Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
~G.K. Chesterton “Evening”
Even on a Monday,
despite so much of the world
suffering,
there is work
that must be done;
I’ve been allowed
this day
to do my best
and maybe as this day dies
there will come, just as miraculous,
another.
She raised her face, shining, and found her mirror in <his> eyes. I saw them look at each other, and felt the tears prickle behind my lids.
~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
I leaned over his shoulder now and deposited a bowl of oatmeal in front of him, a smile hiding in his eyes, caught my hand and kissed it lightly. He let me go, and went back to his parritch. I touched the back of his neck, and saw the smile spread to his mouth.
I looked up, smiling myself, and found Brianna watching. One corner of her mouth turned up, and her eyes were warm with understanding. Then I saw her gaze shift to Roger, who was spooning in his parritch in an absentminded sort of way, his gaze intent on her.
~Diana Gabaldon from Drums of Autumn
Occasionally books and movies get it right. If they really want to show two people in love with each other, it does not require states of undress, or acrobatic clinches, or lots of heavy breathing.
All the movie needs is “that look”.
Some call it “locked eyes” or the “the held intense gaze” or “gazing longingly”. It’s not ogling or lurid or lusty.
It is the look that confirms: “I want to look into your eyes forever and stay lost there.”
It works for me every time because I am lucky enough to know what it feels like. I get that butterfly in the stomach feeling anytime it happens. My husband held my eyes with his from across a room early in our relationship, and forty years later, he still holds them when he looks at me. And I look at him just that way as well. The eyes say what there are no words for. The eyes don’t lie, being both mirror and reflection, as they are portal to both the mind and heart. The eyes never change even though the years bring gray hair and crow’s feet.
The “look” says “I want to look at you forever, just like this, just as you are, wherever you are — because of who you are.”
The room darkened, darkened until
our nakedness became a form of gray;
then the rain came bursting,
and we were sheltered, blessed,
upheld in a world of elements
that held us justified.
In all the love I had felt for you before,
in all that love,
there was no love
like that I felt when the rain began…
~John Updike from “The Blessing” from Collected Poems.
As the rains return,
we shelter together,
blessed by years and miles,
our unknown become known,
our understanding breathed in silence.
Though we be gray as the clouds above,
our hearts beat in synchrony
each pulsing moment
more sacred than the last.
Go north a dozen years
on a road overgrown with vines
to find the days after you were born.
Flowers remembered their colors and trees
were frothy and the hospital was
behind us now, its brick indifference
forgotten by our car mirrors. You were
revealed to me: tiny, delicate,
your head smelling of some other world.
Turn right after the circular room
where I kept my books and right again
past the crib where you did not sleep
and you will find the window where
I held you that June morning
when you opened your eyes. They were
blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate
they would later become. You were gazing
into the world: at our walls,
my red cup, my sleepless hair and though
I’m told you could not focus, and you
no longer remember, we were seeing
one another after seasons of darkness.
~Faith Shearin “Sight”
The helpless state of a newborn adjusting to an unfamiliar world –
when all depends on
deep murmurs, shadowy faces and comforting arms,
full nipples and cleansing rags.
When all that can be said
are mewing cries and satisfied grunts.
Those long exhausting sleepless nights finally transition
to heart-warming smiles at dawn,
when we lock onto each other for survival,
peering into the mutual light and love in our eyes,
needing each other like no other;
it is always, and will be always, about those eyes.
To be amazed by love is not to be blinded but
to let the flare of wonder fill you
like air filling a sail.
Isn’t this the voice of God at work?
Even his silence breathes life into you, a golden sigh as fresh
as Eden. To love someone is not to lose anything,
but to gain it in giving it all away.
~Luci Shaw from “Amazed by Love” in Water Lines
Lovers must not live for themselves alone.
They must finally turn their gaze at one another
back toward the community.
If they had only themselves to consider,
lovers would not need to marry,
but they must think of others and of other things.
They say their vows to the community as much as to one another,
and the community gathers around them
to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own.
It gathers around them because it understands how necessary,
how joyful, and how fearful this joining is.
These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,”
are giving themselves away…
Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another
as a soul “dies” into its union with God.
And so, here, at the very heart of community life,
we find … this momentous giving.
If the community cannot protect this giving,
it can protect nothing—and our time is proving that this is so.
~Wendell Berry from Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Before God and this gathering, I vow from my heart and spirit that I will be your wife/husband for as long as we both shall live.
I will love you with faithfulness, knowing its importance in sustaining us through good times and bad.
I will love you with respect, serving your greatest good and supporting your continued growth.
I will love you with compassion, knowing the strength and power of forgiveness.
I will love you with hope, remembering our shared belief in the grace of God and His guidance of our marriage.
“And at home, by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be–and whenever I look up, there will be you.”
(our wedding vows for our September 19, 1981 wedding at First Seattle Christian Reformed Church — the last line adapted from Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd”)
Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,
What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, crying
down on the north wind in September, acres of birds spotting
the air going south?
Is there something finished? And some new beginning on the
way?
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
~Carl Sandburg from “Fall Time” and “Autumn Movement”
My summer of “no doctoring” finishes today. I return to part-time clinical work tomorrow; a new beginning is on the way.
I am readying myself.
I consider how it will feel to put the stethoscope back on and return to spending most of my daylight hours in window-less rooms. Several months of freedom to wander and wonder will be tough to give up.
However, when I meet my first patient of the day, I’m “all in.” Someone is needing my help more than I need time off. The wind has shifted, it is time to migrate back to the work I was called to do over forty years ago.
Still I will look for beautiful things where I can find them, knowing that even though they don’t last, they will always be well worth the weeping.
Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?
At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect
as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself
that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor
who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,
at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.
~Linda Pastan “Rereading Frost” from Queen of a Rainy Country.
This morning
poem hopes
that even though
its lines are broken
its reader
will be drawn forward to the part where blueberries
firm against fingers
say roundness sweetness unspeakable softness
in the morning
light.
~L.L. Barkat, “This Morning” from The Golden Dress
I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver “Everything”
I’m asked frequently by people who read this blog why I use poems by other authors when I could be writing more original work myself.
My answer, like poet Linda Pastan above is:
Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?
Yet, like Linda, I’ve decided not to stop trying, since I’ve committed myself to being here every day with something that may help me and someone else breathe in the fragrance of words and the world. There are several hundred of you who do take time to read every day – such a privilege to share what I can with you!
Even when my lines are broken, or I say again what another has already said much better yet bears repeating — I too try to write with quiet hands, in reverence and awe for what unseeable gifts God has granted us all.
Let us celebrate by illuminating words and pictures which lift the veil.
Will there really be a “Morning”?
Is there such a thing as “Day”?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Man from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called “Morning” lies!
~Emily Dickinson
You are the future, the immense morning sky
turning red over the prairies of eternity…
You are the meaning deepest inside things
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat, you are shore, from the shore a boat.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, from Love Poems to God from the Book of Hours
I know now what weariness is when the mind stops
and night is a dark blanket of peace and forgetting
and the morning breaks to the same ritual and the same
demands and the silence.
~Jane Clement from No One Can Stem the Tide
I head to clinic this morning
knowing from now on
my work will feel different after today,
no longer the same ritual,
no longer the same demands.
Mornings will be more resonant, depending on where I am:
from the boat I no longer must be shore,
from the shore I no longer need to row the boat.
I can simply be what the patient needs in the moment
and the patient is all I need.
Amen and amen.
God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work. Only to know this, is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.
Those who are in Christ share with Him all the riches of limitless time and endless years. For those out of Christ, time is a devouring beast; before the sons of the new creation time crouches and purrs and licks their hands.
~A. W. Tozer from The Knowledge of the Holy
When worries overwhelm and fretting becomes fearsome,
I need quieting.
When the noise of news headlines screams for attention,
I call out for quieting.
When there is sadness, conflict, tragedy, illness, estrangement,
I long for quieting.
When too many balls are juggled at once, and I drop one,
I desire quieting.
When the ache lasts too long, the tiredness lingers, the heart skips a beat, and one too many symptoms causes anxiety,
I am desperate for quieting.
When tempted and ready for surrender, forgetting confidence, conviction, commitment and faith,
I pine for quieting.
In order to stay still reflecting restoration and rest,
I am called to quieting.
Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage
~Thomas Merton
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
~W.S. Merwin “Separation”
For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.
~2 Corinthians 1:20
…you can read my heart, I hear you say:
For once be present to me, I am here,
Breathe in the perfect love that casts out fear
Open your heart and let your yea be yea.
Oh bring me to that brink, that moment when
I see your full-eyed love and say Amen.
~Malcolm Guite — “Amen”
We become restless and uneasy in our separation from God, broken and empty, feeling unknowable and unloveable — we need mending and stitching with God’s colored thread.
Our answer to Him should be “Yes”, over and over.
God tells us “Yes”, again and again, that we may know Him as He is one with us, part of our lives’ weave and tapestry. Mere mortals like us experienced God born of flesh, as He walked, ate, slept among us.
Christ became the Yes, the consistent thread in our lives, the covenant God made with us. Still we pull away and say “No” as the unloveable are wont to do, regularly and emphatically.
When young Mary was told the implausible and incomprehensible would happen to her, her response was not “No way–go find someone else”. Her response was “Behold the willing servant of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word.”
She says, in essence “Yes! And Amen!”
How often do we respond with such trust and faithfulness, accepting Christ as the ultimate “Yes” from God, who ensures our everlasting salvation?
Let it be. Let Him run through our lives like a thread that never breaks. Let our Yes be Yes.
