, declaring their impatience at my tardiness.

On the days when the weather is terribly windy, wet and cold, the routine of going outside for the day is changed, and the horses must adapt to a day inside their stalls.  After several days of establishing their indoor routine, the weather brightens and they are able to go back outside again. I vary their stalls so they become used to going in and out of any stall I ask them to use. I vary the walk to their outdoor enclosure as much as I’m able, to get them accustomed to a new path with unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells, and to trust me that I will get them safely to their destination even if it isn’t the way we took yesterday.

And I expect obedience even if things aren’t the same. Sometimes there is a subtle change in the scenery that I haven’t noticed but the horses always do. If something is a bit out of place from the previous day, or there is something new that wasn’t there before, the horse I’m leading often stops, gives a soft snort, and takes in the new configuration, trying to absorb it and accept it. Once settled, then the horse will move on, satisfied that all is well, even if everything is not the same.

One day, I moved one of our garden gnomes to a new outpost in the yard. The horses were not amused.  In their minds, he was not where he belonged and seeing him someplace unfamiliar undid them one by one. Once they accepted him in his new home, it was no longer a problem for them–until I moved him again just to keep them on their toes.

Today, I feel I’m too often like my horses in my reluctance to gracefully accept change.  I prefer things familiar, safe and comfortable. Life rarely serves that up tidily, and in fact, most days are a jumble of coping with the unexpected. I’m not always sure the path I’m on is the straightest one, or the one with the fewest potholes, nor am I that confident that I’ve chosen the best path. I may stop, pull back, try to turn around, even snort a bit.  Sometimes I may refuse to take another step.

But there is no turning back. Time leads irrevocably forward, with us in tow, and we must follow, however reluctant we may be. I’m grateful for the gentle flow of the hours and days into years, all too aware of the quickening pace as far more of my life has been lived out than lies ahead of me.

Perhaps what I’m needing most this new year is a slower walk – taking the time to look at all things with new eyes – breathing each breath appreciatively, to become keenly aware it was not my last.

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Another World Waiting For Me

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If librarians were honest,
they would say, No one
spends time here without being
changed. Maybe you should
go home. While you still can.
~Joseph Mills from “If Librarians Were Honest”

This is my first memory:
A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky
       wood floor
A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center
Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply
       too short
              For me to sit in and read
So my first book was always big

In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided
To the left side the card catalogue
On the right newspapers draped over what looked like
       a quilt rack
Magazines face out from the wall

The welcoming smile of my librarian
The anticipation in my heart
All those books—another world—just waiting
At my fingertips.
~Nikki Giovanni "My First Memory (of Librarians)"

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
~Charles Simic “In the Library” from The Voice at 3am 

Perhaps in another life and another time, I would have chosen to become a librarian. Some of my best hours/days/weeks/years were spent in old musty buildings among stacks of books towering over me. I believed in the power contained within the covers and could hear the cacophony of voices that oozed from those shelves.

Libraries are heaven for introverts like me who might never see the world except through others’ eyes and words.

I never studied well in a library as I was constantly lured off to discover something new and more exciting than whatever it was I was supposed to read. As a rule, I would search for the most remote carrel in the building, if only to reduce my desire to explore some dark corner and find a book that had not been touched in decades, just waiting for me to pull it down and open it up.

It was a library that led me to drop band class to take a high school forensics where I made it to nationals in interpretive reading. A library introduced me to Stanford University and its libraries encouraged me to apply for wild chimpanzee research in Tanzania. Later in medical school, the medical library stacks fostered my passion for family medicine. Once I was in clinical practice, my library time was limited to specific research for particular patients, but once I became a mother, I took our children regularly to our local library, just to see them delight in picking through the shelves as I once did.

Now I take our grandchildren, who consider the local small town library nearly as wonderful as the nearby play park. The librarian knows them and reserves books she thinks they would love (unicorns and fire engines).

I have too many unread books waiting for me at home to justify checking out books for myself. Still, I know there are many worlds yet to explore; I have so little time left to discover them all. I know I still can be changed…

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Making the Best of What Remains

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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it.
~Danny Kaye

Every moment is a fresh beginning.
~T.S. Eliot

I am ashamed to admit I squander time looking back,
yearning for a day that has long since passed,
tossing off these present precious hours
as somehow not measuring up to what came before.

Even when I believe things will never change,
they will, and I will. 

There have been over thirty-six years
of such days in this farm country,
one flowing gently after another,
and every single one have been exactly what I’m looking for.

I shall toss my heart ahead and set out after it,
each moment a fresh beginning and blank canvas,
making the best of what remains of my day.

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Remaining As I Was

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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.

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Holding Back My Heart

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The others bent their heads and started in.
Confused, I asked my neighbor
to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl
who brought raw milk to school from her family’s
herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,
and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,
holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.
Ann understood division. . . .

Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk
and led me roughly through the class
without a word. My shame was radical
as she propelled me past the cloakroom
to the furnace closet, where only the boys
were put, only the older ones at that.
The door swung briskly shut.

The warmth, the gloom, the smell
of sweeping compound clinging to the broom
soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it
upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.
I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew
from my piano lessons. . . .
and hardened my heart against authority.
And then I heard her steps, her fingers
on the latch. She led me, blinking
and changed, back to the class.
~Jane Kenyon “Trouble with Math in a One-room Country School”

I avoided all potential trouble in school by avoiding the trouble-makers.
I never was disciplined or even looked at crossly by a teacher. They loved me and I wanted badly to be loved by them.

I looked away whenever another student got in trouble; I didn’t want to be a lookie-loo enjoying the travails of another child. It was painful for me to see another kid disciplined. I know I would have been crushed to be publicly called out, sent to the hallway, name on the board, or worse yet, banished to the principal.

So my heart broke when I saw another child cry,
or be defiant or be removed from class.
I knew I couldn’t fix it or them.
I knew I couldn’t help the teacher to like them.
I knew some kids have their own secret pain they endure.
I knew it would change me to know what their pain felt like.
So I just imagined being good and compliant and rule-abiding and lovable.

Forever.

Of course, I wasn’t and I’m not, sixty years later.
I too changed, just like everyone else.
It still makes me sad to think how much we change, how many hearts we break,
how our innocence is so fragile and as a result, how badly we need forgiveness
so we can learn to love ourselves as we are loved.

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In His Keeping

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God keep my jewel this day from danger;
From tinker and pooka and bad-hearted stranger.
From harm of the water, from hurt of the fire.
From the horns of the cows going home to the byre.
From the sight of the fairies that maybe might change her.
From teasing the ass when he’s tied to the manger.
From stones that would bruise her, from thorns of the briar.
From evil red berries that wake her desire.
From hunting the gander and vexing the goat.
From the depths o’ sea water by Danny’s old boat.
From cut and from tumble, from sickness and weeping;
May God have my jewel this day in his keeping.
~Winifred Lett (1882-1973) Prayer for a Child

photo by Anna Blake

This prayer has hung in our home for almost three decades, purchased when I was pregnant with our first child.  When I first saw it with its drawing of the praying mother watching her toddler leave the safety of the home to explore the wide world, I knew it addressed most of my worries as a new mother, in language that helped me smile at my often irrational fears.  I would glance at it dozens of time a day, and it would remind me of God’s care for our children through every scary thing, real or imagined.

And I continue to pray for our grown children, their spouses, and now for four precious grandchildren who live too far away from us. I do this because I can’t not do it, and because I’m helpless without the care and compassion of our sovereign God.

May I be changed by my prayers.


I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.
~C.S. Lewis

Sleep child upon my bosom,
It is cosy and warm;
Mother’s arms are tight around you,
A mother’s love is in my breast;
Nothing shall disturb your slumber,
Nobody will do you harm;
Sleep in peace, dear child,
Sleep quietly on your mother’s breast.

Sleep peacefully tonight, sleep;
Gently sleep, my lovely;
Why are you now smiling,
Smiling gently in your sleep?
Are angels above smiling on you,
As you smile cheerfully,
Smiling back and sleeping,
Sleeping quietly on my breast?

Do not fear, it is nothing but a leaf
Beating, beating on the door;
Do not fear, only a small wave
Murmurs, murmurs on the seashore;
Sleep child, there’s nothing here
Nothing to give you fright;
Smile quietly in my bosom,
On the blessed angels yonder.

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Yielding to Change

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I went out to cut a last batch of zinnias this
morning from the back fencerow and got my shanks
chilled for sure: furrowy dark gray clouds with
separating fringes of blue sky-grass: and the dew

beaded up heavier than the left-overs of the rain:
in the zinnias, in each of two, a bumblebee 
stirring in slow motion. Trying to unwind
the webbed drug of cold, buzzing occasionally but

with a dry rattle: bees die with the burnt honey 
at their mouths, at least: the fact’s established:
it is not summer now and the simmering buzz is out of 
heat: the zucchini blossoms falling show squash

overgreen with stunted growth: the snapdragons have
suckered down into a blossom or so: we passed
into dark last week the even mark of day and night
and what we hoped would stay we yield to change.
~A.R. Ammons  “Equinox”

We yield now
to the heaviness of the change;
a slowing of our walk
and the darkening of our days.

It is time:
day and night compete,
and neither wins.

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We’ve Seen Nothing Yet

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Enter autumn as you would 
a closing door. Quickly, 
cautiously. Look for something inside 
that promises color, but be wary 
of its cast — a desolate reflection, 
an indelible tint.
~Pamela Steed Hill  “September Pitch”

Summer begins to have the look
Peruser of enchanting Book
Reluctantly but sure perceives–
A gain upon the backward leaves

Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.

The eye begins its avarice
A meditation chastens speech
Some Dyer of a distant tree
Resumes his gaudy industry.

Conclusion is the course of All
Almost to be perennial
And then elude stability
Recalls to immortality.
~Emily Dickinson, Poem 65

This hot summer now wanes, wistful;
it has the look of packing up,
and moving on
without bidding adieu
or looking back over its shoulder.

I wave goodbye without regret; it leaves behind a hot mess
of burned landscape and drought.

Blustery winds have carried in darkening clouds
spread green leaves, chestnuts and walnuts everywhere,
loosened before their time.
Long overdue rain
gave us a good drenching
worth celebrating.

Overhead skies are heavily burdened
with clues of what more is coming:
earlier dusk,
the cool feel of moisture,
the deepening graying purplish hues,
the briskness of breezes.

There is no negotiation possible.
I steel myself and get ready,
wrapping myself in my perennial soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances forth with its clouds,
taking up residence as summer moves out,
bringing its own unique plans for redecorating
using an array of hues and textures.

The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

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Standing on Holy Ground

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I am still skeptical about the reasons some seek spirituality in the land,
for the spirituality the land offers is anything but easy.

It is the spirituality of a God who would, with lightening and earthquakes, sneeze away the bland moralism preached in many pulpits,
a wildly free, undomesticated divinity,
the same God who demands of Moses from a burning bush,
“Remove your shoes,
for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

When God appears to Job, the comforting sentiments we might expect to feel are absent because such sentiments
are at most God’s trappings, not the infinite himself.
The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind reminds him that, comforting or terrifying, he alone is God.  
To be satisfied with anything less
would be the spiritual catastrophe the Old Testament calls idolatry.

Some of our idols shatter in the West’s rugged vastness, others remain.

Perhaps God leaves exposed the land’s brokenness –
the scars of forest fires,
the fossils of extinct biospheres,
rifts showing ancient continents now scattered like puzzle pieces –
to remind us that he is greater than the icon, too.

The heavens and earth will wear out like a garment, the Psalmist says, like clothes that are changed.

“But You neither change, nor have an end.”
Psalm 102:27
~Anthony Lusvardi from “Nature is Your Church?”

We are now 45 days into a hotter dry spell this summer with a slight possibility of some rain next week. Everything here in the Pacific Northwest is looking as it would in late August with the snow melt in the Cascades much accelerated from its usual timeline. With the fires already happening for weeks on the eastern side of the state, as well as to the north of us in British Columbia and south in Oregon and California, we are looking at a withering August of smoke and ash.

Dan and I headed up the Mt. Baker Highway yesterday evening to see how bare Baker and Shuksan look up close. We wonder what snow will be left before our typical precipitation begins in earnest in early October. These seemingly unchanging monoliths are being stripped of their usual garments, now naked and vulnerable. They are subject to God’s transforming power just as surely as we are.

When I stand at the foot of these peaks, I never fail to be awed to a whisper, as if I were inside an immense cathedral. God reminds us to remove our shoes out of respect for His holy ground. Yet I worship not the mountains nor the awe-inspiring landscape they are placed in, but worship their Creator whose strength and love is greater than all.

I tread lightly. I speak softly. I remove my shoes. I witness the fading light.

God, the eternal, the unchangeable, takes my breath away, as only He can..

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