Tag: clouds

And Through Eternity: Facing the Storm

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A front of thunderstorms had sought you out.
It vowed to run a diabolical
black line through all that you were sure about—
the ordinary, sane, the sensible.
You raced to get the loose stuff off the lawn,
with purpose rearranged and stacked the chairs,
relieved, almost, when the phenomenon
of gray-green storm clouds simplified your cares.
And though it couldn’t miss, it kind of did.
Darkness at noon gave way to sun at one.
Catastrophe and doom had been short-lived.
Embarrassed that your fears were overblown,
you faced your mundane day-to-day concerns,
vaguely upset that normalcy returns.
~Robert Crawford “Squall”

Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions,
beneath our religion or lack of it,
we are all vulnerable both to the storm without
and to the storm within.
~Frederick Buechner – from Telling the Truth

I watch the storm fronts roll in, threatening my outside and inside: heavy damaging winds, thunder and lightning, torrential unpredictable rains, mudslides, horrible forest fires destroying what is familiar and routine.

Inside my own head, the storm clouds of news headlines overpower day-to-day mundane concerns: devastating wars and violence, crime and protests, homelessness, rampant starvation and disease, man’s ongoing inhumanity to man.

I want to hide under a rock until the storms inside and outside blow over.

In the midst of the tempest — while wars rage on the planet, while a bitter election season is underway — a miracle may be wrought.
Brilliant light exposes how heaven weeps from heavy clouds. A rainbow touches the earth in holy promise.

God assures His people: this storm too will pass, even the storms of our own making. Darkness is overcome by Light.

Painting of snowy Cascades by John Hoyte

He stilled the storm to a whisper;
    the waves of the sea were hushed.
They were glad when it grew calm,
    and he guided them to their desired haven.
Psalm 107:29-30

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

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This Estranging Season

barnstormingblog5 Comments

Lord, the time has come. The summer has been so long.
Lay your shadows over the sundials
and let loose the wind over the fields.

Order the last fruits to fully ripen;
give them two more days of southern sun,
urge them to perfection and speed
the last sweetness into the laden vine.

Those who have no house, will not build one now.
Those who are alone will long remain so,
they will rise, and read, and write long letters
and through the avenues go here and there
restlessly wandering, with the leaves drifting down.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Herbsttag” English translation by Paul Archer from 1902 in the collection Das Buch der Bilder.

First hints of our condition manifest:
Spite in the wind, mist-gauze across the moon,
Light chill, the spider’s filaments, blanched grass,
And two days as warm as the south change nothing at all.
A morning comes when you know this cannot end well.
Soon it will be no time for gathering in gardens
All too soon, my dears, it will be the weather
For Brahms quintets, for leaves drifting triste past the windows
Of those in their rooms alone for the duration,
For whom this is no time to build. Those now alone
Are going to remain so through this estranging season
Of reading, of writing emails as detailed as letters,
Of watching dry leaves grow sodden on empty pavements.
Rilke said this in lines that I last read in Edinburgh
With my most beautiful aunt in her later age
When, many things gone, she remembered those verse in German.
~Peter Davidson “September Castles”

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 has packed up, and moved on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds. I gaze upward to see and smell the change.  Rain has fallen, long overdue, yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time.  Though we needed this good drenching, there are still potatoes to pull from the ground, apples and pears to pick, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs too skinny to pick. 

I’m just not ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.

The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes, the inevitable mud and mold.  There is no negotiation possible. I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.

So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer left off. Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for an exhilarating display of a delicious palette of hues.

Lord, the time has come. The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.

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Out of One Hundred People…

barnstormingblog8 Comments

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.
~Wislawa Szymborska “A Word on Statistics”
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
~A. A. Milne from “Wind On The Hill.”

Of one hundred people who encounter this post today:

will wonder what photos of clouds have to do with statistics:
ninety two

will puzzle over what wind has to do with statistics:
seventy six

will delete without reading since it has to do with statistics:
twenty four

will “like” it because they are supportive gracious people:
six

will write a comment – if words come to them:
three

will wonder why it was necessary on a Monday morning
to be reminded about their mortality:
one hundred

At least it is nice to know we aren’t facing this alone…

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Stumbling Through Soulful Sweetness

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Cherry cobbler is a shortcake with a soul…
~Edna Ferber

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
~Stephen Dunn from “Sweetness”

When the soft cushion of sunset lingers
with residual stains of dappled cobbler clouds,
predicting the soul of sweetness in next day’s dawn~
I’m reminded to “remember this, this moment, this feeling”…

I realize this too will be lost, slipping away from me
in mere moments, a sacramental fading away.
I can barely remember the sweetness of its taste,
so what’s left is the stain of its loss.

Balancing as best I can on life’s cobbled path,
stumbling and tripping over rough unforgiving spots,
I ponder the sweet messy kindness
of today’s helping of soulful shortcake,
treasure it up, stains and all,
knowing I would never miss it this much
if I hadn’t been allowed a taste,
and savored it to begin with.

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As Good As Ever

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One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.

The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.

It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilacs
and cherry blossoms
sounded their long
whistle down the track

It was some glad morning.
~Joyce Sutphen “Some Glad Morning”

Amazing that it happens yet again each May:

the ground yields up a rich
and blinding verdancy,
the air scented with perfumed bloom,
the clouds strewn and boiling over on the horizon.

It is enough to overwhelm and enchant us
into waking up early for another day,
just to see what lies in store.

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Absence of Secrecy

barnstormingblog1 Comment

I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea –
and to temper my spirit on their edges. 
“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one,
and one I cannot but recommend. 
These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan,
the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula —
are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world…. 
That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft,
holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain,
makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist,
only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatique,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
~Denise Levertov “Witness”

Even on the days when the mountain is hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence it is there.  It has not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover today, but it will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day, maybe not until next week. 

I know this and have faith it is true – the mountain does not keep itself a secret.

On the days when I am not bothering to look for it, too preoccupied so walk right past its obvious grandeur and presence, then it reaches out to me and calls me back, refocusing me. 

There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there it is, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness.  I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.

It witnesses my lack of witness and, so in its mysterious way of being in plain sight, stays put to hold me fast yet another day.  And so I keep coming back to gaze, sometimes just at clouds, yearning to lift the veil, and as a result, lift my veil, just one more time.

photo by Nate Gibson

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Looking for God in the Clouds

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Sometimes they left me for the day
while they went — what does it matter
where — away. I sat and watched her work
the dough, then turn the white shape
yellow in a buttered bowl.

A coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves
were red, was rooting on the sill
in a glass filled with water and azure
marbles. I loved to see the sun
pass through the blue.

“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”

The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh … the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe,
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.

Soon I’d be back in school. No more mornings
at Grandma’s side while she swept the walk
or shook the dust mop by the neck.

If she loved me why did she say that
two women would be grinding at the mill,
that God would come out of the clouds
when they were least expecting him,
choose one to be with him in heaven
and leave the other there alone?
~Jane Kenyon “Staying at Grandma’s” from Let Evening Come

(For Sarah Innes Blos, in memory of Stephen)
Although we always come this way
I never noticed before that the poplars
growing along the ravine
shine pink in the light of a winter dawn.
What am I going to say
in my letter to Sarah- -a widow at thirty-one,
alone in the violence
of her grief, sleepless, in doubt
about the goodness of life,
and utterly cast down?
I look at the lithe trees more carefully
remembering Stephen the photographer.
With the hunger of two I take them in.
Perhaps I can tell her that.
The dog furrows his brow while pissing long
and thoughtfully against an ancient hemlock.
The snow turns the saffron of a monk’s robe
and acrid steam ascends.
Looking for God is the first thing and the last,
but in between so much trouble, so much pain.
Far up in the woods where no one goes
deer take their ease under the great
pines, nose to steaming nose ….
~Jane Kenyon “With the Dog at Sunrise”

I never got to stay alone with either of my Grandmas. One died young of cancer before I was born and the other, like Jane Kenyon’s grandmother, ran a chaotic household of boarders. My parents would not have trusted me to her care given everything else she was responsible for. Plus she also possessed a very fundamentalist world view as a faithful-to-the-Bible church goer who could have scared me to death with her dire interpretation of scripture.

I’m relieved it wasn’t fear that led me to a belief in a Trinitarian God. There is no question faith is a hard road, tested in challenging ways along the way, but God is the first thing and the last, the Alpha and Omega. In between, we must search out His Face every day, knowing how hidden He can be.

Understanding this, I still check the clouds every day, just in case I might miss His coming.

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A Lavender Dusk

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Twilight fell:
The sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars.
~J.K.Rowling from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

How strange this fear of death is!
We are never frightened at a sunset.
~George MacDonald

In our modern world that never seems to rest, a sunrise can feel more daunting than a sunset.  We are unprepared for the day to start:
the ready-set-go of a sunrise can be overwhelming to a tired soul. 

There are mornings when the new light of dawn penetrates right through our closed eyelids, enough to wake the dead, if not the sleeping.  It cannot be ignored in its urgency to rouse us to action.

In contrast, the end of the day requires little preparation.  Sunsets signal a slowing-down and unraveling of tension, a deep cleansing breath, a letting-go of the light for another night.  We hope twilight will ease over us, covering us like a comfortable quilt, tucking us in for the night with a kiss and hug and promise of sweet dreams.

The reason we do not need to fear the sunset is that we know it isn’t all there is. The black nothingness of night would be petrifying if we didn’t understand and trust that the light will return, as startling as it may be in its brightness.  It is the rerunning cycle of the light and dark that reassures.  It is as it was created to be, over and over.

Let the sunset tuck us in.  Let the sunrise prepare us for a new day. 

Now the day is over
night is drawing nigh,
shadows of the evening
steal across the sky.
Jesus, give the weary
calm and sweet repose;
with they tend’rest blessing,
may our eyelids close.

Approach the night with caution
It’s the best that you can do
Move quickly though the darkness
‘Til the daylight is renewed
Approach the night with caution
You will know it’s for the best
Once tomorrow’s morning
Quells the thumping in your chest
For evening is when all things dark can
Slide around with ease
And good things all get shoved in the shadows
By a wicked breeze
Approach the night with caution
No longer shall you roam
When darkness stains the eastern sky
Be sure that you are home
For night is the dividing line that
Blends the right and wrong
Spirits crossing freely over
Can hold you there too long

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At the End

barnstormingblog3 Comments

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close,
and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
~Mark Strand “The End,” from The Continuous Life

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”

I began to write after September 11, 2001 because that day it became obvious to me I was dying, though more slowly than the thousands who vanished in fire and ash that day, their voices obliterated along with their bodies.  So, nearly each day since, while I still have voice and a new dawn to greet, I speak through my fingers to others, who, like me, are dying.

We are, after all, terminal patients, some of us more prepared than others to move on, slipping away into darkness, as if our readiness had anything to do with the timing.

Each day we get a little closer. I write in order to feel a little more ready.  Each day I want to detach just a little bit, leaving a trace of my voice behind, wondering what will be left to say or sing at the end.  Eventually, through unmerited grace, perhaps so much of me will be left on the page there won’t be anything or anyone left to do the typing.

No words should go to waste nor moments allowed to lapse unnoticed.
I dwell here for now, knowing Who will be waiting for me there.

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A Lonely Unyielding Fir

barnstormingblog5 Comments

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold,
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”

Some ask for the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
~R.S. Thomas  “Gift” from Experimenting with an Amen

I am astonished my thirstiness is
slaked by such simple things as
a moment of pink in the sky,
a burst of birdsong,
a tree standing steadfast on the hill through the seasons,
a glimpse of tomorrow over the fading horizon of today.

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”

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