Tag: Covenant

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.

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The Dew Looks Up

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Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
~W.S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning

A walk around our farm in October is
more or less, before or after, now and then,
a timelessness of shifting seasons and fading days.

A prayer becomes like dew from above,
me looking up to the God
who was, is and ever will be,
who already knows what I am about to say.
He knows I don’t tend to say anything new.

He blesses me with the light of His dew.

I write every day to explain myself to people I will never meet. Perhaps, every day, I am trying to explain myself to God.

God is,
(if I stop to look and listen),
yesterday, today, tomorrow –
more or less, before or after, now and then,
but most especially
forever and ever.

Amen.

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Choosing to Protect Unseen Nests

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I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
~Tess Gallagher “Choices” from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

Might I be capable of such tenderness?
Might I consider the needs of others,
by saving not just one nest,
but all future nests,
rather than exercise my right
to an unimpeded view,
wanting the world to be exactly
how I want it?

I must not forget:
my right to choose
demands that I
choose to do right by those
who have no choice.

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Under My Eyelashes

barnstormingblog1 Comment
9/24/2023 -7:12 AM
9/24/22 6:55 AM
9/24/21 6:34 AM
9/24/20 7:22 AM

You can
die for it-
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
~Mary Oliver “Sunrise”

9/24/19 6:55 AM
9/24/18 6:50 AM
9/24/17 7:03 AM
9/24/17 (later)
9/24/17 (even later~)

Over the years, I have not missed many early autumn sunrises – most I have not recorded as they are often gray and rainy.

This particular day of September – the 24th – has been a treasure trove of color and cloud patterns and light for the last decade. Today I share these with you in their variety and beauty.

Every day, let us watch the sun rise with its light under our eyelashes – the fire of happiness illuminating us all as morning breaks open, like the First Day.

9/24/16
9/24/15
9/24/14
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Filling Us With What Endures

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A pot of red lentils
simmers on the kitchen stove.
All afternoon dense kernels
surrender to the fertile
juices, their tender bellies
swelling with delight.

In the yard we plant
rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes,
cupping wet earth over tubers,
our labor the germ
of later sustenance and renewal.

Across the field the sound of a baby crying
as we carry in the last carrots,
whorls of butter lettuce,
a basket of red potatoes.

I want to remember us this way—
late September sun streaming through
the window, bread loaves and golden
bunches of grapes on the table,
spoonfuls of hot soup rising
to our lips, filling us
with what endures.
~Peter Pereira “A Pot of Red Lentils” from Saying the World

I cherish the moments that are most basic, plain, and simple and have the best chance of happening again. I’m not talking about exotic travels, nor the extravagant meal out, nor the once in a lifetime experience. My most cherished moments are quite everyday, and I store them up to fill the decades full.

Most cherished of all is “that look” that says “I want to look into your eyes forever and get lost there.”

I am lucky enough to know what that 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 nearly forty four years later, he still holds them when he looks at me, even over bowls of soup at the kitchen table.

And I look at him just that way as well. The eyes say what words cannot. The eyes don’t lie. The eyes never change even though the years bring gray hair and crow’s feet.

It is what endures. I want to look at you forever, just like this, just as you are, wherever you are because of who you are.

42 years ago today…
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An Awe-filled Quiet

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A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of ridge I caught sight of Devil’s Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil’s Tower is one of them.
~N.Scott Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain

Over the years we have made many cross-country road trips, passing by the turn-off to Devil’s Tower in eastern Wyoming because there was urgency to get where we needed to go. Occasionally we would see it hazy in the far distance, so I could say I had “seen it” but I really had not seen it, according to my Stanford professor N. Scott Momaday.

Scott is from the Kiowa tribe. In his language, this rock formation is named Tso-i-e or “standing on a rock.” For him and his people, it is sacred ground. The Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, Shoshone, and Arapahoe all revere this rock monolith although most tribal members did not live near enough to see it themselves, but the legends traveled many miles through the generations through oral tradition.

Scott taught an unforgettable class on Native American Mythology and Lore I took 50 years ago as a 19 year old sophomore. He has a commanding presence, a booming resonant voice for story telling, a predilection for the poetry of Emily Dickinson and a hankering since childhood to be a character in the stories of Billy the Kid. The first day of class, he introduced us to Tso-i-e first and foremost. He told us his grandmother’s story passed to her from her grandparents:

“Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified.; they ran and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.”

A few years ago, we finally made time to see the Tower up close. For me, this “close encounter” was meant to connect the dots from my class and to understand more fully the spiritual background of the Plains people as our son had lived and taught on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for two years.

The Tower surely is holy ground for us all – we are diminished in its presence. It disquiets the heart with its awful grandeur and sheer other-worldliness. In its own way, it is as resonant as Scott’s captivating stories about its origins, yet remains a reminder of the ever-changing impermanence of geologic formations.

We need more holy places in our lives even as they (and we) change with the sands and winds of time. We need more awe-filled awful quiet in our hearts.

So we continue to tell the sacred stories, generation to generation, never forgetting Who set the world in motion.

Filling Our Dry Wells

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My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.
~Lisel Mueller “The Exhibit”

This is the animal that never was.
Not knowing that, they loved it anyway;
its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny,
right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love
the beast arose, where they had cleared the space;
and in the stable of its nothingness
it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn
but with the chance that it might come to pass.
All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn.
It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass,
then one day walked out and passed into her.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Unicorn”

I sometimes feel the need for magical thinking to help restore goodness in the sad ways of this world. We have fouled our own nest, destroying each other and the extravagant garden we were given.

Hope for restoration feels almost mythical and the stuff of legends.

Power and gentleness do come together in the story of our redemption. We are delivered into a new world by the sacrifice of the most pure and generous Spirit.

Our dry well is filled by a love that quenches all our thirst, promising that our belief in goodness is not myth or legend, but real and true.

Making for the Light

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Let us go forward quietly,
forever making for the light,
and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge
that we are as others are
and that others are as we are,
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –
believing all things,
hoping for all things,
and enduring all things…
~Vincent Van Gogh in Letter to Theo Van Gogh – 3 April 1878

Yet another racially motivated killing appeared in the headlines today. So much collective societal energy is spent emphasizing, elaborating, indeed celebrating our diverse differences. If anything, this separates us rather than unites us, whether it be issues of race, culture, religion, political leanings or sexuality.

Yet we are alike far more than we are different. Despite the variety inherent in all living creatures, we share remarkable similarities deep in our cellular functions – mirror images of each other, intentionally created in the image of God.

“…we are as others are
and that others are as we are,
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –“

Each of us are born from the womb of our mother and each of us will die to dust someday. Those bookends to our lives bind the pages of our lives together, rather than tear us apart.

For some, similarities are not welcome – many hesitate to admit it is true, desiring to maintain distance and disagreement.

Can we make for the Light, enduring this painful journey together? Can we be bound by striving for unity? Can we agree to agree rather than disagree – it is right and true and worthy to love one another just as we are loved by our Creator?

So Frail A Bloom

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Blue and dark-blue
rose and deepest rose
white and pink they

are everywhere in the diligent
cornfield rising and swaying
in their reliable

finery in the little
fling of their bodies their
gear and tackle

all caught up in the cornstalks.
The reaper’s story is the story
of endless work of

work careful and heavy but the
reaper cannot
separate them out there they

are in the story of his life
bright random useless
year after year

taken with the serious tons
weeds without value

~Mary Oliver “Morning Glories”

Was it worthwhile to paint so fair
The every leaf – to vein with faultless art
Each petal, taking the boon light and air
Of summer so to heart?

To bring thy beauty unto a perfect flower,
Then like a passing fragrance or a smile
Vanish away, beyond recovery’s power –
Was it, frail bloom, worthwhile?

Thy silence answers: “Life was mine!
And I, who pass without regret or grief,
Have cared the more to make my moment fine,
Because it was so brief.

In its first radiance I have seen
The sun! – Why tarry then till comes the night?
I go my way, content that I have been
Part of the morning light!”
~Florence Earle Coates “The Morning Glory”

Can I too unfurl with joy in the morning light, knowing I will wilt and wither at the end of the day? Will I live fully open to this day, unconcerned about tomorrow? 

God intended for us to tend His garden yet He continually tends us, His frail blooms. We mess up like random useless weeds and are given a daily opportunity to make it right. I am alive – no question in my mind – to try to make this day better for others.

I blossom under His tending and like a passing smile, I will leave without grief or regret.

The Dewy Cheek of Day

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The red east glows, the dewy cheek of Day
Has not yet met the sun’s o’erpowering smile;
The dew-drops in their beauty still are gay,
Save those the shepherd’s early steps defile.
Pleas’d will I linger o’er the scene awhile;
The black clouds melt away, the larks awaken–
Sing, rising bird, and I will join with thee:
With day-break’s beauties I have much been taken,
As thy first anthem breath’d its melody.
I’ve stood and paus’d the varied cloud to see,
And warm’d in ecstacy, and look’d and warm’d,
When day’s first rays, the far hill top adorning,
Fring’d the blue clouds with gold: O doubly charm’d
I hung in raptures then on early Morning.
~John Clare “Daybreak”

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.
~Linda Pastan “Imaginary Conversation”

How to begin each day like the first day, rather than the last…

It would mean unbridled awe and astonishment, hung in raptures. Look Not only gratitude that the world exists, but also grateful that I exist within it.

Instead of living as if this were my last day, I want to be newly created and dew-baptized in amazement – just like my first day.